The Vagina Monologues (11 page)

Because he will

talk, and tell his friends, and they will think . . . and just maybe some change will be made. I do not plan to change the world in a day, but perhaps in a lifetime, day by day. —Alex, Pacific Lutheran University JOIN THE V-DAY MOVEMENT! TOGETHER WE CAN STOP THE VIOLENCE! It is the

mission of V-Day to end violence against women by increasing awareness through events and the media and by raising funds to support organizations working to ensure the safety of women everywhere. V-Day is a movement: an organized effort to finally end violence against women.

V-Day is a vision: we see a civilization where women live in freedom and safety.

V-Day is a spirit: affirming that life should be lived creating and thriving rather than surviving or recovering from terrible atrocities.

V-Day is a catalyst: by raising wide public awareness of the issue, it will reinvigorate efforts already under way and commence new initiatives in publicity, education, and law.

V-Day is a vital ongoing process: we proclaim Valentine’s Day as V-Day until the violence against women stops, and then it will become Victory Day. In just three years, V-Day has raised and donated more than a million dollars to grassroots organizations that fight violence against women worldwide. The first V-Day event in 1998 at the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York, featuring Whoopi Goldberg, Glenn Close, Susan Sarandon, and Calista Flockhart, raised $150,000. In 1999, V-Day at London’s Old Vic Theatre, featuring Thandie Newton, Kate Winslet, Kate Blanchette, Gillian Anderson, and Melanie Griffith, gave $275,000 to anti-violence organizations. More than sixty American colleges and universities also had V-Days, raising money and awareness. In 2000, V-Day was celebrated in Los

Angeles, in twelve other cities worldwide, and at 150 colleges. More than $785,000 was given to local, national, and international organizations working to end the violence.

V-Day’s Origins and Structure

V-Day was born in 1998 as an outgrowth of The Vagina Monologues. As Eve Ensler performed the

piece in small towns and large cities all over the world, she saw and heard firsthand the terrible consequences of violence toward women, as hundreds of women told their stories of rape, incest, domestic battery, and genital mutilation. It was clear that something major and dramatic needed to be done. A group of women in New York joined with Eve and founded V-Day . . . a catalyst, a movement, a performance that simply demands that the violence must end. V-Day is a next-step philanthropy, housed in people’s minds and hearts rather than in one physical location. V-Day pays no office rent or other traditional organizational expenses because it is not an organization. V-Day pays only three consultants, and is run almost entirely by volunteers. Eve Ensler has never received payment from V-Day for her work as an author, performer, or organizer. As a result of this nonorganizational form, V-Day is able to give away 85 percent of all funds raised. Beneficiaries of V-Day Funds V-Day is proud to be a project of the Tides Center. Tides manages the fiscal and legal areas of V-Day. The Tides Center “strengthens the roots of the social change movement by partnering quality management services with creative programmatic endeavors.” A (501)(c)(3) nonprofit public corporation, the Tides Center is a trusted venue for both funders and social entrepreneurs. As an independent organization, the Tides Center provides fiscal sponsorship and core management services to new and innovative nonprofit programs and efforts. Currently, the Tides Center supports more than three hundred projects in forty states and twelve countries. V-Day distributes the funds collected by donations, ticket sales, advertising, and merchandising to grassroots and field organizations working to stop violence toward women. Funds have been granted to the Anti-Violence Project (N.Y.); Break the Cycle (Los Angeles); Center Against Sexual Abuse (CASA) (Maricopa County, Ariz.); Equality Now (N.Y.); Feminist.com (N.Y.); Haven House (Los Angeles); Human Rights Watch (N.Y., international); Los Angeles Commission on Assaults

Against Women (LACAAW); LA Gay and Lesbian Center (Los Angeles); Newham Asian Women’s

Project (U.K.); New Hope for Women (Belfast, Me.); Planned Parenthood (N.Y., international); Refuge

(U.K.); Safe Place and Rape Crisis Center (Sarasota, Fla.); Sanctuary (N.Y.); Santa Fe Rape Crisis Center; Sine (U.K.); Sojourn Services for Battered Women & Their Children (Los Angeles); Southall Black Sisters (U.K.); The Autonomous Women’s House (Zagreb, Croatia); The Revolutionary

Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA); Women’s AID (U.K.); Women’s Commission for

Refugee Women and Children and Madre (N.Y.); Women Living Under Muslim Law (France and

Algeria). V-Day 2001 Worldwide Initiative The V-Day 2001 Worldwide Initiative will support V-Day events in cities and communities around the world during the month of February. These events will use the format that has been so successful in years past. The centerpiece will be a production of Eve Ensler’s Obie Award–winning play, The Vagina Monologues. Each production will feature women performers both celebrated and less known in the particular region and will raise money to fund organizations working to end violence in those communities. The Vagina Monologues has had a powerful, often

life-changing effect on audiences everywhere, and it is V-Day’s plan to go global with a message that entertains and at the same time creates a visceral shift in consciousness. No one who sees the play can remain neutral to the appalling cost of ignoring the global theme of violence against women, its relationship to how we hold human rights, or to the personal cost of such violence. V-Day presents a sweeping movement based on women’s ability to speak their truth about violence in a way that liberates rather than condemns, and frees both the spirit and political will. By taking V-Day worldwide, we have the opportunity to use this powerful work as a catalyst for shifting our view of our personal relationship to violence and what is possible in a civil society. Visit our website at www.vday.org or contact us at , box 1818, Grand Central Station, New York, NY 10016. Every person counts! You can make a difference!

Thank you for adding your power to V-Day.

Willa Shalit Executive Director

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS There are so many incredible people who helped give birth to this piece

and then sustain it in the world. I want to thank the brave ones who brought it and me to their hometowns and colleges and theaters: Pat Cramer, Sarah Raskin, Gerald Blaise Labida, Howie Baggadonutz, Carole Isenberg, Catherine Gammon, Lynne Hardin, Suzanne Paddock, Robin Hirsh, Gali Gold.

A special

thank-you to Steve Tiller and Clive Flowers for a gorgeous British premiere, and to Rada Boric for getting it done with style in Zagreb and for being my sister. Blessings on the generous, powerful women from the Center for Women War Victims in Zagreb. I want to thank the extraordinary people at HERE

Theatre in New York, who were crucial to the successful run of the play there: Randy Rollison and Barbara Busackino for their profound devotion and trust in this work; Wendy Evans Joseph for her magnificent set and great generosity; David Kelly; Heather Carson for her sexy, bold lights; Alex Avans and Kim Kefgen for their patience and perfection and for dancing the coochi snorcher dance with me night after night. I want to thank Stephen Pevner for his great support in getting all this off the ground, and Robert Levithan for his trust. Thanks to Michele Steckler for being there again and again; Don Summa for getting the press to say the word; and Alisa Solomon, Alexis Greene, Rebecca Mead, Chris Smith, Wendy Weiner, Ms., The Village Voice, and Mirabella for talking about the piece with such love and respect. I want to thank Gloria Steinem for her beautiful words and for being there before me, and Betty Dodson for loving vaginas and starting all this. I want to thank Charlotte Sheedy for respecting me and fighting for me, and Marc Klein for his day-to-day work and his enormous support and patience. I want to thank Carol Bodie: her belief in me has sustained me through the lean years, and her advocacy has pushed the work past other people’s fears and made it happen. I want to thank Willa Shalit for her great faith in me, and for her talent and courage in bringing my work into the world. I want to thank David Phillips for being my ever-arriving angel, and Lauren Lloyd for the big gift of Bosnia.

Thanks to Nancy

Rose for her expert and kind guidance; a special thank-you to Marianne Schnall, Sally Fisher, Feminist.com, and the V-Day Committee. I want to thank Gary Sunshine for coming at the right time. I want to thank my extraordinary editor, Mollie Doyle, for standing up for this book in more houses than one, and for ultimately being my great partner. I want to thank Marysue Rucci for seizing the project and helping me find its way as a book. I want to thank Villard for not being afraid. Then there are my friends-blessings: Paula Allen, for jumping; Brenda Currin for changing my karma; Diana de Vegh, whose generosity healed me; James Lecesne, because he sees me and believes; Mark Matousek for forcing me deeper; Paula Mazur for taking the big journey; Thea Stone for staying with me; Sapphire, for pushing my boundaries; Kim Rosen, who lets me breathe and die. I want to thank great women: Michele McHugh, Debbie Schechter, Maxi Cohen, Judy Katz, Judy Corcoran, Joan Stein, Kathy Najimy, Teri Schwartz, and the Betty girls for constant love and support. I want to thank my mentors —Joanne

Woodward, Shirley Knight, Lynn Austin, and Tina Turner. I want to thank my mother, Chris; my sister, Laura; and my brother, Curtis, for finding the tangly way back to each other. I want to acknowledge the brave, courageous women in the SWP program who keep facing the darkness over and over and riding through, particularly Maritza, Tarusa, Stacey, Ilysa, Belinda, Denise, Stephanie, Edwing, Joanne, Beverly, and Tawana. I want to deeply acknowledge the hundreds of women who let me into their private places, who trusted me with their stories and secrets. May their stories lay the path for a free and safe world for Hannah, Katie, Molly, Adisa, Lulu, Allyson, Olivia, Sammy, Isabella, and others. I want to thank my son, Dylan, for teaching me love, my daughter-in-law, Shiva, and my granddaughter, Coco, for

birth. Finally, I want to thank my partner, Ariel Orr Jordan, who co-conceived this piece with me, whose kindness and tenderness were a salve, were the beginning.

Many more people have become involved in The Vagina Monologues since the original publication of the book. Thank you to Joy de Menil for her insightful, passionate, and careful work on this edition, and for pushing me to write more. I want to thank George Lane for his tenderness, his advocacy, and for believing in me. I’d like to thank Pat Mitchell for her exquisite friendship. Since the first publication of The Vagina Monologues, the play opened Off-Broadway at the Westside Arts Theatre on October 3, 1999.

This production gave the play its second life. I would like to thank David Stone, the lead producer of this production, for his extraordinary vision, tenacity, faith in The Vagina Monologues, and for bringing it out out out into the world. I would particularly like to thank him for jumping into the V-Day movement with both feet, and for finding a way to support the movement through ticket sales. I would like to thank Joe Mantello for his great flair, understated and beautiful direction, for getting me to take myself less seriously, and for convincing me to take my shoes off. I want to thank Abby Epstein for her thoughtful, wise, and delicate ways of guiding women, and for being such a great support. I want to thank Nina Essman for her belief in The Vagina Monologues, her incredible hard work, and for helping me find a dress. Thank you to Eric Schnall for being such a personable, loving, smart outreach into the wider community. I want to thank Loy Arcenas for magical vulva curtains, and for his eye for perfection and grace; Beverly Emmons for the stunning array of pinks and reds and purples, and for lighting the show in a way that made me feel both feminine and fierce. I want to thank Barnaby Harris for dog naps, mad circles before the show, his great intensity, and his protection. Thank you to Shael Norris Mansmann for her loving hands, labia eye shadow, for ongoing wrestling with my cowlick, and for her utter care and kindness. I want to thank Susan Vargo for her incredible work, lifesaving back rubs, and her great heart.

Thank you to Michelle Bauer for delicious maple cookies in the middle of the winter and for making me laugh. Many other people were responsible for the big life of The Vagina Monologues, both by work at the theater and outside the theater. I’d like to thank Domonic Sack, Joel Pape, Jung Griffin, Rob Conover, Arthur Lewis, Jim Semmelman, Karen Moore, Anna Hoffman, Dan Markley, Mike Skipper,

The Araca Group, Amy Merlino, Patrick Carullo, Erica Daniels, Peter Askin, Terry Byrne, Eric Osburn, Russell Owen, Suzanne Abbott, Robert Fortier, Thomas M. Tyree, Jr., Marissa Yoo, Kate Sullivan, Chad Ryan Means, Charlie Chiv, Donald “Buck” Roberts, Bill Butler, David Kalodner, Tony Lipp, Josh Pollack, Gary Gersh, Larry Taube, and Sue Liebman. Finally, I would like to thank all the actors who have generously and brilliantly performed The Vagina Monologues. I bless them for their great talent and their willingness and their desire to stop violence toward women.