Cinnamon, spice and steel

Feb. 20, 2003

Dear Ken,

For Valentine's Day, DC and I went to see a production of "The Vagina Monologues." About 80 people, mostly young women, jammed the community room at the local public library to watch five actresses deliver the monologues.

When the last word was uttered an hour and a half later, everyone in the audience jumped up and applauded. Some screamed.

We were clapping for Brooke Hildebrand Clubbs, Ellen Dillon, Lauryn Neilson, Nikki Redmond and Sarah V. Moore, but it felt like we were applauding brave and talented women everywhere.

You probably know the story: Playwright Eve Ensler asked more than 200 women of all ages and backgrounds to discuss their feelings about their vaginas and distilled their responses into this OBIE-winning play.

The title puts some people off. Perhaps they think nothing with such a title could be serious. They would be wrong. It isn't really about vaginas. It is about being a person who has one.

Sure, some of the monologues are funny. In one, the actresses enumerate scores of names that have been substituted to keep from saying vagina. Some are silly, some fanciful, some ugly. Moore had the audience yelling the one most people consider most offensive, forever reclaiming the word for all who were there.

The college theater major said that performing the play made her realize that there are things about being a woman she is uncomfortable with.

Seeing a production of "The Vagina Monologues" changed her, Clubbs said. She was a 25-year-old working on a master of fine arts degree who suddenly realized she still referred to her "wee-wee place." Much more, when she heard other women talking about their reactions to the experiences of being a woman, she was relieved. "I thought it was only me," she said.

Now Clubbs is a mom who can connect directly with "I Was There in the Room," the monologue Ensler wrote about the birth of her own grandchild.

You wonder how many women could identify to varying degrees with "My Vagina Was My Village," a story told by a woman who was repeatedly raped by soldiers in Bosnia.

The play was a bit too frank for DC. It startles ears used to hearing the cinnamon, spice and everything nice version of girldom. That old saying turns out to have been incomplete.

This week, a friend and I were discussing by e-mail the movie "The Hours." She hated it, thought its women were wimpy because they committed suicide or wanted to commit suicide to escape difficult situations. I wrote back saying perhaps she couldn't connect with their hopelessness. She's a person who is enthusiastically alive.

She wrote again to say that wasn't always so, to tell me how difficult life became after a relative's husband raped her the summer of her 12th year. She kept quiet. She grew depressed. She tried to commit suicide. That changed her.

"In an ongoing retaliation against that summer evening, I attempt to maintain dignity, strength, perseverance, and courage," she wrote, "to fight back at every occasion of perceived weakness of soul and character in myself and women in general, to crusade silently against the wrongness of being used, manipulated, hurt or lied to."

We ought to be thankful that these steely women allow us to walk hand-in-hand with them.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.