The Vagina Monologues Read Free

Women and men faint during the show. It happens a lot. Always at the exact same place in the script. People bring and send objects —vagina
    products: vagina glass hand sculptures, clit lollipops, vagina puppets, vulva lamps, cone-shaped art pieces. There is a huge vagina cake inLondonat the V-Day party and no one can cut it.
    Hundreds of
    sophisticated partygoers eat mauve vagina cake with their hands. The clit is auctioned off and Thandie Newton buys it for two hundred pounds. The Vagina Monologues opens and is published in over twenty countries, includingChinaandTurkey. V-Day has an impossible time raising money from corporations.
    Even companies that sell vaginal products refuse to associate with the word. Women call up for tickets to the “Monologues”; men ask for tickets to the “Vagina Chronicles.” The punk ticketseller tells women that if they can’t say it, they can’t come. A young corporate woman bursts into my dressing room to tell me she really isn’t dry. It’s a lie. Two older Israeli women rush my dressing room inJerusalemand hug me while I’m naked. They don’t even notice. A seventy-year-old man in a trance walks into my dressing room unannounced after a show to tell me that he “finally got it.” Two months later he brings his girlfriend back with him and she thanks me. Midwives storm the dressing room to thank me for finally appreciating bodily excretions. A drag queen performs TVM on closing night.
    Vagina miracles, sightings, and occurrences. They go on. The greatest miracle, of course, is V-Day: an energy, a movement, a catalyst, a day to end violence toward women—born out of The Vagina Monologues. As I traveled with the piece to city after city, country after country, hundreds of women waited after the show to talk to me about their lives. The play had somehow freed up their memories, pain, and desire. Night after night I heard the same stories—women being raped as teenagers, in college, as little girls, as elderly women; women who had finally escaped being beaten to death by their husbands; women who were terrified to leave; women who were taken sexually, before they were even conscious of sex, by their stepfathers, brothers, cousins, uncles, mothers, and fathers. I began to feel insane, as if a door had opened to some underworld and I was being told things I was not supposed to know; knowing these things was dangerous. Slowly, it dawned on me that nothing was more important than stopping violence toward women—that the desecration of women indicated the failure of human beings to honor and protect life and that this failing would, if we did not correct it, be the end of us all. I do not think I am being extreme. When you rape, beat, maim, mutilate, burn, bury, and terrorize women, you destroy the essential life energy on the planet. You force what is meant to be open, trusting, nurturing, creative, and alive to be bent, infertile, and broken. In 1997, I met with a group of activist women, many from a group called Feminst.com, and we formed V-Day. As with all the mysterious vagina happenings, we show up,
    we do the groundwork, we stay in shape, and the Vagina Queens do the rest. OnFebruary 14, 1998, Valentine’s Day, our first V-Day was born. Twenty-five hundred people lined up outside the Hammerstein Ballroom inNew York Cityfor our first outrageous event. Whoopi Goldberg, Susan
    Sarandon, Glenn Close, Winona Ryder, Marisa Tomei, Shirley Knight, Lois Smith, Kathy Najimy, Calista Flockhart, Lily Tomlin, Hazelle Goodman, Margaret Cho, Hannah Ensler-Rivel, BETTY, Klezmer Women, Ulali, Phoebe Snow, Gloria Steinem, Soraya Mire, and Rosie Perez joined together to perform The Vagina Monologues and created a transforming evening that raised over $100,000 and launched the V-Day movement. Since then there have been stellar events at the Old Vic inLondonin 1999, with performers including Cate Blanchett, Kate Winslet, Melanie Griffith, Meera Syal, Julia Sawalha, Joely Richardson, Ruby Wax,