Dallas Henderson performs in “The Vagina Monologues” at the Turner Center Wednesday night. (Photos by: Jacqueline Knirnschild)
Eight performers stood in front of a room full of people to talk about a very taboo subject at the Turner Center Wednesday night— the vagina. Monologues covered every aspect of the vagina, from hair, orgasms, sex, short skirts and sex workers to the words women choose to describe their vaginas.
This performance of “The Vagina Monologues,” a play by Eve Ensler, was hosted by RASA and ADPI and sponsored by the Violence Prevention Office, FeMiss and ASB.
Dallas Henderson, a sophomore political science major, acted out a monologue describing “the angry vagina.”
“My vagina’s furious, and it needs to talk,” Henderson exclaimed. “Stop shoving and stop cleaning it up,” she continued. “My vagina doesn’t need to be cleaned up.
“Why can’t they find some nice delicious purple velvet and wrap it around me, lay me down on some feathery cotton spread, put on some nice friendly pink or blue gloves, and rest my feet in some fur covered stirrups?”
Henderson wanted to partake in “The Vagina Monologues” because she did it last year and felt it was “very empowering.”
“The point of it is to take the stigma away from talking about ‘women’s things,’” Henderson said.
Elizabeth Romary, a senior international studies major, participated in the show because she likes “how the play promotes self-love in its most extreme form.”
“My short skirt is not an invitation, a provocation, an indication that I want it or give it or that I hook,” Romary said in her first monologue while clad in a short skirt.
Meredith Dillon, a senior theater major, said her friends at other schools participated in “The Vagina Monologues” and told her it was an eye-opening experience.
“It made them somehow feel more comfortable with their bodies just saying the word ‘vagina’ in front of a room full of people,” Dillon said. “I think it’s kind of messed up that ‘vagina’ is a cuss word.”
Dillon performed a piece about a woman going to a vagina workshop, discovering her clitoris and learning how to orgasm by herself.
“My vagina amazed me,” Dillon said. “It was better than the Grand Canyon, ancient and full of grace.”
She described her orgasm, “The quaking broke open into an ancient horizon of light and silence, which opened onto a plane of music and colors and innocence and longing, and I felt connection, calling connection as I lay there thrashing about on my little blue mat.”
