Too nervous to sit and cold-sweat on the beat-up, salmon-hued sofa in the lonesome hallway, I hover near the cracked theatre door and eavesdrop on the ongoing student-run auditions for Eve Ensler’s critically acclaimed play, The Vagina Monologues.
The casting for the coveted role of the “Angry Vagina” animates the stage.
Stomps and screams echo from the dim-lit theatre. Seething words from an irate and articulate Angry Vagina loudly reverberate through the listening darkness. The actresses yell and shake with dramatic fury, ferociously spitting out the award-winning lines into the abyss of empty, red-velvet seats.
The director, a well-versed theatre major in her junior year, holds court at the back, and halts every Angry Vagina audition. Calm and encouraging, she offers a challenge to change tone, to change technique, to speak from the core of the belly.
The director interrupts every audition, except for one, and this one audition is performed by my vivacious friend, Monica.
And I have to tell you about Monica, because she is brilliance in motion.
Monica could free-style rap about any subject (“seagulls”). She crafted high-energy, dance-worthy mixed CDs (remember when those were a thing?!), and biked around campus in leather jackets, ankle boots and skinny jeans, her blonde curls bouncing in the breeze.
Once she told me (with a perfected raised eyebrow to punctuate the point) that she and I were the coolest things to ever happen to this place (this place being a university in rural Ohio that we both transferred out of together to flock to the University of Kentucky).
On a fateful Friday night during our freshmen year, we truly befriended each other when we embarked on a determined quest to find a theatre house-party (because we wanted to get in with the theatre people to get roles in upcoming plays).
We got fabulously lost, giggling along the night-drenched sidewalks and never found the house-party but we found each other.
And here we are auditioning for The Vagina Monologues, and Monica, once again, shines a bright light in what-can-be the confusing swirl of college, in trying to find our authentic voice in the halls of academia.
Though I’ve been stationed at the back of the theatre (fear of the looming audition had rooted me right there) for the majority of the Angry Vagina auditions, Monica’s Angry Vagina is the first one I actually hear, and years later, I still hear her.
Monica stands perfectly still. Feet planted, shoulders rolled back, heart lifted. She owns the stage and commands attention, and not by stomping around the stage in projected outrage, but through her commitment to the moment, by sheer presence.
Her stillness anchors and energizes Eve Ensler’s words, words that I can now hear, because they’re not consumed and garbled up in the exaggerated motions of performative anger. They have been given an embodied center so the words that need to be heard can flow forward with blazing clarity.
Monica respects Eve Ensler, trusts the playwright’s writing.
She doesn’t need to act out the words, she lets the words speak for themselves, words from a playwright who has honored her sacred rage and has alchemized the anguish into potent, purposeful passion.
And in listening to the Angry Vagina, and perhaps because Monica had too listened to The Angry Vagina, I realize that the Angry Vagina is actually funny. Her fury fuels and fashions a scathing, sharp-witted funny that expertly utilizes humor to entrance, engage, and educate her audience.
“I want to taste the fish because I ordered the fish.”
Monica enunciates each word; she lets the words sizzle and pop, giving the audience the gracious, well-paced time to hear – really hear, digest the layered meanings, and in the digestion, there’s the delivery of metabolizing medicine, and that’s to laugh.
My laughter rings out and frees the butterflies that have been fluttering around my stomach. I realign my presence with my body, with an affectionate attentiveness that now brightly includes a renewed sense of empowered pride in the salt-water world of my vagina.
I want to taste the fish because I ordered the fish, too.
I find myself standing back in the doorway of this memory … witnessing my friend’s audition because this moment continues to reveal deeper and deeper meaning about the embodied, expressive power of sacred rage.
My inner voice sighs in relief. My inner voice has been urging me to tell you, yes, you! about the Angry Vagina.
“They need to know about the Angry Vagina,” my inner voice persistently whispered as I contemplated the serious role of comedy in protecting and advancing human rights (and you can read that writing HERE
Perched on a stool at a downtown coffeeshop, poised and choreographing a type-dance on my computer, I would hear the voice that comes from within, that emerges from the inner knowing of the womb, an intuition that lives and breathes in the circuitous movement of time.
“They need to know about the Angry Vagina.”
The request tumbled me back into pre-audition nerves, a frenzy of butterflies set loose inside my belly.
“They need to know about the Angry Vagina.”
My inner voice is clear like a beam of early sunlight. She rises from the base of my spine, the words taking shape from the fluttering sensations lifting up from my pelvic floor and into the auditorium of my ribcage.
And I do what I’ve been conditioned to do …
“Why?”
I question the logic, and the intuitive operates beyond the realms of the left-brain logic. I reason I can speak my truth without going there … without going back to those theatre doors and sharing the valuable lessons I gleaned in witnessing my friend’s audition, and I do.
I send out my piece on the day that just happened to coincide with the Supreme Court’s overturn of Roe vs. Wade.
Oh.
Now I understand why my inner voice urged me to write about the Angry Vagina.
And I am heart-seized in disappointment that I didn’t follow the initial whisper, that I didn’t write what my soul-voice was guiding me to write, that I abandoned my inner knowing, again.
And yet, this is the work of embodied homecoming.
This is my lifetime’s work of trusting myself, and returning to my divine feminine essence.
I have been severely conditioned to not trust myself, to not trust my body, and to relinquish my power of inner knowing to external authorities, to constantly look outside of myself for answers, approval and permission.
I’ve been conditioned to be afraid of my body, to strive to dominate and control my body, to live in a linear parade of marching forward time.
There are cracks now in the conditioning.
The presence of the divine feminine is activated and strengthened every time I choose to prioritize the wellbeing of my body, every time I choose to align my actions with my womb-spoken truths, every time I live in reverent rhythm with my cyclical nature.
Time, I am beginning to appreciate and understand, is not a straight line, it’s circuitous. It’s a cycle, a circle.
So let’s loop back to the moment where I am standing at the back of the theatre, witnessing the auditions. Here, past, future, and present merge together as one.
For the past few years, I have been watching the global stage and my own internal theatre, and how the two reflect one another, how the two are one. I’ve seen social media platforms set ablaze with performative fury, and I’ve experienced this explosive rage within myself.
And I look to Monica, I listen for the fire-purified lines of Eve Ensler, and I grant my body permission to growl, stomp, punch and high-kick, to move with the emotion, to get to the core of the feeling, and when I do I meet a grief that I can grieve.
I see a teen girl in the auditorium who is me and she is telling me that she wishes she had known.
She wishes she had known how phenomenal it is to live and exist and breathe and love as a woman in this brilliant female body.
She wishes she had known that her body does indeed communicate through sensation and images, and she can trust what she feels. She can feel what she feels unapologetically.
She wishes she had known that she didn’t have to be quiet about loving her period, that she does not need to like tampons, and that self-pleasure and sexuality is innocent, blessed, the most natural gifts of bliss in the world.
I had to tell you about the Angry Vagina because I needed to return to that moment when I honored my nerves and trusted that I needed to get off the couch and go listen to the auditions.
This is the day-to-day work of purposefully leaving the hallways of outer life and turning within to our inner stage, to witness the emotions parading and speaking, to be that bright listener, to hear and discern that true voice of soul, which communicates through the miraculous vessel of a human body, and to embrace all that is arising, eager to be heard so it can be so vibrantly and powerfully expressed.
And if you question what you hear, if there’s hesitation and doubt, this is part of the unfurling, part of the healing, a cracking of the conditioning that rivers alighted awareness back to you.
Time is a circle.
We loop and return to the same lessons so we can implement and continue to grow from what we have learned. A widening of consciousness. So the next time we arrive at the beginning, we will know where we have been, and we can choose to trust the intuitive voice that simply says, “Tell them.”