The Vagina Monologues is made up of a varying number of monologues read by a varying number of women. Each of the monologues deals with an aspect of the feminine experience, touching on matters such as sex, love, rape,
menstruation, female genital mutilation, masturbation, birth, orgasm the various common names for the vagina, or simply as a physical aspect of the body. A recurring theme throughout the piece is the vagina as a tool of female
empowerment, and the ultimate embodiment of individuality.
It all started with a comment from Jason to Eric and then it blew into something else entirely. A bit of background first:
Jason was a devout Jehovah’s Witness during our high school years. Eric was a good Roman Catholic and I was, and still am, the Episcopalian.
I can’t remember HOW it all got started, just know that it got started because at this point in our lives, Jason calls himself an Atheist
and/or non-believer while Eric is still the Roman Catholic and I’m still the Episcopalian. Suffice it to say Eric made a comment about God or religion and Jason commented back and the debate was ON!
In THIS corner you have an ex-communicated Jehovah’s Witness-now Atheist and in THAT corner you have Roman Catholic Eric. Refereeing this
match is Matt - the milquetoast Episcopalian who wants everyone to just love each other and get along.
As this on-line debate grew, others started to chime in. Some with strong Christian beliefs, some with no beliefs whatsoever. Some who had a deep faith
now no longer, some who were questioning. This debate lasted a few days (weeks?) and spanned some thousands of back and forth comments.
Was anything resolved at the end? Did Jason suddenly decide to pay attention to the Pope. Did Eric renounce “Vatican 2 - Now More Vaticany!”
I don’t think so. But the exercise enabled the brain synapses to work and that’s, typically, a good thing.
What I ended up with was an idea for a stage play called “The God Monologues.” Fascinated by people and their relationship with God, or
not, I wanted to collect stories from all around the country from all walks of life. Both from people who have found God and how and why and what having God in their life means to them and those who have rejected God or feel
that God has not part in their life and why and how not having God in their life means to them.
The plan was to collect these stories and put on a stage play. Jason bought in, my friend Cami bought in and we pulled in some people who actually
know something about putting on a play. Jason created an AMAZING website and we put out the call for stories. This was going to be our “bread and butter” the content for the actual play.
Using Social Media and other avenues the call went out. As the stories came in, though, I was surprised. The ratio of “has no relationship
with God” to the “has a relationship with God” was about 8 to 1. I assumed we’d be more evenly split.
The other problem was that the stories about no relationship were actually very intense and heartfelt and, in some ways, heart breaking. Whether
it was escaping from a cult, an abusive relationship with their “Christian” family, their struggle to deal with massive amounts of guilt due to their sexuality or upbringing, etc. Whereas the stories about people having
relationships with God amounted almost entirely to: “God loves me, so I love him.” Or “I was raised in the church and....cool.”
Conflict creates stories and if there’s little or no conflict - there are little if no stories.
It was vitally important from Day One that the stories we get were true. We didn’t want to just make stuff up but we also wanted a core balance.
If we had ten “non-believer” stories, I wanted ten “believer” stories. I didn’t want to be accused of pushing a certain belief (or non-belief - even though I’m a believer) because we weighed certain stories more
than others. In fact, if we were to ever have finished/created this play, I would almost want it down to the minute just so if someone came up to me afterward and said: “Well, geeze, I think you really pushed the non-believer
stories” - I could honestly say: “We had ten stories each, the non-believer stories took up 48 minutes, the believer stories took up 47 minutes.”
As the non-believer stories filled the website we then started approaching people who were believers directly and, surprisingly, what came back
was that some feared they would, a. be made fun of or b. be challenged on what they believed and how they got there.
We assured them that neither would happen but, alas, we never got a good enough ratio and the play has been put on indefinite hold.
Every so often I get a hankering to put it back out there. Or just start doing research and finding true stories out on the internet and use
those, changing the names as needed.
Maybe someday.
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