So I parked my car in my friend´s garage early Tuesday morning and got on a plane with my mom and her new husband. We had a slight problem at the ticket counter because someone typed his name as Dennise instead of Dennis. Our connecting flight from Houston featured a young autistic guy two rows in front of me breaking into a siezure after eating a bag of peanuts. Two women on the plane were nurses and they laid him in the aisle, stuck various things in him. We were over the Gulf of Mexico, so we turned back and landed in Houston. He walked off the plane, so he was ok.

Back in the air, we flew just to the left of a mess of lightning. It was exquisitely beautiful. The clouds alight with electricity, the sky looked like Albert Bierdstadt meets Einstein with a little Alex Grey and Georgia O´Keefe. Each time the lightning struck, the outlines of the clouds would glow for a moment. It reminded me of synapses firing… a brainstorm… ideas being created… the confluence of two unrelated things, suddenly making new meaning, making light and beauty.

I got another stamp on my passport as we went through immigration. Maybe I´m not so much a world traveler as a stamp collector… tee hee. We drove our rental car from the airport to San Jose (following the guy who picked us up.) Stayed in a beautiful hotel called El Presidente. I figured with a name like El Presidente, it would be a shithole, on account of irony, but it was a welcome oasis of clean sheets, air conditioning, and flat screen HBOness after a long travel day.

Our rental car is a stick shift, the streets aren´t labeled, and the traffic is a little crazier than in the states )though nothing like India.) They drive on the right side of the street here. I take the wheel for most of the trip to Manuel Antonio, which is about 170 km from San Jose. We got lost in San Jose and in the next big city, both for about half an hour… finally paid a taxi driver to take us to the freeway. Nothing is labeled. We didn´t opt for the GPS. I actually enjoyed the adventure. (This is the real reason they wrote ¨Do You Know the Way to San Jose¨)

We drive through the rainforest and the mountains, which are beautiful. One rest stop overlooks the mountains and reminds me so much of a rest stop I was at in Southern India that I´m salivating for chai. There are so many similarities with Central America… the climate and landscape, the Christianity mixed with the local religion, the hints of socialism… Dios Mio, I almost forgot to mention that the coffee is amazing. I rarely drink coffee, but it´s so good here, I´m drinking it like a caffinated fish. Oh, I bou

I wish I could speak Spanish so much… my Spanish is like a bastard child of Sesame Street, conversational French, and some cassette tapes I listened to on the way to Mexico when I was eight. I smile and nod a lot. I do a really good gracias.

We rolled around in the waves last night… the water is really warm. Watched the sunset as we walked along the beach. I played some pool with the gay bartender… not really… I played on my own… I´m just saying… Actually it turns out that they de’crimiminalized um, gayness, here about 20 years ago, and I guess Costa Rica is a big gay tourist destination.

This morning we went on a white water rafting trip down the river. There were a few class four rapids! One girl fell out of our boat in the rapids and floated down the river, bobbing up and down for a bit. She got caught under our boat and then she got rescued by the kayak, which then flipped, and she bobbed through the rapids some more. Our whole boat almost tipped over as the guide was trying to help her. Quite an adventure. We finally got her back in the boat, and her lip was a little bloody. Ok other than that. It was actually a really fun ride and the land is amazing. We saw frogs, spiders, hawks, all kinds of butterflies and trees… And now we´re back at the hotel, Playa Espadilla, which is right next to the national forest. A package tour with surprisingly great features. So I´m off to soak in the pool a bit and try to relax and enjoy all that´s here.

Namaste,
Alicia

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Phoenix: I am inspired by the magical bird who, every 500 years, builds a nest, sets it alight, and burns in its own fire. It then rises anew from the ashes and lives again. Reminds me of Passover. Like the flood story from the Torah, a version of the Phoenix story exists in China, Japan, Russia, Egypt, Greece, originating in… you guessed it, India (Garuda, the bird of Vishnu.)

Show Report: Tucson less phreaky than Phoenix…
I’m sitting in my friend Abby’s dining room in Tucson, Arizona. Abby’s three month old baby, Juna, is adorable and amazing. Bouncing Juna in my arms is at once peaceful and thrilling. It’s sunny here with a light breeze that carries the tune of morning songbirds. The air is dry and intermittently dusty, the land dotted with cactus. Dogs bark at night in packs, reminding me of India, but with less death-cries. Today I visited my comedian friend Robert Mac and threw some ideas around for my show about India, “Eat, Pray, Laugh!”

I put on my show “The Punchline” five times in the Phoenix Fringe Festival these past few days. Emotional spaces opened up in my later performances that I had been longing for–there were whole shows, not just moments in which I truly enjoyed myself. I expanded into my characters more playfully, freely, deeply. It was both inspiring and relieving to know that it gets better and better as time goes on.

The audiences were so great… they really enjoyed the show and got what I was offering (although smaller crowds than I would have liked.) Here’s one among many awesome reviews from a fellow Fringer/Storyteller from LA:

“You have a lovely show. I really enjoyed it. You are a very skilled writer and performer, with great command of the story arc… the Distraction Dance was awesome.” -Antonio Sacre

Tucson is less weird than Phoenix. Phoenix is very hot and you can’t walk anywhere. The only kind of “alternative” lifestyle that seems to exist there is the punk genus. If you don’t go to the university and walk around in a bikini and shorts all day, (where is the beach, young ladies??) and you want to be different, you have to be a punk. It’s very sad. The people from the ASU theatre department are great, and really dedicated to bringing more grassroots culture up into Phoenix with the Fringe Festival. Keep on fighting the good fight. Anyway, I stayed in the Hilton by the airport for $45 a night (thank you, Priceline) and was able to get in the jacuzzi every day and watch HBO, so that made up for various shortcomings of the city.

A final highlight: yesterday I drove up to Arcosanti, 75 miles north of Phoenix. It’s an experimental community centered on the architecture and ecology ideas of Italian Paulo Soleri. Soleri, a Guggenheim fellow now about to turn 90, completely re-imagined architecture and city planning such that people, culture, and natural space are the focus, instead of, say, cars, roads, and parking. His city plans are like hives, built to maximize open space and human interaction. Some deep part of my soul called out to me, yearning for such a place to live and work. Even though 50,000 people a year visit Arcosanti, and they’re actively building a city big enough to house 7,000 people, the pace is a snail’s. They need an infusion of millions of dollars to really build it. Maybe they can get in on that stimulus package…?

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Dear Fellow Humans from the year 2009,

As 2008 passes like a gall stone, I’m laid up for the first day of the new year, high on early episodes of The West Wing and the belief that the inauguration of our new president will rescue this country from free-fall. It’s been an endlessly interesting year for us all. Electing our first black president, losing 40% of the capital in the stock market, seeing Tina Fey look so much like Sarah Palin, I can’t tell who’s who.

Personally, I’ve had an interesting year as well. It began with a ten-day silent meditation course in India. You all followed my travels throughout India, Thailand, and Cambodia for three months starting last February. I gathered parts and memories of myself scattered in many lifetimes during that trip. I returned home with a powerful sense of independence, maturity, and knowing that no matter where I am in the entire world, I can take care of myself and be happy. Then I came home and saw my parents. (And forgot again. Ha!)

I also joined a year-long training course for life coaching and workshop leading in August, and began coaching people in creativity and spontaneity. After doing standup, working and playing with others to break through to what is most true for them is my favorite thing to do. And after almost two months of work on my solo show, “The Punchline,” I played to sold out houses at the Fringe Festival. It was an honor to win Best Female Solo at the Festival and be selected for the Solo Show Festival in Marin in February (the 24th.)

I’m sending out this new year’s wish to you because I want to reach out and connect with you. I’ve been very affected by the intensity and fear of the world’s events–the end of easy oil, the reluctance of auto companies to completely re-invent themselves in order to protect the environment, the blindness and greed of the mortgage industry, and the sense of scarcity the downturn in the economy has had on us. And the message I want to convey is that it’s time to open our eyes to what’s really happening in the world. And to take a stand. To speak what we believe, and to align our actions with our values and our words. But I also want to say that there is so much more to life than the what’s in the news. Our own thoughts and actions are what truly build the fabric of reality, moment by moment. And together, we have the power to focus our thoughts to send an asteroid crashing into Bernard Madoff’s living room. (But read some of my beloved Krishnamurti and you’ll realize we are all Bernard Madoff.)

So stay tuned for info about my gigs, laughter yoga classes, and workshops in the coming year. I’ll be premiering the full version of Eat Pray Laugh! at some point, and I’m also putting together a down and dirty old-school standup set for the clubs.

To 2009, may all beings be happy.

-Alicia

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We were driving in the car yesterday listening to NPR.  They were playing Obama’s top ten favorite songs according to Blender magazine.  Bruce Springsteen’s “I’m on Fire” was on his list, and I thought, “God, Barack is so hot.”  And then I just burst into tears.  It’s been so bad for so long, that the idea of this country getting on track again is hard to open up to.  It’s feels like having been in an abusive relationship for the last eight years, and now there’s this new guy, and he’s not only saying all the right things, he’s doing some of them.  You want to let the love in, you want to let it work you out and heal you, but there are wounds.  There’s mercury in the fish, the FDA and the FCC are in the hands of profiteers, the unholy, unspoken union between the food industry and the healthcare industry are consipiring to bankrupt us of our health and our money.

This fancy talkin’ new President sure sounds sweet, but the truth is he won’t meet our expectations.  He’s here to lead us and shows us back to the path to take responsibility back into our own hands and to fulfill our expectations ourselves through perseverance and right action.

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I did a set tonight in Morgan Hill, California.  Far far away from, well, anything it seems.  I’m very uninterested in political material, partly because I never feel as informed as I’d like to be to back up my arguments, partly because it’s annoying to talk about something that I care about and find out who the Republicans are in the audience.  Then I wonder what they’re thinking of me, and if they’re thinking as poorly of my opinions as I am of theirs, and in general it’s just unpleasant.  So I did some of my new material about my trip to India and meditating, and it went incredibly well in a room mostly full of Christian Republicans.  They had fun, I had fun.  They heckled, I heckled back.  People always apologize to me after shows where they heckle me.  Like somehow we’re old buddies.  Ok.  Be my buddy.  Fine.  But so I was surprised that my material, which is designed for a room full of new agey spiritual types actually went over with the straight crowd.  Good to be doing standup again.

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