Sunday, January 04, 2004

	Click photo for larger image.

Soma is the name of a tarot card, as well as the name of the woman in the Bloomfield storefront where a bust of Jesus shares space with Pan, a Zodiac manual, Greek underworld god Osiris and many denizens of Santeria.

Soma -- she uses just one name -- is turning a cavernous space that adjoins the storefront at 4814 Penn Ave. into The Eye, a salon for conversation, art, performance, tea drinking and tarot-card reading. She started tarot reading as a teenager.

"There's always been an interest. I remember begging my father for a palmistry book in third grade," she says. Her father worked for Westinghouse, setting up testing of nuclear power plants, and she spent part of her childhood in Japan and Korea. She has also lived in several cities in the United States but has been in Pittsburgh for most of 20 years.

	"Here" is a weekly feature produced by Post-Gazette photographers and writers who roam the region to capture close-up slices of life. Can you point us to a special person or place, experience or story? E-mail us at here@post-gazette.com. Link to past installments Here.

Many people first approach tarot reading "wanting a party trick -- they want you to tell them something about themselves that only they could know," says Soma. Or they want to know the future.

"Reading for divination purposes is one of the uses of the cards. But tarot is a symbolic language. Each card is encoded with many meanings. Interpreting the symbols is an intuitive process that [the person having the cards read] takes part in."

In addition to the "Soma" tarot card, she chooses "Scarlet Woman" and "Self Created" to represent herself in the photograph.

People can use the cards to gain perspective, to see things in a new way, she says. When that happens, things can get intense. "I've experienced things that were a bit like being in the eye of the storm. It can be a very dense atmosphere. Sometimes I wish I could just chase the blue-light special at Kmart."

She did step back for a few years, leaving Pittsburgh and Eye of Horus, the bookstore she owned on the South Side. She had her second son, Seth, now 2 (her other son, Ian, is 13). Back in Pittsburgh, at a grocery store, she met another family with a 2-year-old child. It was kismet, she says, and the friendship brought her to the Penn Avenue location to let the two 2-year-olds become next-door neighbors.

The juxtaposition of symbols in tarot and elsewhere appeals to her, and she's incorporating that idea into filling this brick building. "I like to rearrange concepts," Soma says.

She walks around the big space that will be the salon and points: Here, there'll be a tea counter; over there, in front of the giant garage door in the rear, a stage; another wall will hold artworks. She plans to open to the public on Feb. 6.

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