Eve Ensler

I Am an Emotional Creature The Secret Life of Girls Around the World Eve Ensler Villard: 150 pp., $20 In this series of monologues, Eve Ensler, author of "The Vagina Monologues," imagines the voices of teenage girls from around the world. "As a woman," Carol Gilligan writes of Ensler in her foreword, "she knows the pressures on girls to silence themselves, to act as if they have no feelings or their feelings do not matter. . . . A girl claiming her emotions breaks a silence and unleashes a vast resource of clean energy."

I Am an Emotional Creature The Secret Life of Girls Around the World Eve Ensler Villard: 150 pp., $20 In this series of monologues, Eve Ensler, author of "The Vagina Monologues," imagines the voices of teenage girls from around the world. "As a woman," Carol Gilligan writes of Ensler in her foreword, "she knows the pressures on girls to silence themselves, to act as if they have no feelings or their feelings do not matter. . . . A girl claiming her emotions breaks a silence and unleashes a vast resource of clean energy."

Forget about performance art, the women are told at the write-your-own-version of "The Vagina Monologues" workshop. No one should try to replicate Lara Flynn Boyle's or Julianna Margulies' provocative odes to sex or any of the other monologues that were read by stars in Eve Ensler's theatrical production, drama therapist Blair Glaser tells participants at workshops around the country. Instead, Glaser, who will hold the one-day workshop in Malibu on Saturday, keeps the focus on sexuality.

Eve Ensler, the valiant performance artist whose show "The Vagina Monologues" encouraged A-list celebrities to join her in a celebration of that censored region of the female anatomy, has found a new locus of unnecessary bodily shame to talk about -- her paunch. "I had finally come to like my vagina," she confides early on in "The Good Body," her latest act of corporeal liberation, which opened Wednesday at the Wadsworth Theatre.

I was greatly dismayed to see the story about the disappearing women of Juarez in the Calendar section ("Vanished," by Anne-Marie O'Connor, Oct. 31). While you may have run the story to coincide with the presentation by Eve Ensler and others at UCLA, or even to highlight the Day of the Dead, I find it appalling that you chose to present the story as if it were some kind of murder mystery, relegated to the pages of "Style & Culture." For the hundreds of murdered women in Juarez, and for all of their friends and family, every day is Day of the Dead, and there's nothing stylish about it. Samantha Ott Highland Park

"Not the V Word" (Feb. 11) by Josh Getlin was a delight to read. Eve Ensler has taken a path most women would be too shy to travel. That is until now. Ensler's path reminds me of the consciousness-raising phase many women like me went through in the early 1980s, the result of which was to no longer suppress our feminine identities and to wish as well as act wholeheartedly for equality. I look forward to Ensler's Los Angeles appearance. I remember an evening in 1961, when I was playing Scrabble with several people.

Various artists "Caroline, or Change" (Hollywood Records) *** Get a magnifying glass if you want to read the lyrics as you listen to this two-CD recording of Tony Kushner's semiautobiographical tale about a Jewish boy in 1963 Louisiana and his family's black maid. Seldom have a CD's lyrics been printed in such small type. Reading them is worth the effort, however. The CD booklet contains the whole libretto of this almost entirely sung show.

"Let's talk about vaginas," Kristin Johnston says bluntly on the other end of the phone. Unapologetic, ready for whatever. It was a dare, sort of. What Johnston really wants to talk about is Eve Ensler's play "The Vagina Monologues," one of the most forthrightly graphic pieces of literature ever to discuss the subject of women's anatomy.

When Eve Ensler tried to place a newspaper ad last month, nobody thought she'd have trouble with the subject--a gala fund-raiser protesting violence against women. But she hit a serious snag over language. One word in particular that the paper felt uncomfortable printing: Vagina. As in "The Vagina Monologues," a play Ensler had written and would perform at the event along with a star-studded cast.

Eve Ensler, the valiant performance artist whose show "The Vagina Monologues" encouraged A-list celebrities to join her in a celebration of that censored region of the female anatomy, has found a new locus of unnecessary bodily shame to talk about -- her paunch. "I had finally come to like my vagina," she confides early on in "The Good Body," her latest act of corporeal liberation, which opened Wednesday at the Wadsworth Theatre.

Various artists "Caroline, or Change" (Hollywood Records) *** Get a magnifying glass if you want to read the lyrics as you listen to this two-CD recording of Tony Kushner's semiautobiographical tale about a Jewish boy in 1963 Louisiana and his family's black maid. Seldom have a CD's lyrics been printed in such small type. Reading them is worth the effort, however. The CD booklet contains the whole libretto of this almost entirely sung show.

I was greatly dismayed to see the story about the disappearing women of Juarez in the Calendar section ("Vanished," by Anne-Marie O'Connor, Oct. 31). While you may have run the story to coincide with the presentation by Eve Ensler and others at UCLA, or even to highlight the Day of the Dead, I find it appalling that you chose to present the story as if it were some kind of murder mystery, relegated to the pages of "Style & Culture." For the hundreds of murdered women in Juarez, and for all of their friends and family, every day is Day of the Dead, and there's nothing stylish about it. Samantha Ott Highland Park

Forget about performance art, the women are told at the write-your-own-version of "The Vagina Monologues" workshop. No one should try to replicate Lara Flynn Boyle's or Julianna Margulies' provocative odes to sex or any of the other monologues that were read by stars in Eve Ensler's theatrical production, drama therapist Blair Glaser tells participants at workshops around the country. Instead, Glaser, who will hold the one-day workshop in Malibu on Saturday, keeps the focus on sexuality.

Eve Ensler's "The Vagina Monologues," at the Canon Theatre, is not just a play anymore. It's a social movement. The Obie Award-winning show has toured widely since it burst onto the New York theater scene in 1996. In its Canon run, "Monologues" features the high-voltage team of Julie Kavner, Julianna Margulies and Rosie Perez, all of whom have performed as part of the piece's continually rotating celebrity cast off-Broadway.

"Let's talk about vaginas," Kristin Johnston says bluntly on the other end of the phone. Unapologetic, ready for whatever. It was a dare, sort of. What Johnston really wants to talk about is Eve Ensler's play "The Vagina Monologues," one of the most forthrightly graphic pieces of literature ever to discuss the subject of women's anatomy.

"Not the V Word" (Feb. 11) by Josh Getlin was a delight to read. Eve Ensler has taken a path most women would be too shy to travel. That is until now. Ensler's path reminds me of the consciousness-raising phase many women like me went through in the early 1980s, the result of which was to no longer suppress our feminine identities and to wish as well as act wholeheartedly for equality. I look forward to Ensler's Los Angeles appearance. I remember an evening in 1961, when I was playing Scrabble with several people.

Eve Ensler's "The Vagina Monologues," at the Canon Theatre, is not just a play anymore. It's a social movement. The Obie Award-winning show has toured widely since it burst onto the New York theater scene in 1996. In its Canon run, "Monologues" features the high-voltage team of Julie Kavner, Julianna Margulies and Rosie Perez, all of whom have performed as part of the piece's continually rotating celebrity cast off-Broadway.

Jane Fonda, Eve Ensler, Christine Lahti and Sally Field added their celebrity voices Saturday to those of mothers and activists clamoring for justice in the slayings of hundreds of young women in this Mexican border town in the last decade. "I am rich, I am famous, I am white, I have a daughter, I have a granddaughter, and I know if they were murdered or disappeared, the authorities would work very hard to find out who killed them," Fonda said at a news conference in Ciudad Juarez.

When Eve Ensler tried to place a newspaper ad last month, nobody thought she'd have trouble with the subject--a gala fund-raiser protesting violence against women. But she hit a serious snag over language. One word in particular that the paper felt uncomfortable printing: Vagina. As in "The Vagina Monologues," a play Ensler had written and would perform at the event along with a star-studded cast.