My first experience with The Vagina Monologues was during the fall of 1999. My family and I traveled to New York for a long weekend, and being an avid lover of the theater, I was systematically deciding which shows I wanted to see. I remember being intrigued with The Vagina Monologues--not simply because of its title, but also because of the exciting reviews I found in the New Yorker and also because it was off-Broadway, which somehow signified "cooler" to me. When I got to the city I actually walked all the way over to the Westside Theatre at West 43rd Street, went into the small, square lobby, looked at the large black and white stills of various women sitting on tall stools with their standing microphones, and then left. I didn't buy tickets for two reasons. The first being that the theatre didn't offer any rush or discount tickets, and $55 was definitely out of my student price range, and the second, more embarrassing being that I didn't really want to have to tell my father the name of the play, and I especially didn't want to have to talk with him about it afterwards.

With this in mind, I certainly never expected to be standing on the Old Playmakers stage at UNC just a year and a half later, shouting out "VAGINA" with all my heart to a sold out house that incidentally included my father. It's difficult to describe how this came to be--I suppose it was one of those wonderful accidents that shape human life. When I saw the audition flyer in late November, I knew this was something I just had to do. It all made sense: I was a freshman looking to "get involved," as everyone kept advising, ready to get back into theater after a rather lengthy time away, and also fairly discouraged with many of the attitudes towards gender and sexuality that I had encountered on my new, notoriously "liberal," campus. So I auditioned, I got called back, I got called back again, and finally I was cast. I knew what I was doing was worthwhile socially as well as artistically, but what I didn't fully realize was how incredibly impacting it would be personally.

From the very beginning, The Vagina Monologues calls for "a context of other vaginas--a community, a culture of vaginas." And this is exactly what it produces. When you begin to open up to people around you, especially other women, you begin to see sexuality in a different way. Teachers tell students not to hesitate to ask questions--if they're unsure of something, more than likely a lot of other people are too. This show tells women, as well as men, that almost everyone is curious, confused, excited, and unsure about female sexuality, and well, vaginas. The puritanism of early America may be hundreds of years in our past, but much of its philosophy has contributed to our own shame and secrecy concerning sex. The first step to breaking down this taboo is simply talking about it. Working with twelve other actresses and one dedicated director, I found an incredibly supportive community in which I could talk about all the embarrassing, silly, uncomfortable moments that come along with being a woman without fear of further awkwardness. I discovered just what a powerful tool self-disclosure is.

While I certainly found a very strong, loving community in our particular production of The Vagina Monologues, doing a piece of this nature connected me with so many other women outside of the obvious cast--the show's other performers across the nation, the audience members who responded to the production, and finally the women whose interviews led to the writing of the monologues. For this is where the strength of the production lies--in its communication of real, individual, personal stories, which represent in the most powerful way a larger, more overwhelming situation. In essence, the show puts a face on a social issue, and is in itself a form of documentary work.

Some people criticize the show for focusing so exclusively on one part of the body--after all, isn't that pornography? But what I came to realize, as I worked with the script and the cast and the spirit, is that the vagina is a beautiful way to get to the essence of femininity. As the women in the play talk about their relationships with their vaginas, it reveals a tremendous amount about their perceptions of themselves. And in talking about their vaginas, they talk about their own lives.

It's difficult to find an appropriate conclusion to my experience with this show--probably because I don't feel I am finished. Though I left the stage nearly three months ago, The Vagina Monologues is still a prominent part of my life. I'll never stop being a woman, so women's issues will never go away for me. I'm still in close contact with many of the people from the show, and I'm still very concerned with sexuality and gender. And now I can (at least try) to talk about all this with my dad.