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 []