“GLENN CLOSE IS on the phone!” my assistant shouted from her desk outside my office at Turner Broadcasting.
Glenn was also on the board of the Sundance Institute, and we’d become friends. I reached for the phone.
“Pat, you have to come see this play I’m in,” Glenn began immediately.
“Love to, Glenn. Where is it and when?”
“It’s Saturday night”—she paused dramatically—“in Sarajevo!”
Racing ahead, she said, “Pat, you won’t believe what’s going on here. It’s a big story. Women from the refugee camps, hundreds of them, are expected to be here. It’s about them.”
I heard the big story comment and my journalist instincts kicked in.
“What’s the story?” I asked.
“The war may be over, but these women are still in those rape camps… that’s what they call them, you know,” Glenn continued, her voice rising in urgency. “So many thousands of women lost their homes and families and most of them were raped. People need to know this and that’s what the play is about. Their lives during and after the war.”
“Who wrote it?”
“Eve Ensler,” Glenn replied. “You know, the woman who wrote The Vagina Monologues.”
I didn’t know, but right away, I knew I should have known.
Glenn continued, “Eve spent months in the camps and wrote a play based on their personal stories. CNN should do a story about this, don’t you think?”
“Yes,” I said, “of course we should. I’ll track down Christiane Amanpour. No one knows more about the Bosnian War than her. Can I call you back?”
“You won’t be able to reach me,” Glenn replied. “This is the first call I’ve been able to make the whole week. Please, try to make this happen. It’s important.” With that, the connection died.
My mind was already racing with how to make this happen in four days. I was dying to book a flight to Sarajevo myself, but in my current position, leading Turner’s original production team, I was more a desk-bound executive who sent other reporters and producers to the front lines to get the stories.
I called Christiane Amanpour, whose reporting on Bosnia had rocketed her to international fame as CNN’s most recognizable face. Who doesn’t remember her standing in her flak jacket, so close to the conflicts that we could sometimes hear the shots and bombs in the background?
Of course Christiane was interested. She, more than almost anyone in the news business, understood how this war had torn apart families and communities before ending with an uneasy peace and Yugoslavia divided into Serbian Bosnia and Muslim Croatia.
“I can’t go, Pat, I’m getting married! But why don’t you go?” Christiane asked. “You’ve reported war stories before, and this one seems right up your alley.”
Minutes later, I went to Ted’s office and before he could control the conversation I said, “Ted, there’s a great story happening in Sarajevo tomorrow. Glenn Close… you know her… the actress from Fatal Attraction”—this made him look up—“Well, she’s acting in a play by the author of The Vagina Monologues”—this secured his focus for another few, critical seconds. “She’s written a play about the rape victims of the Bosnian War, and in four days, Glenn and some other well-known actresses”—I was stretching the truth at this point—“are performing it. CNN’s got the exclusive.”
I had Ted’s full attention. “Who’s going? Christiane?”
“She can’t. She suggested I go.”
Ted raised an eyebrow. “You? You’re not a reporter.”
“I was for a lot of years, Ted. I’ve reported from war zones and I can produce too, so you get two for one. This is our story. The other networks won’t even know it’s happening.”
“Okay. Go for it.” He liked the sound of exclusivity.
Permission granted. Now, how to do it?
My assistant booked the flights while I rushed home to pack, calling Scott on the way.
“I can’t go to dinner Saturday night, I’m going to Sarajevo to report a story.”
Instead of asking me sixteen questions designed to get me to change my plans, Scott said, “That’s fabulous! What can I do to help?”
LANDING AT THE Sarajevo airport, which looked more like a military barracks, many hours and two connections later, I struggled to find the CNN crew in the crowd. Then, when I finally found them, I tried not to look surprised when they asked, “Okay, where are we going?” I didn’t know!
I hadn’t been able to reach Glenn again by phone and decided to trust that the crew would be able to find out where someone as well-known as Glenn was performing. Luckily, the crew assured me that there weren’t that many theatres still standing, so it should be easy enough to track down a group of famous American actresses, especially in a city with half the population it had before the war.
The evidence that this had been a war zone was visible everywhere: unoccupied buildings, some half standing, with missing walls; most shops boarded up; and very few people on the streets. Within a half hour, we stood in front of a large brick building with a sign propped up against the double doors saying “National Theatre.” On an outside wall, next to a huge hole where an artillery shell had made a direct hit, a brightly colored poster read: “Necessary Targets, a play by Eve Ensler.” The poster listed Glenn Close, Marisa Tomei, and names of Bosnian actresses in the cast.
We walked quietly inside the darkened theatre. Way down at the bottom of rows and rows of seats was a big stage. I spotted Glenn, who stood near the stage’s footlights. She squatted down, shielding her eyes to see who was emerging from the shadows. When she saw me, she threw her arms in the air and shouted, “Pat Mitchell, you cunt!”
Well, that stopped all movement… onstage and off. The CNN camera crew stood very still, staring at me for a response. I was speechless as Glenn jumped down from the stage and wrapped me in a bear hug, repeating over and over, “You came! What a great cunt you are!” Now in the light, she could see the dumbstruck reactions on my face and the crew’s.
Glenn laughed. “That’s a term of endearment and empowerment! You’d know that if you’d read The Vagina Monologues!” Which I should have done.
Just then, the playwright, Eve Ensler, approached, looking just like Louise Brooks, with her dark hair parted in the middle and full-forehead bangs. Eve shook my hand and gave me a look that didn’t transmit a feeling of gratitude as much as it seemed to acknowledge that I had done the right thing. “Thanks for coming. Listen, I can’t talk now; we’re going on for the first time in about three hours, and the Bosnian actors are backstage still learning their lines in English. Why don’t you take your seats in the theatre and we’ll talk later.”
The crew and I found our places in the cavernous dark theatre and watched Glenn and Marisa rehearse. Glenn was playing the role of an American psychiatrist and Marisa, a young journalist. Both had come to a Bosnian rape camp to offer group therapy for the women being played by Bosnian actresses as well as a few local activists.
Later, when I interviewed the women backstage, I learned that all of the Bosnian women in the play had been, in one way or another, victims of the war. They were the “necessary targets” in a war that was, to a large extent, fought on women’s bodies. Eve’s purpose in telling their stories and performing it in the city where so much of the violence had happened made the whole evening so electric and emotional. I knew for sure that Glenn had spoken a profound truth when she called me. This was an important story.
Watching Eve’s work as playwright and director, I fell deeply into awe for the small woman with the big presence. She was an undeniable force field of energy and passion, coaxing and coaching the actors trying to deliver phonetically learned lines in a language they didn’t speak and managing more than one complete breakdown when the stories being acted were too close to the real memories of pain and violence.
Clearly the actors didn’t seem really ready to perform, but soon the doors were opening and the VIPs—the US ambassador and other high-ranking representatives of the international community working in Sarajevo on postwar recovery efforts—were ushered to their seats. But the audience that mattered most to Eve was the women from the camps.
The crew and I went outside as their buses arrived. Hundreds of women of all ages poured into the area in front of the National Theatre. Their faces reflected their suffering; even though the war had ended, these women couldn’t come back to Sarajevo because they no longer had homes or families to return to.
As the women filed into the theatre, they looked both apprehensive and excited as they greeted old friends from other camps or demolished neighborhoods. When the play began, there was scattered applause as the audience recognized the local actresses and activists who appeared on stage—and there was a big applause for Glenn and Marisa.
From the very first scene, the wails began—not quiet tears or gentle sobs, but heart-rending wails, loud and unlike anything I’d heard before. The sound swept through the parts of the theatre where the women from camps were sitting, waves of pain spreading from row to row. Onstage, the play continued as if these sounds were part of the performance, and in a way, they were. It was impossible not to be swept up in this collective experience of recalled pain.
Near the end of the second act, a large group of the women sitting in a bloc behind me stood up and filed out, still crying audibly. Had the pain of remembering become too much? I had to know, so I followed them out. As they were boarding one of the buses, I approached the driver and, through an interpreter, asked why they were leaving before the play was over: “Curfew!” he answered, adding, “It’s time to return to the camps.” A painful reminder that the war wasn’t over—not for the women still living in forced isolation in camps, many without homes or families to return to, the war’s forgotten “necessary targets” that Eve’s play had documented.
Back inside, the play continued. At the end, the remaining audience showed their gratitude with endless rounds of applause and standing ovations.
I found Eve backstage and told her about the women forced to leave because of camp curfews. “I want to talk to you more about that,” she told me. “Let’s meet up tomorrow at the hotel.”
Hotel? In all the rush to get to the story, I hadn’t made any sleeping arrangements for myself or the crew!
“Don’t worry,” Glenn told me. “It won’t be a problem for you to stay with us.” The crew and I followed her back to the hotel, where no rooms were available. Beth Dozoretz, an American friend of Glenn’s who came with her to Sarajevo, quickly offered to share hers with me, and our crew bunked in with another crew in town. That’s how it always happens with journalists or activists with passion but very little planning; details like where you’ll sleep or eat just work out. No hot water? Skip the shower. No extra bed? Share with someone you just met.
The next day, Eve explained her vision to raise awareness of the global epidemic of violence against women and girls. “I don’t want to create another nonprofit organization,” she said. “I want to use art—my plays and whatever else I create—to support the work already being done on the ground by local activists and organizations. My work begins with asking women what they need to heal and restore their lives.”
Less than a year later, Eve launched a global movement with a star-studded Broadway performance of The Vagina Monologues on Valentine’s Day, which she proclaimed to be V-Day. What followed was a movement built on the rights to perform The Vagina Monologues anywhere by any group for no fee beyond a commitment to use the funds raised to support groups in the community or country working to end gender-based violence. For more than twenty years, there have been tens of thousands of productions in 140 countries—from Pakistan to the United States—in more than forty-five languages, raising $100 million to support locally led antiviolence work.
MY FRIENDSHIP WITH Eve Ensler, which began in that theatre in Sarajevo, is one of the most important friendships in my life. Working with her, supporting V-Day’s programs and activities, has taken me to places I might never have gone, from Juarez to Eastern Congo. Through this work, I have met women who have transformed pain into power, who have survived unspeakable violence to rebuild families and hold communities together.
Many times, as I’ve traveled to South Africa, Kenya, and Congo with Eve to support the work of V-Day activists on the ground, friends have asked, “Aren’t there dangers in traveling to some of these places?” There are dangers in all places for women and girls, but what really frightens me is what I’ve witnessed in Bukavu in Eastern Congo, for example, where a war is being fought, like the one in Bosnia, on the bodies of the women. When one of the leaders of the militia groups that ravage the countryside was arrested, he said, “Raping a woman is a lot cheaper and a lot more effective than a SCUD missile.”
And he’s right. When you rape a woman in front of her husband and children, you essentially destroy the fabric of the family, which is the fabric of the community, the village, the country. That’s what fills me with fear and rage—witnessing the evidence of human beings committing inhuman acts of violence on other human beings—in most cases, the most vulnerable populations of women and girls.
Stories of what’s going on in these war zones around the world should be big stories in the news all the time, but as I found out when I returned with the story of the survivors of the Bosnian conflict and an interview with the playwright and the actresses, CNN gave me a mere five minutes for the whole story. Another challenge was that I wasn’t allowed to say the word vagina, which made it difficult to talk about the playwright’s seminal work and her plans to use that play, The Vagina Monologues, to launch a global movement. It would take a couple more years and a certain incident with a Clinton White House intern, whose testimony included the word vagina as part of a public record, for naming this important part of a woman’s anatomy to be permissible on CNN and every other television network.
As for cunt, that four-letter word hasn’t yet passed the censors for television. Many years later, when Jane Fonda was asked on The Today Show about her involvement in an upcoming The Vagina Monologues production, she answered, “I’m doing the cunt monologue.” The horrified producer ran toward the control booth, yelling, “Bleep that and go to commercial!” Jane seemed oblivious to the panic, accustomed as she is, and all the rest of us vagina warriors are, to the responses evoked by the words that Eve’s taboo-breaking play redefines—her intention, in part, to take the power out of the words for denigration or abuse and restore it to women. Traveling the world with Eve, from churches in Atlanta, Georgia, to villages in Kenya, I’ve felt the power when women “say it,” “own it,” “love it.”
BEING A PART of the global V-Day movement has been a defining factor in my journey to becoming a dangerous woman. I have stepped more fully into my own willingness to take risks by observing and learning and working alongside my V-Day sisters, in this country and around the world. With them, and with Eve as our inspiration, I’ve learned to wail, to be in touch with my own pain, and to feel the healing that comes with sharing stories and being together. I have danced with women who have no reason to dance or laugh or smile but do so anyway, pushing past fear to feel their own power and strength. I’ve seen communities change one warrior at a time, and I’ve watched with admiration and awe as Eve’s vision for what is possible and what must be done to bring attention to the epidemic of violence, gets bigger and more audacious.
“We’re calling it One Billion Rising,” Eve announced at our summer board meeting in 2011. “We’re going to get one billion people all over the world to dance together to end violence.”
The women in the room exchanged looks that said we weren’t sure we heard her right.
“You meant to say one million, right?” asked Carole Black, the former president of Lifetime who I had persuaded to see The Vagina Monologues with Eve performing and had immediately become one of V-Day’s most effective supporters.
“No, I mean one billion. That’s with a b. Think about it! The largest demonstration ever to end violence, and we can do this by asking all the local V-Day activists to organize their own risings.”
And that’s what happened. The next February 14, risings in nearly every country, all organized and coordinated by Eve and Monique Wilson, an actor/activist from the Philippines, created a movement the world had never seen before. Women, men, boys, girls dancing—yes, dancing. There was a One Billion Rising anthem, “Break the Chain,” written by songwriter/producer Tena Clark, and each community created its own dance and actions.
An event this global was covered widely by media, but some reporters were skeptical. “What can dancing do?” they’d ask. “In dancing,” Eve explained, “we liberate our bodies, give them freedom to move and to take up space, together, to put aside differences in race, age, culture, religion, if only for a dance or a day. And yes, to make a difference, too.”
Every year since, millions have danced in the streets of thousands of towns and villages in two hundred countries, in the halls of parliaments, in schools and churches, in prisons and large public squares, in private rooms and with thousands in the streets—dancing, sometimes marching, too, and always rising, moving together.
“What can dancing do?” Dancing insists we take up space. Dance is joyous, sexual, radical, disruptive, and dangerous. It breaks the rules. Dance connects us and pushes us further and that is why it’s at the center of One Billion Rising.
I’ve seen the difference dancing with purpose can make—as I danced on those Havana rooftops, with Shangaan women around a fire in the Sabi Sands, with survivors of the violence in Eastern Congo, with Syrian women in the Zaatari refugee camp, with V-day sisters in Atlanta, New York City, Sundance, and so many other places. Women and the men who stand and dance with them can come together with passion and purpose. Whenever I’m in these dancing circles, I feel freer, more purposeful, and yes, I feel more dangerous, too—more ready to engage fully in the work that follows the dancing.
Vaginas united and dancing together, working together, supporting each other, and rising to the challenge is a dangerous act of disruption that will continue going global until the violence ends.
DANGEROUS TIMES CALL FOR DANGEROUS WOMEN
In Conversation with Monique Wilson
Monique Wilson has spent her life blending acting with activism. Born in the Philippines, she started her professional acting career when she was only nine years old (in the musical Annie, of course!). By the time she was eighteen, she was performing the lead in the West End’s production of Miss Saigon. When she returned to the Philippines and started her own acting company, the New Voice Company, she produced and acted in The Vagina Monologues, and became a member of GABRIELA, a national alliance of grassroots Filipina women’s organizations.
Monique has used her talents as an actor, organizer, and passionate advocate to lead changes in the Philippines, and now, as director of One Billion Rising, organizes activists and risings around the world. I wondered what had sparked her willingness to engage with risk, and asked her to tell me how it began.
When did you become such a dangerous woman?
Monique: There was no particular incident or moment that inspired me to become a dangerous woman. For me, I believe, the seed is certainly what we have carried as a colonized people—and particularly as colonized women. And even as a child, I’ve never accepted the double standard between men and women and always fought against the norm of unfaithful and abusive husbands/fathers, the wives always doing the coping and adjusting, the children living in a culture of silence. I remember being as young as three and thinking that life was never fair for the women in my family. And because of that I became a fighter, a rebel.
How does being considered a dangerous woman impact your life and work?
Monique: The greatest reward of being a dangerous woman is that it brought me to GABRIELA, to V-Day and One Billion Rising—which then brought me closer and deeper into revolutionary and visionary work. And all these brought me back to the heart and core of my own fierce warrior women ancestors: the Babaylan women, our priestess-warrior-healer-teacher-protectors. Filipina women have the “dangerous collective subversive memory” of her equality and strength—and this lives in us today.
How do you think about the role of dangerous women in such dangerous times?
Monique: I have learned what it is to be a revolutionary: somebody who is guided by a fierce, passionate love. A deep, deep love of others, of fellow women, of community, of country. Who is willing to take risks and live on the edge. Who doesn’t just believe in change, but is willing to live it—to be wild in possibility,
to live in every breath,
to be magic.
And remind us of what we have always been…
Radical.
Courageous.
Rebellious.
Unafraid of the wild heart beating inside each of us.
ALIVE.