Dick Sutphen’s Road Diary
London, England & Barcelona, Spain
November 2003 (continued)

Lani, Baylan and Tara at the entrance to the Healing Arts Festival. We did a live 15-minute interview on BBC Radio.

Sunday, November 9: We talk to Cheyenne by phone in the morning. She is ecstatic over the club experience, but on the downside, the London “rave” scene and people don’t seem to have lived up to Los Angeles standards of cool. “Those attending were more interested in drinking than dancing,” she says. They did not have the “personality or style” she expected.

The cabby who takes us to the festival wants to talk. This is “Remembrance Day” in the UK -- their version of our Memorial Day. There will be parades and many streets are blocked, he says. He wants to know what is going on at the Royal Horticultural Halls.

“The Healing Arts Festival,” Tara says.

“I’m no more the wiser,” he says. “Is that like alternative medicine?”

“Yes, in a way,” she says.

The cabby now goes into a many-mile tale of how his wife embraced reflexology to resolve back problems. He thinks she was faking the whole thing to get out of work and to force him to do the house cleaning and cooking for three years.

Tara listens, responds. She is now his friend.

“Where are ya from?” he asks.

“Los Angeles,” she says.

“Ohhhh my ... well ... everyone can’t be perfect.”

“You don’t like LA?” she says.

The guy now starts to back peddle his opinion. I laugh to myself and look out the window.

Cheyenne handles CD sales in the workshops. She knows the products as well as Tara and I, because she uses the sessions with her friends.

We arrive at the festival two hours early to do a live interview on BBC radio. The interviewer is Baylen Leonard, an American who has been living in England three years. We strike up an easy rapport. He wants to talk in the festival entrance because it is noisy, and on the radio it will sound like a lot of activity is taking place.

The break for the live segment will come in 15 minutes. Subject: past-life therapy. When Baylen finds out Tara is psychic, he asks for a reading. She takes him aside and without even looking at his palm, tells him many intimate details about his love life, career and what is to come.

“I’ve had considerable contact with psychics, but no one has every read me that accurately,” he says.

When it’s air time, I talk about past-lives for a moment, but quickly spin the interview direction to Baylen’s psychic reading by Tara. “But we’re not going to talk about any of that on the air,” Baylen says, concerned. Tara talks and jokes with him and the London studio contact who is enjoying this interview as much as we are.

I can’t imagine the interview helping the festival, which is over tonight, but it was fun. With an hour to kill, we sit in on a Thai Yoga session, followed by New Age musician Tim Wheater’s demonstration of his sound bed. We’ve known Tim for years, and I enjoy watching this. A man lies within an elevated canoe-like bed. Large gongs stand at each end, and there are 60 strings beneath the curved bottom of the bed. Tim plays the gongs and strings at the same time, plus he hums, plays a glass bowl and other instruments. The blur of movement and sound is overwhelming. Tara wants to experience lying in the bed during an impromptu concert.

Our four-hour Past-Life Workshop is fully attended. For some reason, I don’t feel like doing my standard workshop. Instead of my normal spiel, I walk into the room and say, “Hello, I’m Dick Sutphen and let’s talk about reincarnation.” I place a bar stool almost on top of the front row. “Help me out here. I need questions from you.”

English audiences are very reserved and interaction is usually only a fraction of what we experience at home. After Patti’s first workshop on Friday, she said to me, “They really don’t want to interact do they?” She evidently pushed them and one of the participants in her workshop said, “You want us to react like Americans.”

I too want them to react like Americans, and I keep at them until they do. I enjoy the process. They do too. Tara’s Past-Life Release session is well received. To end the workshop, instead of my planned processes, I spin off into a Parallel-Life Transfer. The reaction is far more positive than normal from a British audience.

Workshop over, we quickly pack up, say our goodbyes to the festival staff and meet Diane White, a personal friend, in front of the venue. She leads us to her BMW and we’re quickly away, headed to her house in Clappham. Diane is from New Zealand, an artist who creates costumes for the London theater and takes freelance interior-design assignments. Her husband Wilf works for the BBC. We have not seen the Whites since they came to our home in Malibu for dinner a few years ago.

With Diane and Wilf White and their dog Humbug in Clappham, a suburb of London.

The Whites live in a beautiful neighborhood of classically English, three-story homes. Diane has been away all day, so rather than cooking, orders in. We drink wine, talk, drink Scotch, talk.

Wilf is an intellectual and I delight in conversation that varies from Arnold as governor of California ... to the fact the French wineries are in financial trouble because the Americans and English have stopped buying French wine ... to Wilf’s experiences regarding an IRA (Irish) terrorist attack on a BBC building.

Diane drives us back to our apartment at midnight. We pack our suitcases until 1 AM.

Click HERE for the continuation
of Dick’s London/Barcelona
2003 Road Diary