Vaginal Wonder

"It was better than the Grand Canyon, ancient and full of grace. It had the innocence and freshness of a proper English garden. It was funny, very funny! It made me laugh. It could hide and seek, open and close."
- Eve Ensler, The Vagina Monologues

Folks, I have absolutely adored being involved in Raleigh's first ever community production of the Vagina Monologues. What a total blast, what a bunch of great women and men I got to work with, what a powerful and important message to carry into our world with laughter-filled sails! A sort of artistic vagina manifesto, if you will, with core beliefs being that:

* Our bodies are sacred and beautiful (temple of the soul...), and that vaginas, though mostly hidden from sight and a bit odd looking and hairy and sometimes smelly and delicate and often a site of illness, invasion, and other trauma and turmoil, that our vaginas are among the most beautiful and sacred parts of anybody's body because they give us such pleasure, they give us all life, and ultimately, they are the reason we get to shake our fists proudly in the air (or our asses proudly on the dance floor) and rejoice in being members of the fine fabulous foxy ferocious fantastic female community.

* That though extremely personal, women's experiences of their bodies, their womanhood, and their vaginas are deeply affected by socio-cultural systems of oppression, judgement, and outright violence and warfare. That to love peace is to love justice is to love people is to love women is to love vaginas, and that creating a cultural community that is kind and loving and reverent toward vaginas is ultimately creating a just, peaceful, loving culture. And that, my friends, is the good stuff, eh?

And what of the monologue I had the distinct pleasure of performing? The neurotic nerdy British woman in "The Vagina Workshop"? I really loved getting to know her, getting into her character, and cultivating the fantastic sense of wonder and humor that come through so vividly in the monologue written about her.

I identify with her a lot - I indentify with her nerdy overanalyses, her run on sentences ;), her tendency to rationalize the hell out of everything, tee hee, her love-hate relationship with her sexual self - sort of delighted and innocent and awe-struck and also tentative and difficult - and also with her journey out of a sort of sexual dependency and passivity and into a more independent, proactive, self-loving relationship, not only with her sexuality, but with the direction of her whole life.

I mean, the monologue is about masturbating, so yeah, at a real basic level, it's about self-loving, but I don't just mean solo sex, come on, y'all know what I mean. It's about taking care of ourselves, taking responsibility for our own happiness, for the fulfillment of our righteous desitines in the world, for being the love we wish to have in our lives, for cultivating our own internal springs of love and energy and conscience and ambition and creativity. The point being that when we're with the important people in our lives - our lovers, friends, family, etc. - we're not needy and waiting for them to fill us up, direct us, define us. We're already overflowing. We're able to give and to receive love and life with these people, and to move forward and build something new and fantastic together out of our overflows, rather than just trying to fill each other's gaps.

Anyway, this has been a very interesting and fun monologue for me to think about and perform, for these reasons, and also because of the accent, I adore accents. :) Here is one of my favorite passages from the monologue on the subject of righteous self-love, or rather on the subject of un-righteous fear of self-love, for your reading pleasure (emphasis mine, not Eve's):

"Then, the moment arrived that I'd both dreaded and longed for. The woman who ran the workshop asked us to take out our mirrors again and to see if we could locate our clitoris. There we were, the group of us women, on our backs, searching for our spots, our locus, our reason, and I don't know why, but I started crying. Maybe it was sheer embarrassment. Maybe it was knowing that I had to give up the fantasy, the enormous, life consuming fantasy that someone or something was coming to do this for me, to lead my life, to choose direction, to give me orgasms. I could feel the panic coming, the simultaneous terror and realization that I had avoided finding my clitoris, had rationlized it as mainstream and consumerist because I was in fact terrified that I did not have a clitoris, terrified I was one of those constitutionally incapables...."

So, stay tuned everyone - due to popular demand, the Vagina Monologues will be back in Raleigh before month's end for a special encore engagement.

And also, stay tuned for pictures from the show, the final $$ count from our production - all proceeds from ticket & merch sales are going to the Women's Center of Wake County - and for information about getting involved in next year's Raleigh community production of the Vagina Monologues.

Many many thanks to all my homegirls and boys who helped make this happen. And thanks to Eve Ensler and V-Day for spreading the gospel of vaginal wonder hither and yon, and for sharing the Vagina Monologues - not only the show, but the powerful experience of performing it ourselves - with people all over the world. Rock on, brothers and sisters.