My last performance at Burning Man -- I swear this is it!

Last year, as the dust swirled around us, the winds knocked me off my feet and my bicycle was mired in foot-deep powder, my eyes filled with mud, eyeliner and mascara streaming down my cheeks like Alice Cooper, I said: "I hate Burning Man. I HATE BURNING MAN! I am never, never, ever, ever going back to that dustbowl again!

This is insane! This is not fit for human habitation. I NEED TO GET A LIFE!"



Well, I admit somewhat sheepishly, that not only am I returning to that madness, but I am one of the people co-leading a HUGE Burning Man camp, right on the Esplanade.

(For those of you who have never been there, Esplanade is the main street USA of Burning Man-- actually more like the Champs de Elisses. Not only do we have prime real estate -- we have a massive 150 x 350 parcel of it. It's like being given a free plot of land at One Fifth Avenue in New York and told: Hey, do whatever you want! Just don't leave a trace of glitter, feathers or even a single cigarette butt or we'll banish you to Outer Suburbia and you'll never set foot on Esplanade ever again! (More than 150 camps this year weren't even granted "Theme Camp" status -- and thousands of them were rejected for this prime space. Some because they failed to "MOOP" their site and leave it spotless. (Burning Man lingo for removing Matter Out Of Place.)

Oh, so much pressure to be cool!

So, now we have to create something magnificent and Esplanade-Worthy in this empty chunk of dust. It's a blank canvas for free expression, and we're hauling out the "paints" -- artists, musicians, dome structures, fabric, lights, power systems, sound systems and every scrap of everything we'll need to create a temple out in the middle of Bumchuck Nowhere, Nevada.

Our "camp" is Sacred Spaces Village, a quiet retreat from the chaos, and our art project is the Evolutionary Temple -- where we'll have spaces filled with visionary art, elaborate altars and installations, live art creation, workshops, healing and massage. We'll also have a comfortable, carpeted and cushioned all-white temple space called "Cosmos" with absolutely NOTHING going on so people can retreat from the chaos and be silent, meditate and find that place there they are at One with the universe and each other.

(Well as silent as you can be with 16 megawatt sound systems thumping and booming around you in all directions, and the sound bleeding into a thump soup that can literally drive you mad because there is no space, ever, between your thoughts and the noise, between your eyes and the profusion of lights and colors, where every molecule of your spirit is oversaturated with love and beauty, and there's no privacy, no down time, no division between your personal space and the constant social contact.)

It's so interesting that you're afraid to sleep -- because you might miss something.

We have a saying at Burning Man: "You can sleep when you're dead."

There's another saying a friend of my quipped once: "Sleep is just a chemical deficiency. That's what caffeine is for."

My younger brother is also leading a Burning Man camp this year, in another prime location. (Yes, it's genetic!) His creation, Camp Photon, is for pro photographers -- they'll offer camera seminars, camera cleaning, and slideshows of eye popping photography on a big projection screen. Check it out at http://www.campphoton.com.

And if you're looking for a tea totaling (we don't have a bar and we're not drinkers), spiritual place to land, with free yoga classes every morning and a vegan and raw meal plan, check out http://www.evolutionarytemple.com or visit us out there: Esplanade and 5:00.

But I swear this is the LAST time. Next year I'm spending labor day at the Maui Writer's Conference and getting that book published!

Learning to let him drive

The other day I reunited with an old flame from the past. We hadn't seen each other in more than 7 years, and started to reconnect on Facebook.

During lunch, he opened his fortune cookie. It said: "A good friend is the best mirror."

In that big space, we've both transformed so radically that we're almost like different people now. Seeing myself through the mirror of this rediscovered friendship, is like time traveling overnight from 38 to 46. I'm starting to appreciate that this journey wasn't a waste of time, and that I'm a better person now because of it.

At first I was shocked to see how he'd gone from dark hair to gray, from slender to middle aged paunch, from a trendy young man full of hubris, ego and attitude, to a stable father, a responsible, caring, loving adult. Having a child cracked his once guarded heart wide open, and I have to say, I like him a lot better this way. The person I was then might have been more attracted to this man 7 years ago.

Last time we were together, I was a hard driving corporate executive and focused most of my energy on my career and acquiring stuff, including a house worth almost a million dollars. I was living a very inauthentic life. He was living a very authentic life of spiritual seeking, way on the cutting edge of San Francisco's countercultural underground, and I think when we met he was actually living in his car with a large dog. He was too intense for me. But there was a powerful attraction there -- and I ran from it because a lot of the things he was into at that time (from alternative music to astrology and metaphysics) were just way to wierd for me to handle.

For most of those 7 years, I've been in and out of painful, hurtful and even abusive relationships. Seeking the love inside that I wasn't finding outside, I delved deep into a spiritual journey that has involved tantric sexual healing work, workshops and therapy.

Meanwhile, while I stepped out of the dominant paradigm to explore an increasingly way-out world, he became more conventional.

He turned into the corporate executive, got married, bought the house, had a child. And now, here we were, 7 years later - strangely closer to each other and with more common ground than we had when the journey began.

His marriage was destroyed by his wife's controlling behavior -- which included her insisting on driving all the time, working while he stayed home and played house husband, and finally, a spiritual path that was the final blow that severed their common ground.

It is especially ironic that such a physically large and strong man, a man who is like the very essence of masculine, ended up so "pussy whipped" and emasculated in his marriage.

Laura Doyle wrote a controversial book a few years ago that advises women to let go, become more feminine, and let the man be in charge.

Here is my friend Laura's book:

http://www.surrenderedwife.com/surrendered_wife_books_surrendered_wife.html

As a hard driving career chick, I always had a hard time letting go. Now that my journey had softened me up, made me more comfortable with my divine feminine essence, I could relate more to the wisdom in allowing the yin/yang of masculine / feminine polarity take over -- much as Ginger Rogers let Fred Astaire lead her in the dance. I was feeling more comfortable with the idea of being with this extremely masculine, powerful man, and letting him set the pace of the relationship, letting him pursue and lead. And with the idea, eventually, of relinquishing my lonely independence and allowing myself to be interdependent.

Writer and relationship guru David Deida talks about striving, ideally, for "interdependent" (rather
than co-dependent) relationship between men and women, and the balance
of masculine / feminine energy. Interdependent relationships are
extremely rare but definitely what I'm striving to find and create in my
life someday.

http://www.daviddeida.com.

Bay Area Storytelling festival coming up

This weekend, the Bay Area Storytelling festival returns to a lovely wooded glen in the East Bay. It's an older, more traditional crowd, but I hope I can "shake it up" a little when I get up on the open storytelling stage. The veteran storytellers here are inspiring masters of the form. Come on out, bring your kids, a picnic, a big blanket and a wide sunhat.

The electric snowcone

Burning Man was brutal this year. We had duststorms every day. More like sand storms. In one of them, the whiteout was so thick that you needed a GPS to navigate through it. You couldn't even see an inch in front of your face. Some people wandered lost for hours at night in the chill winds. It was an ordeal, but we survived!

At one point, at the depths of my dismay with the weather and the dust, sometimes so loose and sandy that it was impossible to bicycle (or even walk) through it, I started ranting: "I hate Burning Man! I'm never coming here again!"

But of course, all that misery will fade and by next summer all I will remember are the highlights. Like this moment, when I told a new story, "The Electric Snowcone" on the main stage. I can't tell you if the audience was in rapt attention, or just so exhausted they couldn't move. It was a rare, calm sunny day, but the dust was so thick that I wore goggles on stage.

Now if I could just make sure they don't have a drum circle pounding away while I tell a story, it would be perfect!

Bumping it up to the next level

This month, I started studying with Rebecca Fisher, founder of Tell it on Tuesday, the Berkeley- based performance series. I saw Rebecca perform her epic one woman show, "The Magnificence of the Disaster" twice at the Marsh. Rebecca puts her entire body into the storytelling performance and uses unsual props and sound effects. She's an up and coming talent, a rising star in the performance art world, but is already teaching and mentoring others.

There are 8 storytellers in our class. Each has a different gift, a different angle, a different life experience. I'm probably the least theatrical in the group -- my storytelling comes from my experience as a writer and journalist, and it's based in the narrative, the craft of the word, rather than the sound, expression or the movement of those words. Some approach the story from the art of theatre -- I approach it from the craft of writing.

Dusting off a story about the Summer of Love

I just returned from two weeks of dancing in the dust (cough, cough) at the Burning Man arts festival in Nevada. In the midst of a windblown week, on a calm and brilliantly sunny day, I told stories as a featured performer on the spoken word stage at Center Camp -- the downtown hub of this temporary city of 50,000.
The light is aways extraordinary in this circus tent, topped with multicolored spiral flags and filled with half awake people clutching cappuccino, wearing surreal dust goggles and pant masks. There were drum circles, folksingers, Capoeria dancers, yogis and people kissing and hugging. In the middle of this scene, I told stories of how it all began.

I had been up all night, on a candy colored metal flaked bicycle ride with my friend Samsara, where we pedaled under the waxing and waning full moon lunar eclipse. The night ended on the bamboo dance floor we helped build, where just as the moon started to return from the shadow of the sun, Samsara cranked up Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" at full volume. It was 4 am, but strangely, nobody woke up, and none of the neighbors complained.

When I stumbled into the cafe at 1 pm, still wearing the black fishnets and top hat I fell asleep in the night before (with contact lenses glued to my eyes) -- I was not exactly in any presence of mind to tell an hour of stories in front of the largest audience I've ever seen. Then again, they weren't exactly awake either.

I started with a story about the Be In and the Summer of Love, 40 years ago, where a young, handsome Tim Leary took the stage, and someone tossed what looked like confetti into the crowd. (It later turned out to be something stronger.) By the end of the summer, everyone had long hair, and the hippie era was born.

Then I told "1967" - about a peace march my friend Patty and I staged in our suburban front yard, back when we were both five. (My father spanked me when he saw the crayon-scrawled picket signs that said: "Make love, not war.") Then I brought it into the future, with a story about my first Burning Man, in 1993, when the whole festival could have fit inside that cafe and renegades shot up Minnie Mouse stuffed animals in a drive by shooting range. We've evolved.

Now, 40 years later, an endless summer of huge events like Burning Man make the Summer of Love and the Be In look drab and tame in comparison -- as I looked out into a room filled with thousands of girls with multicolored yarn hair, and the men in man kilts and lingerie, it seemed so much freer today, so much more self expressive. And we do it all while maintaining corporate jobs and double lives. We may turn on and tune in -- but we don't drop out. We're involved.

It's a different world now, one where we talk about making peace instead of ending war, where we don't try to change the world outside us, we try to change ourselves first. We are the future, and it's not a bad place to be, if you can stand the dust.

Telling under the trees at the Sierra Storytelling Festival

This weekend, I had the chance to meet my fellow Renegade storytellers at the Sierra Storytelling Festival in the charming Gold Country town of Nevada City. The festival happens in one of my favorite places on the entire planet, a sweet little white schoolhouse up on the San Juan ridge overlooking the mountains. (This place appeals to many artists and writers, including the poet laureate Gary Snyder who was rumored to be in the audience.) Nevada City has a special appeal to renegades who left San Francisco in the 1960s to go "back to the land" and many of those now gray haired hippies still live in off the grid solar powered houses here.

It was a perfect, warm summer day, the breeze was just enough to keep things moving, and we sat under the pines and ate watermellon on a picnic blanket. l

The stage was beautiful, with a pine tree rising right up inside it, and two huge bouquets of sunflowers on either side. The mic and soundsystem are amazing -- you can stand anywhere on stage, walk and move, and this mic picks up every nuance.

This is the first time I have ever witnessed nationally famous professional storytellers in action and it was humbling. They were riveting. If you ever have a chance to visit this festival, go!

On Saturday I had chance to take the stage, and told "1967" -- a story about my first peace protest, at the tender age of five, in the height of the summer of love. After I told the story, someone in the audience shouted "encore!" Ok, just one person, but it's a start! Now I dream of taking the center stage as a featured teller at this charming festival someday in the future.

Summertime storytelling schedule

I am sometimes hysterically funny and always brutally honest. I tell it like it is.
I'll be telling at these events this summer:

June 6 – Memoir Spool, "White Trash Moments", San Francisco, 7 pm

June 9 – Flambe Lounge (Burning Man Precompression), San Francisco, all night long. (I'm on stage in the Green Room, 9:30-9:45 pm)

June 16 – Burning Man Presents: “BBQ a Newbie Picnic”, Golden Gate Park San Francisco, 12 pm

June 18 – One Taste, San Francisco, 8 pm

July 11 – Memoir Spool: Kid's Stories/Family Night, Bazaar Cafe, San Francisco, 7 pm

July 20 - Sierra Storytelling Festival, North Columbia Schoolhouse Cultural Center Nevada City, CA, 3:30 pm

July 31st - Memoir Spool "How I Found Burning Man", San Francisco (at the Burning Man Headquarters)

August 1st - Memoir Spool: I got thrown out!, Bazaar Cafe, San Francisco, 7 pm

August 27-September 3 -- Burning Man Festival, Center Camp, Gerlach, Nevada, TBA

THE DETAILS:

Memoir Spool Storytelling
WHITE TRASH MOMENTS
Wednesday, June 6th from 7:00 to 9:00 PM.
Bazaar Cafe, 5927 California St. @ 21st Ave., SF, CA 94121 [map]
www.bazaarcafe.com (415) 831-5620 (parking is better one block north on Lake St.)
ADMISSION: Free!

Flambe Lounge Precompression
Space 550, 550 Barneveld St, San Francsico, 8 pm - 6 am
Saturday June 9th, 8PM to 5AM (no entry after 4AM) 21+ with I.D.
www.space550.com
(I will be performing in the Green Room at 9:30 pm)
Admission: $10-20

One Taste Open Mic Night
Monday, June 18, 8 pm
One Taste Yoga Center
Folsom Street, San Francisco, CA
www.onetastesf.com
$10 suggested donation

Burning Man presents: BBQ a Newbie Picnic
Saturday, June 16th, 2007, 11am-6pm.
Pioneer Log Cabin, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco.
The Log Cabin area is plainly visible from the 'Y' where Stowe Lake Drive branches off of JFK. It is just to the west of the new DeYoung.
Golden Gate Park Map: tinyurl.com/c4qdn
Admission: Free (bring a dish to share)

Memoir Spool - Kids' Stories/Family Night
Wednesday, July 11th, 7 pm sharp
Bazaar Cafe, San Francisco
Free admission
www.memoirspool.com

Sierra Storytelling Festival (open mic)
July 20–22, 2007
www.sierrastorytellingfestival.org
North Columbia Schoolhouse Cultural Center Nevada City, CA

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Spirit to the rescue

This photo of the magic dresser is a character in the story I'll be telling Saturday...you'll have to be there to know how it fits into a pivotal moment.

"Spirit to the rescue" is a magical tale about how I tuned into spirit last year on the playa when my bicycle was stolen. Spirit kept giving me everything I wanted -- from toilet paper, to a snowcone when I was thirsty, to a hat...to a new bicycle. It's a story that embodies what it's like to tune into the needs of others -- an experience that seems to happen to a lot of people spontaneously when they start to synchronize and tune into each other's frequencies in the inexplicable way that seems to happen when we're out there.

I'm storytelling onstage this weekend at Flambe Lounge. It's exciting to participate in the revival of oral storytelling and spoken word as an alternative to passive spoon-fed media. The oral and digital storytelling movement is blossoming (You Tube is just one example of the new "WE-dia" created by the people, for the people). The Burning Man arts community is becoming a hub for a new younger generation of storytellers exploring ways to revive this most primal art form.

How it all began (a storyteller's tale)

Winds swirled and coughed in an asthmatic dust devil dervish dance. I escaped to the center camp stage in search of an oasis from the wind. With each breath, particles of gypsum cut my lungs like shards of glass. My eyes were blistered by the sun, and bloodshot from the assault of dust. I cracked them open just enough to see across the room.

A hissing sound rose from the crowd -- people in goggles, paint masks and bandanas were booing a comedian on stage who was telling politically incorrect jokes--the kind of racist and sexist stuff that isn't even hip enough to qualify for spam on the Internet.

I was standing right next to the emcee. She said: "This guy is so bad. He's dying! We need to get rid of him. But there isn't anyone scheduled for another hour...."

A voice came out of me: "I can tell a story."

"Great! Get up there. Now."

Sunlight filtered in long streaks through the haze of dust, giving the circus tent of center stage a shadowy look like a smoking chamber in a Paris airport. I squinted into the haze, shivering in a flowered bikini, blue fishnets, ridiculous wide brimmed sparkly pink hat, and a matted white fur coat.

In a trance, I steppd up to the stage and spontaneously wove stories out of the dry thin air from the thread of my radically eccentric childhood. I was guided by a force much braver and more flamboyant than myself. The stories blew through me, cut through my fears. Spirit was holding my hand and feeding me lines, the laughter was comforting, and strangely I was at home on this stage, a place so surreal and otherworldly.

People clapped. They cheered. They asked me for another story. And another.

When my trance ended, three stories and an hour later, nearly 300 people filled the frumpy couches and clustered around the stage, held transfixed in rapt attention. Well, maybe so tired they couldn't move.

Either way, a new Gigi was born: Storyteller.

Attention isn't easy to come by at the Burning Man arts festival, where everyone's an artist, and some of the world's most fascinating performers (including celebrities like Sting and Daryl Hannah) spend their precious vacation in an edgy, surreal, anything goes orgy of creativity. But these jaded, dust-encrusted, candy-colored, fur-trimmed people roared with sympathetic laughter, and when it was over, they errupted in applause. I took it as a sign.

I mean, if that ain't a sign from the universe, what is?'

I spin stories spontaneously from memory -- but everything is true. I've been performing and videotaping stories for more than 2 years now, initially under the tutelage of Kathryn Dudley, my mentor, and the originator of a concept called Renegade Women -- a storytelling group that meets once a week to tell simple 10 minute tales from our past, examine them under the lens of a video camera, play them back, and in the end, transform ourselves into more powerful and present women.

Just talking about it, being heard, committing our choices and mistakes and terrors and triumphs to story, can sometimes be more powerful than psychotherapy. Nothing like airing all the skeletons in your closet in front of a live audience, turning tragedy into comedy, to exorcize those demons from your psyche for good. Once you get that stuff out, it's just...Not A Big Deal Anymore.

Back in my career as a print journalist, I wrote the first story about Burning Man. It was 1993, when you needed a map and a compass to find it.

Who could have predicted that me, a shy outsider looking in, would someday be on the inside, looking out?



Why do I do what I do?

Quite possibly the worst photo ever taken of me -- after 5 days of minimal sleep and no showers. But I really do want to make the world more beautiful.