Vaginas of the College united, along with those who lacked the muscle of the evening, to fill the Music Building's auditorium for the second annual presentation of "The Vagina Monologues."
Thirty women participated in eloquently displaying the many layers of this often hidden and mysterious body part. They brought their captivated audience from the height of comedic observation on a subject - formerly too taboo to mention - into sobered silence at the dangerous realities that are entwined with this part of the female identity.
The experiences of over 200 women from all socio-economic backgrounds were given a voice, and as the author, Eve Ensler, originally discovered, it is something women love to talk about.
The actors were dressed in black, red and pink, on a stage to match. They were surrounded by taffeta and rose petals as they read their stories from pink notecards for two hours broken only by thunderous applause.
Though they would disdain the smell of an onion being associated with the vagina, it revealed itself through their stories as sharing the layers that onions have.
Their stories were heartfelt, amusing and shocking. The show opened with a warning to anyone who wished to separate the qualities of the muscle. "Love me, love my vagina, love its hair," it proclaimed. They are one package.
Various women identified what exactly their vaginas would say, wear and smell like, ranging from everything to nothing at all.
One story chronicled a 72-year-old woman who had never experienced an orgasm for fear of the "flood" which would accompany her excitement. From her first scarring experience in 1953 to her dreams haunted by soggy Rat Pack members wading in her tide, she had closed her vagina, and it would stay that way for the rest of her life.
The beauty of self-discovery and wonder which accompany seeing your vagina for the first time was explored in a Vagina Workshop, and the lesson to be learned was that your vagina cannot be lost.
There were many uncommon medical facts told about the vagina that are rarely known, including that the concentration of its nerve endings is twice the number than in the penis. "Why use a hand gun when you've got a semi-automatic?" they asked.
The sobering truth echoed through the silence pierced only by the soft, quivering voices of abused Native American women who suffer 3.5 times the domestic violence faced by most American women.
A woman learned from an ordinary man the extraordinary lesson of loving her vagina, and not covering what she thinks is repulsive with thoughts of furniture.
Every woman remembers the day of her first period, as recounted by the women on stage, both early and late bloomers, as an exciting event or a stark embarrassment. They described the ways this monthly flow appears to each woman, likening the drops in the toilet to drops of paint.
The angry vagina of a southern belle bellowed about the tortures made up for the vagina. "Tampons - what the hell is that?" Her vagina shuns the constant attempts to cleanse it, the "cold duck lips" of exams and the ever-wandering thong, for a life of luxury and desires.
There was only bitter desolation left after the savage rape of a Bosnian woman. It caused her to remove herself from her vagina, her home and live forever as a refugee in a strange world, never to return to her desecrated native land.
A skit, "My Short Skirt," revealed the proper response for catcalls, setting the record straight that the skirt and everything under it belonged to her, alone, in an empowered refutation to degrading excuses for rape and harassment.
The pain and abuse of a young girl's vagina was transformed into beauty and pleasure by her encounter with a lesbian mentor.
The darkness, isolation and abuse of life in the Burqa was related to a woman drowning in cloth, for lack of light and not noticing her own insanity, only a redundancy of death.
The word "cunt" was reclaimed by the virtues of the individual letters, syllables and sounds which comprise the formerly pejorative term.
A 6-year-old, not yet tainted by society's views, described her vagina in red high tops and in its uniqueness lying in a "really, really smart brain" somewhere deep inside.
A dominatrix was portrayed well. She worked solely for women's moans after abandoning tax law, but keeping the suits for certain uses in her new career. Men couldn't handle her moans, but she extracts women"s moans of varying variety depending on ethnicity, empowerment and sexual satisfaction.
The performance closed with final description of the vagina in all the pain, beauty and majesty of birth.
