Page 31 - Talented Astrologer • Volume 1 Number 10 • June 2017

My background is in musical theater, and I’m a huge fan of the work of Stephen Sondheim. (Anyone who knows me personally appreciates how much of an understatement that is.) A few years ago, HBO aired a documentary about
Sondheim, in which Sondheim talked about his mother, who was quite a piece of work. His mother always told him he had been born at 3:30 a.m., and it was a very di cult birth. His mother would repeat this story to imply that he had always been a burden, and that from the start, caring for him was inconvenient. Years later, he got his father’s side of the
story: it was an easy birth, at the reasonable and more convenient time of 9 p.m.
is was big, and entirely unwelcome news to me.
Sondheim was one of the celebrity charts I had used in 2013 during the rst Natal Interpretation Training Intensive at The Real Astrology Academy. My students and I spent weeks writing interpretations
of Sondheim’s chart, and the chart we used was
the one with the 3:30 a.m. birth time. When
I selected this chart, the Rodden Rating
was “A,” but Astro-Databank now lists
the birth time as 9 p.m. with a “C” rating
for con icting data.
Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t touch a chart with less than a “B” rating, and I will rarely write
an interpretation of a celebrity chart with less than an “A” rating. I’m also
suspicious of on-the-hour birth times, even when they’re recorded on a birth certi cate,
because few hospitals appreciate that astrology
is an exact science and even a few minutes can make a di erence in a birth chart. Still, I thought it might be interesting to compare the two
charts, and see how the altered birth
time a ects the interpretation.
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