One Hour Teleseminar with William Arntz
Will is the producer, director, and screenwriter for What the BLEEP Do We Know!? & the highly anticipated Director’s Cut Version: What the BLEEP – Down the Rabbit Hole, in theaters February 2006.
Join the driving force behind the movie, William Arntz, in an exploration of " What the Bleep!? and Beyond," a dialogue with IONS senior scientist and Entangled Minds teleseminar host Dean Radin.
William Arntz |
Dean Radin |
Radin also plays a prominent role in the upcoming Rabbit Hole director’s cut version . To find information on Radin’s programs go to:
shiftinaction.com/
entangled_minds
&
shiftinaction.com/discover/
luminaries/dean_radin
For a sampler, Click here for the FREE three-minute teleseminar highlight
You can join us and participate in exciting weekly teleseminars such as this one by joining the Shift in Action program of the Institute of Noetic Sciences:
IONS membership
Once you’ve become a Shift in Action Partner, you can gain access to the full teleseminar with William and Dean at: shiftinaction.com/node/1599
For a FREE IONS What the Bleep Study Guide, go to: www.noetic.org
Comedy Goes Quantum
By Cate Montana
Picture this. You’re in a nightclub in New York City (no longer smoke-filled of course), waiting for the comedy act to begin. A tall, dark haired, rather exotic looking beauty strides onto the stage and up to the mike. Expecting the usual comedy shtick about ex-husbands, mothers-in-laws or first-date fiascos, you hear a different patter:
Vanda Mikoloski
“You know you want to say, ‘That driver that just cut me off is a jerk.’ But you can't really say that anymore. You can say, ‘You occur in my reality as a jerk.’ Or ‘I'm accessing the jerk in me to in order to perceive you as a jerk.’ But it ain't satisfying. And the most accurate thing you can say is, ‘I'm a jerk.’”
What’s this? A New Thought comedy routine about consciousness and personal evolution? Yep - and more.
|
|
|
|
Throw in a few jokes about particle physics, superposition, alternate realities and multiple potentialities existing at the same time and you begin to get the flavor of Vanda Mikoloski’s outrageous quantum comedy routine; a way-out of the ordinary laugh at life as we know it. Take Vanda’s response to the state patrol officer who has just stopped her for speeding. “Yes, officer, there was a Vanda going 85 in a 55 But there's also a Vanda going 55 in an 85. There's a speed of light Vanda. There's the perfectly still Vanda. There are many, many Vanda's officer. You just collapsed the wave function on the wrong Vanda, that's all.”
Speaking of wave functions – even the fact that Vanda’s collapsed into a version that finds her back in comedy after a nine year absence is pretty outrageous, especially considering she left the smokey-bar routine to pursue work as a full-time yoga instructor. So what induced the professional yogini to return to the mike? Coincidence? Happenstance?
Actually, it was Elaine Hendrix, the actress who plays Jennifer in What the Bleep!? Good friends with LA comic Rick Overton, she suggested he look into doing a routine based on the movie’s ideas. That lead to a call to Vanda’s brother, (coincidentally) Bleep marketing director, Pavel Mikoloski, which lead to a call to Vanda to get involved. Overton encouraged her to develop an act of her own.
“I told him, ‘I don't want to be in nightclubs’ … and he said, ‘But you're an elder. You've got to give back to the tribe now.’ And it was like one of the pivotal things that people say to you.”
Encouraged by the thought that greater years bring greater wisdom, Vanda realized she could re-approach comedy on her own terms, say what she wanted to say and get the audiences she wanted to get - a far cry from her earlier attitudes as a hungry young comedienne just looking for gigs.
“I thought, ‘What do I want to give my life for? What do I want this gift to be about?
I'm fascinated with the trap of being human and, at the same time, as it says in What the BLEEP!?, the majesty of being divine. We have that paradox in us - like you’re going to a meditation retreat and going deep into your deepest essence, and suddenly you're pissed off at your best friend. It's that whole paradox of having the divine and the very human, which is sometimes very petty and small in you, and how to reconcile that.
“That is fascinating to me. We're all in it together. As long as we're in a body, we're challenged.”
|
|
|
At the moment, Vanda’s challenge is to continue to develop new material for her hour and a half show, Enlighten Up!, polishing it and finding the appropriate venues.
The fact that she now finds herself doing her routine in churches and convention centers as often as she does clubs and bars she finds amusing, but not surprising considering the content. What she does find interesting however, is how broadly appealing her material actually is. Even though many of her jokes take pokes at fundamentalist Christians, or wander into the realm of blasphemy, the good ol’ boys in the bars don’t seem to mind.
“Can I even say the word Jesus? Can I say that I want to be exactly like Jesus? Can I say that I think I can be like Jesus? … But even better because he wasn't very funny. I’m funny. ”
“They go with me on it,” she says, rather bemused.
But, as Vanda points out, audiences will eat steak if you feed them steak, and hamburger if you feed them hamburger. Doing what comediennes call “writing up,” creating higher-brow material than ordinary, works as long as you give the audience context and don’t talk about things they can’t understand. And “writing up” is what Vanda’s new goal is all about.
“My dream is to have a comedy show that not only is funny and gets the endorphins going and has people feel good when they leave, but actually to be inspired and see that more is available…that it actually expands the walls of our perception. … What would that be like, if you came back from a standup comedy show saying, ‘Well, I laughed a lot, and that was great. But I also have a new lease on life.’ That would be way cool. Really.”
***
|
|
