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.