Theater, pubic hair and human rights

So I've been back at school for three weeks. And to say things have been hectic is...kind of an understatement. It's my final semester! I'm supposed to just be applying for jobs and lolling about. Preferably lolling about drunk.

Instead, I'm just beginning to crawl out of an awfully draining cold, and lots of fun other things. After four years, I still get surprised when college isn't what the movies make it out to be.

But on the bright side. My first theatrical performance since high school is this coming weekend!

I will be enacting a monologue from Eve Ensler's "The Vagina Monologues." Basically, in the 90s Ensler interviewed hundreds of women about their vaginas. What they look like, how they smell, what they would wear, what they would say, y más. Lots of thoughtful, insightful stories. A lot of people consider the show to be kind of a "She woman, man hater," experience, but personally I love it. It's fun, it's enlightening, and all of the money earned through ticket sales goes towards good causes.


Now, people keep asking me: "Briana, what vagina are you supposed to be?" Like the different characters in the show are the Spice Girls. There's the angry vagina, the sad vagina, introspective vagina...well I'm hairy vagina.

Sexy, I know.

I get to read a monologue about how a woman's husband said that he screwed around, because she wouldn't shave down there.

So it's not that deep of a story. Pubic hair. Woo hoo. At least it's fun.

But some of the monologues in the show are absolutely earth shattering. One in particular, this year's Spotlight Monologue, is about teenage sex slaves in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. During the past few years, rebel Hutus have been traveling across the border between Rwanda and Congo. Everywhere they go they leave a trail of fire, destruction, death and pain. Almost 6 million people have been killed, and over 200,000 women are known to have been raped. Some as young as 14 months old.

A portion of this year's proceeds from "The Vagina Monologues" is going to help the survivors of Congo's femicide.

Here's Nicholas Kristof's amazing January 30 column about rape in Congo. Like many of the human rights stories that Kristof consistenly covers, I am often left feeling like he is the only reporter on the scene. Which absolutely should not be.