Things Will Get Better
By Dr. ENRICO FRANCISCO, Ph.D.

EVERYBODY has their lucky day, and Woodstocker Judy Glib-Middlestein-Walsh- Frankfurt is still waiting for hers.

Judy, a long-time resident of Dakota Lane in the cozy part of town, originally thought she was born a Sagittarius, but news reports from England issued two years ago led her to believe she was actually born under the "thirteenth sign," Octiphilius, the sign of the octopus. When this was debunked as a hoax, she missed the story entirely and did not find out that she was actually a Scorpio until I cast her accurate horoscope for the first time fifteen minutes ago.

"That explains a lot," I told her, my brain squirming with each thought of the subtle, involuted complexities of her, well, sort of lopsided chart, which include Saturn in Scorpio, Venus in Scorpio, Mercury in Scorpio, and the Moon retrograde right on the Scorpio-Cancer cusp, but mostly in Scorpio, all in the newly discovered thirteenth house.

Some people know nothing about astrology, but are quite adept at intuiting the best possible days to do things, like getting involved in extraordinarily complex marriages.

When Judy married real estate developer/rock music impresario/bounty hunter Simon Middlestein 3rd in Calcutta on Feb. 29, 1974, there was a rare planetary alignment involving Mars, Neptune, Pluto and the defunct Telstar satellite, which happened to be in an exact conjunction with the jettisoned stage-three booster rocket from the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission, and that, my friends, spells trouble.

It turns out that in the first year of the marriage, Middlestein had sex with everybody but her, ran around all the sluttiest places in the Mid-East, piled up money in Swiss bank accounts, became a transvestite, and sold their house without telling her after stealing back her engagement ring, reading all her diaries and insulting her mother, then proceeded to annul the marriage using a rare procedure in the Alaska State Supreme Court that his white-shoe lawyer told him about, and then left just $74.45 in their joint checking account and about $3,549.00 in overdue bills.

Astrologers pride themselves on being non judgmental, and my sincerest apologies to my many esteemed colleagues out there (Sue, Esther, Dave, Fatima, Carol, Marcel, etc.) who are reading this and whose reputations may be besmirched by what I am about to say, but I am going to say it and that's it. Simon, you're a louse.

However, Judy still loves him dearly and would have him back to this day, even though she's only met him four times, which is explained by an aspect configuration in her natal chart which essentially says in a very roundabout way that she is naive.

Judy, by the way, is an aspiring painter and sculptor, and her basement is piled with her work, which nobody has ever seen, as indicated by her rather full third house (loaded with the asteroids Sculpee, Tempra, and Craypas, plus a few random planets, 20 or 30 Arabic parts and especially the South Node, which adds incomprehensible depth to everything I am saying).

Heartbroken and destroyed, the next year she met the man she thought would save her, José Jones Walsh, a drummer who was cutting an album at Bearsville with the rock band Glassy Eye. When they met for the first time, he was on his eleventh beer and sixth order of fries at the Woodstock Pub and had women waiting for him in two different hotels. She took him home and he slept on her couch, and the next morning she cleaned up, bathed him and drove him around to collect his things, and then didn't see him for six months until he returned from his European tour and spent three weeks in quarantine at the Reich STD Rehab Center in Berkeley.

The day they wed, Telstar and the old Apollo 13 booster had teamed up again, this time in a Grand Square with Pluto, Uranus, John Glenn's lost glove, the asteroid Catastrophe, Neal Armstrong's urine bag and the Soviet Cosmonaut who's been orbiting the planet since his space capsule popped open in 1966, and has been trying to hitch a ride on the Space Shuttle for 14 years. Suffice it to say, José was "in orbit" nursing a $900 a day cocaine, crack, angel dust and Advil habit he had somehow hidden from her, was wanted for an assortment of felonies in three states and was married to two other women and one other man, plus, he claimed to be a vegetarian but ate only hamburgers. Further, he had a Cheeze Whiz fetish.

I mean, that is disgusting.

When they split, Walsh got half the house. He and some buddies came with chain saws and did $25,000 damage before the Woodstock Police and the Zoning Enforcement Officer explained at gun point that the house would have to be sold and the proceeds divided in half.

Finally, she met Roger Frankfurt, and they married in Florida on Jan. 28, 1986, the day of her Neptune Return. As they exchanged vows, the deafening roar of the Space Shuttle Challenger launching majestically into the sign Aries overcame the whole ceremony, and then, of course, the rocket, in a fabulous show of misguided technology, blew apart in mid-air, showering wreckage into Aquarius, Libra, Sagittarius, Taurus and Pisces as the hundred wedding guests who had flown in from 14 countries stood agawk with their mouths agape. As luck would have it, according to my buddy Oscar at NASA, a piece of debris the size of a pea hit Roger on the head at an estimated air speed of 457 knots, liquefying him instantly, which, according to my research into his astrological connections with the Russian Mafia, the Israeli intelligence organization and NYNEX, is quite frankly all for the better.

But enough of dwelling on the past!

The future looks great for Judy, especially since Telstar was plucked out of orbit and put in the Smithsonian, the old booster rocket landed as a red-hot lump of aluminum sizzling into the Indian Ocean three years ago, and NASA finally lost track of John Glenn's stupid glove. And Judy is paying me handsomely to keep reminding her not to get married.++