Vagina Blessings in Brookline

At the Coolidge Corner Theater today, Eve Ensler of “The Vagina Monologues” fame read from her new book “Insecure at Last: Losing it in our Security Obsessed World”. The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review summarizes the new work saying, “Ensler stitches together vignettes from her visits to locales where women are coping with the aftermath of calamities both natural -- the 2004 Sri Lanka tsunami and post-Katrina New Orleans - and man-made - Afghanistan, Kosovo and the Mexican border town of Ciudad Juarez.”

Ensler’s stage training punctuated the reading, particularly a vignette detailing a Katrina survivor who, after tending to her son’s severed fingertip for seven hours, waded with the wounded boy in neck deep, sewage and chemical filled water to New Orleans’s convention center. The survivor recounts:

”At some point, we decided to stay outside the center. Then someone said water was coming. Everyone panicked and started running. There was a stampede. Knocked down the elderly. I thought my leg was broken. Military suddenly arrived in a truck. The National Guard. I have no idea how many there were of them. They jumped out and put rifles to our heads, ‘Motherfuckers! Bitches!’ they said. ‘Lay down. Don’t move, motherfuckers.’ We lay face down on the asphalt.

“I still have nightmares, all these months later.”

Even if you don’t read the whole book, pop into a bookstore and read the chapter from which this excerpt is taken (page 178).

After the reading, Ensler signed books at Brookline Booksmith, inscribing my copy of TVM with “Vagina Blessings”.