The Vagina Monologues The V-Day Edition | Page 4

and Kathie Lee. David Letterman tries to say vagina, but can't. Barbara Walters confesses on The
View that she was embarrassed by TVM and thought it was strident. She later recants. CNN does a
ten-minute special on TVM and never mentions the word. Dharma's and Greg's parents are buying
tickets to TVM on an episode. Vagina Occurrences: Glenn Close gets 2,500 people to stand and chant
the word cunt. Tovah Feldmanstern was denied the right to direct TVM at her all-girls progressive high
school, so she directs it independently. A woman rabbi sends me a hamantasch and describes its vaginal
meanings. There is now a Cunt Workshop atWesleyanUniversity. A woman brings her uterus to the
theater to have me sign it. A young man makes and serves me a vagina salad for dinner with his parents
inAtlanta,Georgia. Bean sprouts are pubic hair. Roseanne performs “What Does Your Vagina Smell
Like?” in her underwear for two thousand people. She makes up her own lines, one of them being:
“What does your vagina smell like?” ANSWER: “My husband's face.”
 Alanis Morissette and Audra McDonald sing the cunt piece. 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, Eddi Reader, Katie Puckrik, Dani Behr, Natasha McElhone,
Sophie Dahl, Jane Lapotaire,