From her one-bedroom apartment in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen, Llorraine Neithardt, a full-time, Jungian-inspired clairvoyant and part-time shoe guru, has been teaching a lucky handful of students how to “unleash the shoe within.” For the past five months she’s been teaching directed workshops but has been making her own shoes for years. She’s had a shoe art show at Art Basel in Miami and even inspired a shoemaking character in the movie “P.S. I Love You” starring Hilary Swank.

With another instructor, who has taught shoemaking at Pratt Institute and the Fashion Institute of Technology, Ms. Neithardt teaches the intricate craft of hand-making footwear, leading students through the cobbler’s steps, helping them source materials, and sketching out the shoes they describe to her, “like a police artist,” until her sketch captures the image they had in their heads. She’s taught her dentist, a man who wanted to make an anniversary gift for his wife, and an accountant with a penchant for towering stillettos. Her students, who pay around $1800 to take one of her workshops, often discover they are natural cobblers, but all of them seem to come from the experience with something more than just a pair of shoes. To hear it described, the process takes on an almost ecstatic quality. “It is my heart,” said one recent participant.

From the article in today’s New York Times:

“Llorraine is the real deal,” said Joan Juliet Buck, the essayist, actress and a former editor of French Vogue, who met Ms. Neithardt through a fairly typical, elliptical encounter. “It was a party that Salman Rushdie gave in someone’s loft,” Ms. Buck recalled. “I’d just moved back to New York from Santa Fe, into this tiny studio, and I meet a guy at the party who reels off my new address, except he’s got the apartment number, but not the floor, wrong. I blanch. ‘How do you know that?’ I ask. He says, ‘Because the best psychic in America lives on that floor.’ Of course I went to see her, because who could resist?”

Mostly they talked shoes, Ms. Buck said.

Another friend, the writer-director Richard LaGravenese, said of Ms. Neithardt, “She’s this sort of mythic goddess, Auntie Mame with second sight and Manolo Blahniks.” When Mr. LaGravenese was stymied in an early draft of a screenplay that became “The Fisher King,” directed by Terry Gilliam and for which Mr. LaGravenese was nominated for an Academy Award in 1992, Ms. Neithardt introduced him to the Fisher King legend, an Arthurian tale involving an injured knight. “I’d been struggling with these characters,” Mr. LaGravenese said. “When I found that myth, everything kind of clicked.”

To read Llorraine Neithardt’s story is to discover something akin to Cinderella, only this fairy godmother is more hip by far and teaches you how to make your own fantastic shoes, with whatever miracles they need to perform determined solely by you. It’s a wonderful confluence of magic and fashion! Imagine my delight. I’m planning my trip to New York now.