Read by Jennie Lathan
I have just seen the Vagina monologues. I went with my women's book group. We are doing 'Pride and Prejudice' – you must remember the lovely BBC television adaptation - the one with Colin Firth's Mr Darcy - the wet-linen-shirt-coming-out-of-the-lake one.
To be honest 'Pride and Prejudice' was the only reason, I had joined the Book Group, I relished, yes that's the word, relished the opportunity to talk about it some more.
We did that! Although the conversation was rather more about 'nineteenth century proto-feminism' than I was comfortable with and rather less about the clothes than I would have liked - especially from Georgina, the girl with the clumpy boots and the small 'tache.
It was Georgina, who one evening after we had just finished with 'Mr Darcy', so to speak, said: I know let's go see the Vagina Monologues! This was greeted with enthusiasm by the rest of the group and I concurred, although I didn't really know what she was talking about and I had misheard her anyway and thought she'd said the Regina Monologues. Thus turning up in the West End I was fully expecting a theatre piece about our own dear queen. That is not what I got.
What I did get was a performance by three actresses, more specifically an ex-minor soap star, a 'stand-up' comedienne and somebody I had never heard of before, but was reliably informed by the programme that she'd done 'an amazing one woman show at last year's Edinburgh Fringe about bicycles'.
Apparently the cast is 'turned round' frequently; as they sat for the duration of the show on stools and didn't even attempt to learn their lines, I supposed this was not because of exhaustion.
I cannot recall the first piece - I think I went into a sort of shock, when both the content and style of delivery became evident. I do remember that there was talk about rapes and births and just about every variation on the attitudes of women to what went on 'down there.'
I found myself incredibly moved. I found myself on the edge of tears of laughter, joy and pain. And at one point I found myself on my feet shouting out, at the top of my voice, the 'C' word, over and over again. To my certain knowledge the 'C' word had never passed my lips before and yet here I was wielding it with the nonchalance of a mid-shipman stoker. I was intoxicated on 'C', I was enraptured with this little bit of Anglo-Saxon crudity - like a schoolboy exploring the coarser entries in the New Oxford Dictionary.
I left that theatre determined to go straight home and squat naked over the largest mirror I could find.
I didn't of course. For a start, Gerald was asleep and the only suitable mirror is in the bedroom.
But more importantly something occurred to me on the coach back to Tunbridge Wells; for some reason I remembered a lesson from school. Miss Carter I think it was, she took us for biology in years one and two. We were discussing flatworms, tiny squiggy things, not real worms at all. The reason for this, as Miss Carter explained, is that they only have one orifice. The word orifice got a tremendous laugh, as if it was the dirtiest thing imaginable - in the minds of twenty 12 year old girls anyway. Yes, flatworms are just sacks, one orifice only and they are the most advanced animal you can get like that. Everything else, as Miss Carter said are tubes; two orifices, (double the laughter from the prepubescent school girls).
That's it, tubes - that is all we are, 'functionally differentiated tubes'. It's all just about tubes - which I'm sure you will agree casts a rather different light on life. For example, just think, the act of osculation itself then simply becomes the joining together of two tubes at their oral ends and what we think of as inside our bodies might well be considered outside. And as for 'down there'!
As this came back to me after all those years I started laughing to myself as well: I mean isn't this all rather a lot of fuss to be making about what are at the end of the day nothing but tubes and orifices?
Obviously society imparts a different value to them, but we still seem to be extraordinarily obsessed with tubes. More obsessed I felt than was truly necessary.
So, I never got the mirror off the built-in wardrobe door and Gerald has never come back from the bathroom to find me squatting over it like a constipated sumo wrestler. I'm quite willing to let 'down there' stay 'down there' for all intents and purposes. One thing though I'd like to share though: if Mr Darcy were ever to sweep me off my feet and place me on the back of his sturdy charger as we galloped into the moorland mists, I might just lean forward and whisper into his ear one word:
cunt
I think he'd rather like it.
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My "Vagina" by Terry Newman was read by Jennie Lathan at the Liars' League Sex & Death event on Tuesday 10 July, 2007.
After 20 years in small dark rooms, staring into electron microscopes, Terry Newman came out and wrote some jokes for the radio. He is now busy writing plays and film scripts and musicals and books (because nobody has told him that he can't) and doesn't miss the dark that much.
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