The hippy-dippy nature of Boulder provided Katie Rubin with the perfect audience for her jokes revolving around spirituality and work with Access Consciousness when she performed at the Dairy Center on Friday night.
This is not to say that Rubin wouldn’t be well-received anywhere–though centered around her journey of getting sober and the spirituality she embraced as a result–Rubin’s show is more of a look at the choices and attitudes of a person struggling through life along with the rest of us.
In front of a nearly sold out theater of people who appeared to all know each other, Rubin took us through her life. Starting in her adolescence with an alcoholic father, Rubin continued through her own experience as an alcoholic and, more importantly, what her journey after getting sober taught her about life. The audience came to understand what Katie was all about.
She attended an energy healing university and then found Access Consciousness, a program that emphasizes the concept that, “Consciousness includes everything, and judges nothing,” Rubin explained. Rubin relayed what she has learned through these programs in the form of “tools” for the audience to apply to their own life.
It didn’t feel like a lecture, though, or as if spirituality was being shoved down our throats. It felt like talking to a friend who happens to make you double over in laughter, or in the case of some audience members, succumb to snorting heard round the world. With perfect pauses and over-the-top impressions, Rubin delved into the basics: dating, sex, work, and body image.
Nothing was too serious, and she wasn’t annoyingly self-deprecating – she made the audience comfortable with relate-able concerns, like insecurity and an overwhelming hatred of group exercise and then delved into how spirituality and consciousness helped her overcome obstacles.
Rubin’s theater background shone through with her with her impressions, as she got her whole body involved – women who annoyed her were like Barbie on cocaine, while the stereotypical “dude” was a bit monkey-like. Her every man nature guaranteed that everyone in the audience had in their head an image of their real life crack Barbie and dude monkey.
The show wasn’t geared toward one gender or another – Rubin could at one point be a guys guy, describing her tendency to take initiative in dating scenarios and also spoke to women with her disdain of the “perfect” women she is surrounded by in Los Angeles.
She also appealed to all ages. When she shared the wisdom gained from learning about awareness, she was quite the old soul. But when this knowledge was applied to a no-holds-barred story about being “astride” a man on a date, Rubin achieved a perfect balance.
Perhaps most striking is that the audience really does come away learning something. It’s not the same lesson for everyone, and it may not be earth shattering, but when a woman as confident and successful as Rubin professes to be just as human and lost as the rest of us, while still managing to laugh about it, it’s hard not to feel a little inspired.
Contact CU Independent Staff Writer Maggie Wagner at magdalen.wagner@colorado.edu
