Thursday, October 14, 2004

Political satire in the 1980s Ladies Against Women in Canada, at the capitol. Or perhaps this is the parliment building? My recollection of the details is limited. 11:31:51 PM     comment []

	Wednesday, September 29, 2004

Thanks for visiting, Billionaires! As you can see from my first posts, the Billionaires for Bush Blog inspired my interest in telling the story behind Ladies Against Women this year. Thanks to the Billionaires for placing a post from me on their main page, and I'm serious about consulting and brainstorming. Go, satirists! 8:27:17 AM     comment []

	Tuesday, September 28, 2004

Street satire in the 80's -- stumping for the unconceived consumer-citizens Among the opportunities for promoting the Ladies Against Women causes were stage performances at rallies and demonstrations, "guest disruptions" where we were invited to barge in and interrupt a conference or rally, street actions including those we called ourselves, benefit performances of our stage show for groups we liked, club bookings and self-produced runs of our stage show for our own support, and to get critical reviews, probably something else I can't remember, birthday parties and the like, and ... parades! My favorites off the top of my head were San Francisco Gay Freedom Day (before it became the tamer "Pride" parade), Doo-Dah in Pasadena, Saint Stupid's day, All Species Parade, and How Berkeley Can You Be. Parades are different in that the political message has to be very fast and fun, and there is no time to establish context. Marching in parades allowed us to make up good cheers we could use in other situations, and because parades are kind of boring, they are great for improving choreography. Parade steps we refined on the hoof included: Keep our nation on the track, one step forward, three steps back (with a little cha cha kind of action that could be done in place or moving forward) Push us back, push us back, waaaaay back (with backwards action) What do we want? NOTHING When do we want it? NOW and to go with the sperms rights image, Blow your whistle! (TWEET) Toot your horn! (TWEET) We love the people Until they're born! Less ladylike, but fitting for some situations: Your bosses, united, will never be unseated. If you go back to the first post and read forward you'll find other cheers, chants and tactics between my random fits of nostalgia. 10:00:03 PM     comment []

Sometimes the Ladies Against Women came in from the streets While we were a thriving ficticious mass movement with many active if erratic chapters, the group had been created by a performing group. So we continued to perform a series of shows that mutated and transformed based on the street feedback and the improv interludes each night. Twice we booked ourselves into NYC tours including club gigs and benefit shows or invited "guest disruptions" in larger halls, based on good theater press. We played large towns and small, and did hundreds of radio interviews tied to the touring. That media coverage did at least as much to get our word out as did coverage of any classic demonstrations. And the feedback in a club setting is all about listening to the kind of laugh as well as the timing. It's palpable, intimate, intelligent and fun. Then afterwards you can talk with audience members. It was intense, sometimes exhausting, but very rewarding. 8:29:36 AM     comment []

Street satire: we put out the call, and these ladies joined us in greeting Phyllis Schlafly Phyllis was the archetype for the anti-feminists we satirized, so she must have seen ad hoc Ladies Against Women groups outside her speaking engagements dozens or even hundreds of times. If we were the only notice she was getting I would have thought we should forget it and let her lapse into obscurity, but there were generally straight-ahead women's groups protesting, so any Ladies Against Women contingent was largely playing to the activists. But we knew Phyllis knew about us, because often costumed Ladies went into the speeches and debates, and fanned themselves, tsk-tsked use of words like "lesbian" or "work," and applauded randomly or on cue when she used the word "family". In August, 1985, an AP writer named Sharon L. Jones wrote an article about the group, and when she interviewed us she asked what Phyllis thought of these demontrations. We told her we didn't know, but her organization was the Eagle Forum in Illinois, and perhaps she'd be willing to say. So the reporter called her up, and got this quote: "They made idiots of themselves," Mrs. Schlafly said. "Nobody knew what they were trying to say. They dressed up foolishly and behaved in a childish way. If they had a point, no one got it." We were delighted, and used the quote on posters along with good press from theater critics for several years. The only unfortunate aspect was that people tended to think the quote was made up. Some things are just too good to be true. And now next time Schlafly googles herself, here she'll be. Maybe we'll get a new quote. 12:02:35 AM     comment []

	Saturday, September 25, 2004

Satiric protest in the 1980s -- Ladies Against Women greet the Queen You can only imagine how excited we Plutonium Players -- Ladies Against Women and our men's auxilliary --plus our extensive network of drop-in ladies were at the prospect of a state visit of Ronald Reagan and the Queen of England to San Francisco. I wish I had the press clips from this. Was it fun? Yes. Did it cheer up those with criticisms of Reagan (or England for that matter?) Yes, nearly uninimously. Was it politically effective? That's the big question. In that case, I would say yes, because we played to a mostly if not totally sympathetic crowd. For these demos we used our set material, did improv, and generally created a few new slogans and demands. I notice that Jeff Thompson is there as his redneck right wing character. I would argue against this today in terms of the political message, but we were a coalition of characters and at our street events we tended to welcome or sometimes to tolerate a huge range of individual creativity. Again, you see the possibility for tensions between being a tight and coherent ensemble and a loose, broad coalition of activists. Fortunately we figured out how to let our standards shift from street to stage. 1:40:24 PM     comment []

	Thursday, September 16, 2004

This Bush attack ad on Jesus is a nice bit of contemporary political ad parody that has been making the rounds. Doing satire the pre-web era, we did a lot of commericals as performance. TV ads are a wonderful format for skits because many of them are well known to a broad audience and they are so mercifully short, of course. Oddly enough I don't think we ever did candidate ads, We'd have candidate endorsements, but then they'd be "sponsored by" nuclear power, star wars defense technology, or some contemporary boycotted item perhaps. 8:17:02 AM     comment []

	Thursday, September 9, 2004

Ladies Against Women stage show poster Photo is Jain Angeles as the cheerleader, me as Virginia (Mrs. Chester) Cholesterol and Selma Spector Vincent as Mrs. T. Bill Banks. John Byrnes Barry, Jaime Walker and Geoff Thompson were also in this show as the men's auxilliary. We loved playing the People's Theater Coalition at Fort Mason in San Francisco, later known as Life on the Water. Our shows were primary, but street demos and short appearances at benefits, which we came to call "guest disruptions," kept us on our toes and activist, and kept us improvising in character, so that we couldn't let the Ladies go. This is one of the interesting tensions between the needs of a theater group and the needs of a group of activists. 11:00:40 PM     comment []

Ladies Against Women on the web The Ladies folded up their aprons in 1990, a few years before online organizing started to blossom. When I created a web page in 1994, I included a snapshot of myself as Virginia (Mrs. Chester) Cholesterol and soon put up the Ladyfesto page based on our ever-changing series of pink handouts. For a little while I hoped my cohorts would be able to create updates with me, but I was the one who was online and chronically overwhelmed by my job at The WELL. We were all working other full time jobs now, and had other family and priority shifts. We wrote an in-character Lady's Handbook in the early 1990s, but when I tried to step back from the publisher submission part of the project various factors conspired to bring that project to a halt. Perhaps we'll self-publish it sometime soon if we can rekindle our enthusiasm. There is film footage to digitize too, for history and current imspiration and amusement. 8:09:01 AM     comment []

	Sunday, September 5, 2004

Ladies Against Women and packaging -- triple bag it ! Sharon Harrington as religious rightwinger Dodie and Selma Spector Vincent as plutocrat Mrs. T. Bill (Edith) Banks demonstrating the importance of using petroleum in every part of your life, rather than simply on the road. This photo is from approximately 1989. 2:40:37 PM     comment []

	Saturday, September 4, 2004

What happens when parody invades reality? Zell's speech appears to have drawn on an internet hoax! Tsk, tsk. Was Zell scamming us, or was he a victim? Wonder what he'll say. 2:05:13 PM     comment []

A cafe press conference, at the 1988 Republican Convention at New Orleans Virginia (Mrs. Chester) Cholesterol describes her pink frock and sheer frilly non-functional apron for the pesky members of the media. Behind, on a chair, you see the hand-made lace-edged picket sign and a second ruffled pink apron used to protect the dressy apron for the cooking lesson portion of the press conference, which included George no-W Bush's supposed favorite ingredient, the pork rind. He had learned from Reagan how to play the "just folks" card through junk food, something all candidates have had to do since then. 11:26:47 AM     comment []

	Friday, September 3, 2004

But can satiric "counter-protest" move people to change? In thinking about how Ladies Against Women worked at the 1980 through 1988 conventions, I'm struck by how unusual our experience was then, and how may more protests have irony and satire as an element now. Our huge advantage over many demonstrators was the advantage that is shared by performers in a long improvisational run and by candidates on a campaign trail. We appeared before people who had not seen us, while we had the advantage of having done our act, our speeches and our slogans many times before, we'd honed speeches based on responses, and heard the same questions many times. We often conducted theatrical rallies where at some point we made the whole audience into the press, and called for pesky questions. This was great practice for actual media events. It means that your speeches -- or jokes, as it were -- are ultimately directed and edited by the people. Nothing else does so much for timing and timeliness. The Billionaraires have all of that same huge advantage we had, and the additional power of the Web and serious fundraising. The one thing that may decline due to success is the power of novelty, but when you have a good body of material and multi-level humor, and the ability to make the personalities and interplay between characters compelling, the novelty of the "one joke show" stops mattering. I hope they test their possble radio spots in front of live audiences... I think the collective response of a group is different than the same people one by one alone. The internal quality issues for a satire group at that made tension for us were those of being performers who had quality control, and the open call of a "movement" where performance ability and degree of practice are all over the map. We kind of skirted this by being open to participation on the street, setting rules, guidelines and dress codes, but protecting our material and reputation for our more polishd stage show, The tension around controling art versus unleashing an idea and lettinng it mutate was fascinating. A book, movie or (now) Web site could have helped with that tension, since there would have been a way for anyone to determine the original or "official" version. Still, it's a bold thing to enable performing, improvising satiric grassroots chapters, and probably always will be. 8:30:55 AM     comment []

Ladies Against Women oneliners as buttons Buttons from 1980 (REAGAN FOR SHAH) through later theatrical tours such as the run of our show in Toronto (CLAW - Canadian Ladies Against Women, and CLAW versions of others such as CLOSE YOUR EYES AND DO YOUR DUTY). The buttons were fun for press packets, trading and selling to fans, and use on costumes, but the satiric statements were a bit peculiar looking if used on civilian, out of costume outfits. Some slogans we used on picket signs included BAN THE POOR, SAVE THE STOLES (worked only with particular costuming), MILLIONAIRE MOMMIES WITH NANNIES AGAINST STATE SPONSORED DAYCARE, KEEP THE FEDS IN YOUR BEDROOM, SPERMS ARE PEOPLE TOO... plus all kinds of ephermeral reversals of protest slogans. Street cheers were fun in that the tempo and choreography evolved. Some I remember included MOMMIES, MOMMIES, DON'T BE COMMIES; STAY AT HOME AND FOLD PAJAMIES... WHAT DO WE WANT? NOTHING! WHEN DO WE WANT IT? NOW! ... INTO THE KITCHENS AND OUT OF THE STREETS... and my favorite for marches and parades: KEEP OUR NATION ON THE TRACK, ONE STEP FORWARD, THREE STEPS BACK. We did get slogans and cheers back from the far flung chapters now and then, and repurposed them for our stage production and for demonstrations, too. 12:26:45 AM     comment []