Long Island Medium tour hits Des Moines

Theresa Caputo, star of TLC’s “Long Island Medium,” says she’ll show up to Des Moines with her hair and nails done — and some fabulous shoes.

Some kids impress their friends by telling them their mom is a police officer or a lawyer or an artist. Theresa Caputo’s kids grew up telling people their mom communicates with the dead.

But it’s not weird.

“We’ve always had an open relationship. It’s like, it is not weird to me that I talk to dead people with my kids. It was just like, ‘This is what Mommy does,’ and it was like, ‘OK’ — like that’s the norm,” said Caputo, star of the hit TLC show “Long Island Medium.”

To this working mom, talking with spirits is simply her job.

“I never dreamed that I’d — when I grew up — that I’d be talking to dead people, touring around the country on a tour bus,” Caputo said. “But yet it’s the most normal thing for me. I feel like this is what I was meant to do.”

Caputo says she has been able to sense and feel spirits since she was 4 years old, but she didn’t learn to communicate directly with them until she was in her 20s. Caputo has been a practicing medium for more than a decade, and her reality TV show debuted on TLC in 2011. The lively mother of two — always appearing in great shoes with her hair and nails done to the nines — has also written two books and is currently touring the country for her live show, “Theresa Caputo Live! The Experience,” which stops at Wells Fargo Arena on Monday, Oct. 19.

Despite all that, Caputo stays humble, considering herself a wife, mother and all-around family woman first. “Well, I still don’t think I’m really famous…” she laughed during a phone interview. “I think because my parents never made a big deal about what I was able to do. I was always able to, as a child, express what I sensed and what I felt.”

To put it simply, a medium is a person who mediates communications between living people and spirits of the dead. The practice gained popularity in the 19^th century, but it started to lose credibility when some practitioners began using the same techniques as stage magicians. Mediums continue to work today, like Caputo, and there are still people who don’t believe in their talents. As for Caputo’s response to critics — she doesn’t really care.

“Everyone has a right to their own opinion — about anything in life,” she explained. “And I’m not asking anyone to believe in what I do as a medium. That’s not the goal here.

“My goal and my wish for everyone that either watches ‘Long Island Medium’ or comes to ‘The Experience’ is that I want them to know that what they sense and feel is real. That they’re not crazy, that it’s not their imagination — that the souls of their loved ones, they are always with them, and that there truly is more to life than what’s here in the physical world. And that’s it.”

Caputo always knew she had a gift, but she never considered it her ticket to fame and fortune. Instead, it was more a duty to help people that led her to where she is now.

“What I’ve done has helped people get up in the morning, feel like they can breathe again…or maybe restore faith or reunited families back together,” Caputo said of her work’s impact. “And, to me, there is nothing more important than family.”

When Caputo goes to work with the spirits, she says they are always ready to communicate. She adds that they know when she is working, especially with a big audience, and she can feel all of them at once, “trying to jockey for position.”

“So in a large arena, like I will be at the Wells Fargo Arena…I give a speech, and it’s almost like that’s my sign to spirits that I’m ready to work. And it’s amazing. I’ll just start sensing and feeling things that mean nothing to me, but that’s absolutely life-changing for someone else,” Caputo explained.

Sharing so many emotionally charged and difficult experiences with hurting people seems like it would take a toll, leaving the communicator emotionally drained after a while, but that’s not how Caputo feels. In fact, it’s the opposite. Caputo says it’s more difficult for her to not channel spirits, comparing it to the act of being angry versus happy.

“You know how it’s just easier to be happy? And it takes so much more energy to be negative and to be mad, right? It’s the same thing for when I work. It’s easier for me just to say what it is that I’m sensing and feeling. It takes a lot more energy to block it.”

Caputo says what she loves about her live show is that she can deliver a message to one person, and it might affect dozens of other people in the audience.

“There are so many other people in the audience that are gonna be able to connect with that situation,” she added. “And that’s the amazing thing, because you might personally not get read, but what (you’ll hear can be) absolutely life-changing.”

Theresa Caputo performs live at Wells Fargo Arena at 7:30 p.m. on Monday, Oct. 19.