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.