Think “psychic,” and you imagine somebody in a polka dot schmatta with a crystal ball, calling up the spirits. That’ll be $29.99 for the first ten minutes, please. Credit cards accepted.

Joyce Keller (www.JoyceKeller.com, where she sells her books, CDs, DVDs and even a board game) believes she has special powers, but she likes to call herself an “intuitive counselor.” She listens to you and, maybe, she’ll help you figure some things out. And she won’t rip you off.

You just have to get a call into her radio program, which her producer-husband calls “the country's longest-running paranormal show.” From her studio in Weehawken, Joyce has been hosting “The Joyce Keller Show” on WGGB radio, 1240 AM, since 1987. It airs Wednesdays, from 11 p.m. to midnight. No charge for advice. You may have trouble getting the signal beyond northern New Jersey, but you can stream it live at www.am1240wgbb.com.

Joyce says that as long as she can remember, she has “seen” things other people don’t. “Even before I went to school my mom would tell me about numerology or astrology, so I thought it was normal.”

Her first day of kindergarten, she recalls, she called her teacher over and said, “You have to go home because your mommy is very sick.” The teacher told her to be quiet.

But the next day, she says, the teacher took her aside and told her that her mother actually had gotten sick. The mother got better but the teacher asked, “So, am I going to get married?”

One day recently an “animal communicator” was her on-air guest. Callers wanted to know how to reach their pets — not all of whom were alive. One of her most memorable on-air moments, she says, was when she was on the old Soupy Sales radio show and a man who had leukemia called to say he was starting chemotherapy the next day. Joyce told him he was going to be fine.

“Soupy was so shocked he stopped throwing water balloons. ‘How can you say that,’ Soupy told me,” she says. “The following week the man called back. He got a clean bill of health.”

Some hard-bitten reporters we know can’t help but be skeptical about people who say they can predict the future. “I tell people I can’t prove anything,” Joyce says. “I am here to make people feel better, to let them know they should not be depressed about life, to send a message of hope and courage.”

Franco DiGangi has been cutting hair for 50 years in Caldwell. 

“I saw children come in, then they grew up and brought their sons,” he says, reminiscing recently about the decades of snipping, clipping and buzzing.  Everywhere he goes in town, folks know Franco. He knows them, and their hair.
 
Franco  arrived in 1956 from Italy with his new wife Christine, speaking no English. He worked alongside his father-in-law to learn the trade, then opened the neat store at 369 Bloomfield Avenue  46 years ago. It’s still there. Franco lives a few blocks away, and has walked to work ever since. He loves his job.

The town fathers (and mothers — the mayor is female) recently cited Franco for his 50 years in business. There’s a sign on his window trumpeting the honor, and customers aplenty to offer congratulations. 

Today, Franco reflects, that he has been in this country longer than he lived in his native Italy. He describes himself as  a “full fledged American — one- hundred percent.”

The DiGangis have two grown sons, both bachelors. To be sure, there are plenty of friends in Caldwell who want to change that…so that the 77-year-old barber can become a grandfather.

But for now, he’s the Barber of Caldwell, and if you live in town, he’s the man that knows your head better than just about anyone else, because chances are he’s been looking at it for years. Snipping, clipping, and buzzing.

An event on your Main Street may not make the top story on WWOR’s 10 p.m. newscast, or the front page of the Star Ledger. But in some places, the news you really can use comes from independent websites and blogs that cover your hometown like a blanket.

A popular one in northern Monmouth County is Red Bank Green (www.redbankgreen.com), “a town square for an unsquare town,” founded by former newspaper reporter John T. Ward.

The site contains a mix of local crime, arts, politics, and business stories. Its coverage area spans from Lincroft to Sea Bright. Ward objects to the term blog because “it makes you think of a guy in pajamas sitting with a bottle of whisky and writing.” He calls Red Bank Green an on-line newspaper that is fair and balanced. 

Ward was inspired by the localism of a blog — Baristanet  (www.baristanet.com), the feisty Montclair-based website whose founder Debra Galant we profiled last spring www.njmyway.com/content/view/62/65/. The Baristas have broken the pajama-and-whisky mold — these gals are so wired to local cops and politicians that they’ve become influential opinion makers in town.

Another blog coming on strong is Hoboken411 (www.hoboken411.com). It began nearly two years ago as a portal with a focus on business, but is now steeped in local news, community happenings, and advertiser-based videos that make celebrities of local shop owners (http://hoboken411.com/archives/6468). 

This is a blog, no question — open to all, no holds barred. But there’s no better place to figure out what to do, see, eat, or buy in the Mile Square City.

At the southern Shore, Cape May Times (www.capemaytimes.com) just makes you want to take off for the weekend and head down there. No bad news, just great coverage of the local arts scene and the area’s natural wonders, plus everything you need to know about dining and lodging.

These sites are updated all day long with changing news and breaking stories. You’ll be connected all the time… because they are the new voice of your hometown.

A special essay by NJ My Way contributor Lisa Romeo

When the Giants won the NFC Championship, my husband Frank and I had a moment. 

Our two boys decided to wear only Giants blue until the Super Bowl, not a problem in a household that owns 47 Giants shirts — including one purchased at the 1987 Super Bowl.

Our sons already knew their parents were in Pasadena when the Giants beat the Broncos, 39-20, yet suddenly our long-ago trip meant this set of 50-ish parents did onceknow how to be spontaneous, carefree, maybe even cool.

“The minute the Giants won the NFC that year, your mother was on the phone to the airlines,” Frank told the boys. “We didn’t even have game tickets.”

The kids’ mouths dropped, accustomed to parents who are Olympian advance-planners.

Back then, the Giants had not won a championship in decades. For a couple who met on a bus to Yale Bowl (where the homeless Giants played in 1976), and whose best dates were spent screaming “Go LT!” this Super Bowl trip was perfect.

We must have had to request vacation days, find an airport ride and arrange pet care. But I only remember a fierce and unfettered determination to not let once-in-a-lifetime pass by. We were 20-something, kidless, mortgage-less, fearless.

“Wow. How did you get tickets?” asked the 14-year-old.

“The day before we left, a guy I knew got some,” Frank said, noting we paid the usurious amount of $450 for the pair (face value, $75 each).

“How did you find a hotel room?”

“Mom’s cousin lived in Hollywood; we figured we’d camp on his floor.”

What?  No stressed-out parents poring over guidebooks and gaming Priceline for a half-price suite?

“And, we got stranded in Chicago. Snowbound,” I recalled. The unscheduled overnight at the O’Hare Hilton just another piece of the adventure: room service, a movie, serendipity.  That’s what I remember — being young and optimistic, besotted with each other and football, with a bare-faced optimism, a why-not, let’s do it, c’mon-get-happy attitude.

Of course we’d find tickets. Of course the snow would stop, cousin Larry would cheerfully put us up, we’d get time off, pay cash, and drive five hours straight back to my parents’ house in Las Vegas, delirious with victory. 

The 9-year-old asked if we texted during half-time, but he liked what I told him did happen instead. When a nearby fan asked where we were from and I said, “Elmwood Park, New Jersey,” a big guy two rows ahead turned around. “What street?” he asked, and then extended his hand. “I’m your mailman.”

Twenty years later, most of the game is a blur, though I followed each play, moaned and prayed, whooped and groaned like the die-hard fan I was  (I do remember thinking John Elway was cute, but never said so aloud).  Frank can recount key plays, replay bad calls, reenact each Giant point.

What I recall, sometimes with chagrin, is the effortless comradeship, the untroubled impromptu zealousness we inhabited then, a coupled simpatico now so elusive, even in a family that watches football together. And I secretly rue having been supplanted as my husband’s number one cheering-screaming partner in Giants fandom.

“Can we have a Super Bowl party?” the boys asked. A checklist popped into my head: clean house, grocery shop, scrub nacho stains from carpet.  But then I remembered the take-out menu clipped to the refrigerator.

“What the heck,” I said, and touched my husband’s blue-shirted shoulder.
# # #

Lisa Romeo is a Cedar Grove writer whose work has appeared in The  New York Times, O-The Oprah Magazine, literary journals and anthologies. More personal essays and humor pieces at www.LisaRomeo.blogspot.com.

Adrienne Richardson was pregnant with her first child when she was laid off from her job as a publicist in Philadelphia. It was right before Christmas, 2005. But the sudden unemployment turned out to be one of the best things that ever happened to her.

Thanks to a state program that inspires and trains unemployed workers in the field of their choice, Adrienne — who knew nothing about the magazine business — got the money and time to develop an idea: a glossy targeting the moms of South Jersey.

Now celebrating its one year anniversary, Adrienne’s dream magazine is circulated in six counties from Cape May to Burlington, and mailed to the homes of thousands of her subscribers. She prints 38,000 magazines a month, delivered to 800 locations where they are given away. 

But South Jersey Mom (www.southjerseymom.com) is different from the freebies that are full of content paid for by advertisers. The magazine takes on the issues that others ignore, like domestic violence, autism, body image disorders, postpartum depression.
The latter, Adrienne knows well. She was devastated by PPD after her baby was born.

“I felt lonely and lost,” she says. “I thought, there have got to be other women out there who’ve gone through what I went through.” Readers responded with their encouragement. The magazine struck a chord with many moms.

Adrienne has big plans to expand to Central and North Jersey editions, and beyond.
She’s a believer in localism — content that is relevant to readers’ lives and the world they know.

And in the power of motherhood. In her letter to readers she writes: “Your family might not tell you this every day… but what you do is irreplaceable and you are amazing women.”