Starring The Boutique: Acting & Advocacy

Styling in a dramatic foot-pop to show off holiday gift wrapping at the Austin boutique. I'd like to believe the deer approves. 

*** 

“You’re my favorite vagina.”

I beam in the Chipotle line. I feel like I just won the academy award.

Since my debut as the Happy & Not-So-Happy Vagina in Eve Ensler  revolutionary play, The Vagina Monologues, I have basked in a glorious after-glow of campus stardom.  

I blush and bow in response before redirecting the conversation to the goods waiting to deliciously fill the burrito bowl.

Years later, I brush up against my former college-self.

I stand at the front of the boutique on the iconic South Congress strip, I spin and tap around in my glittery Toms to a remake of “Jingle Bells.” My acting training serves me here.

One foot back, softness in the knees, connect the ring finger to the tip of the thumb (gives the hands something to do, so the body is at ease and the lines flow effortlessly).

I press into my feet. I engage my belly. I speak from my gut.

“Good Afternoon,” I croon. “Welcome in.”

And then a big grin. My smile is sincere, but like a good actress, I choose to exude the emotion needed to enhance the scene.

Behind the screen of greeting guests and spontaneously twirling (because my new tennis shoes are so comfy and fun to whip around in), I dive into currents of thought on purpose, passions, effortless bliss.

And I bump into the Happy Vagina. 

That college gal was/is truly happy. That Happy Vagina emerges to speak. She’s got a monologue ready-to-go. She’s coming to remind me that I can merge advocacy with the arts. That I can utilize dynamic gifts - a voice restless to rise, a heart yearning to reach out and embrace, a muse impatient to create - to shape a life-role rooted in purpose and service and lifting the vibration higher, and this life feels like bliss.

I know the feeling because the feeling has been felt. There have been life chapters where parallel rivers of energized interests coincided and connected and the result initiated a cascading flow of embodied excitement and intuited knowledge on how to proceed.

In retrospect, the timeline shimmers in crystal-clear clarity.

The curiosity to take the gender women’s studies class, which leads to a new circle of great women to befriend, and the uncovering of the covert narratives shaping masculinity and femininity, which sparks deeper introspection on the unquestioned ways I move and fear and interact with women and men, and express or don’t express my own masculine and feminine energies.

And the class leads to sign-ups and auditions for the college production of The Vagina Monologues, and the invitation is to step into the collective feminine pain (which includes the pain of men who have been forced to brutalize their own emotional selves), and through movement, through the powerful art of humor, through strong and loud voices birth the stories the feminine shakes to share.

Standing on that stage, twirling after giving a bow, I emanated a happiness, a bliss, a contented joy that continues to exist in a body now restless and a heart heavy with desires and dreams and questions on how to make those creative entities breathe.

There will always be two sides of me: the academic and the creative. The intellectual and the free-spirited artist. The deeply serious advocate and the light-hearted creatrice.

In college, I nurtured the advocate through my studies, and infused my yoga classes with creativity, and I acted, and I wrote.

My post-college-life has been a hot mess of attempting to appease either side through compromise, and I simply do not feel complete unless both the intellectual and the creative are acknowledged and incorporated into the daily play of life. 

Moving to Austin did not ease this fight. The intensity of the two sides grabbing and yelling for attention has escalated, and there’s a pressured realization of time. There’s no self-established deadline, but there’s an unnerving feeling that time is extremely precious, and I need to scoop up time and use those rented moments very wisely.

And standing in front of the boutique, booming my voice to greet, I know this is an experience calling forth times from the past to train and inform the next scene.

The twenty-seven-year-old wistfully musing by the Texas tees is grateful, and a bit in awe, of the trust my college-self naturally leaned into to feel into an aligned step.

In listening to my past self, the monologue of passion meeting purpose, I immerse into the feeling of contented bliss, and the feeling shimmers into existence as I tune into a podcast on improv classes for refugees, called Improv Without Borders  (star-kissed thanks to the superstar humanitarian who sent a text of inspiration my way).

An audience to the podcast, to my former self rising to present a remembered truth, a return to enlivened feeling, I can listen and bow to relinquish the fight, and surrender to trusting feeling.

So, I’ll channel the Happy Vagina to sing greetings and hellos, and keep my heart open for the spark of insight on how to step onto the next stage to advocate, to perform.