I’d like to tell you a little about V-Day, a global movement to end violence against women and girls. Why would you talk about that? Well, I’ll tell you. V-Day is held during this time of year. It’s a time when groups of women get together to volunteer their acting skills, their production skills, their fund raising skills and their sense of humor to make it possible for women’s stories to be shared and for awareness to grow among many people. They raise funds for local non-profit groups who help out women and girls who may have no resources available to them and who need help. It starts with one woman’s story.

As the poet Muriel Rukeyser once asked, “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open, show it’s anger and call her a lunatic.”

Writer and performer Eve Ensler interviewed a very large number of women about their lives, their bodies and their experiences. She created The Vagina Monologues and many groups all over the world perform these pieces and raise money for local non-profit organizations. We raise awareness of women’s experiences, specifically, awareness of violence against women. We believe it must stop.

I participate by dressing up in a giant, pink suit that I made, and I call myself Lady V-Jay Jay, or Lady Vagina. I talk to people and tell them where they can find out more information. In this role, I am a “lady” who wears pearls, sensible shoes, gloves and carries a purse. I  hand out free condoms and dental dams.  I ask local merchants to donate prizes to our raffle and/or silent auction. Here’s yours truly posing with the directors of the 2011 show at Brava Center for Women in the Arts:

2011 Vagina Monologues show in San Francisco

I know what some of you are thinking. ‘What’s a nice girl like you going around doing, talking to women about DOWN THERE?!’

“V-Day’s mission is simple. It demands that violence against women and girls must end. To do this, once a year, in February, March, and April, Eve allows groups around the world to produce a performance of the play, as well as other works created by V-Day, and use the proceeds for local individual projects and programs that work to end violence against women and girls, often shelters and rape crisis centers. What began as one event in New York City in 1998 today includes over 5,800 V-Day events annually.

Performance is just the beginning. V-Day stages large-scale benefits and produces innovative gatherings, films and campaigns to educate and change social attitudes towards violence against women” — V-Day web site

If you would like to attend a local production of this show, or would like to support efforts in your area, please e-mail me, visit the V-Day web site, get in touch with us on Facebook. I will be at two performances in my area:

March 8 - 10, 2012 at the Women’s Building in San Francisco, CA

Note: special pre-show fundraising events include February 8 night at ELIXIR

February 25, 2012 At Mills College, Lisser Hall, Oakland, CA

There are as many ways to get involved as any of us can create.

Thank you.

Sincerely,

Lady V-JayJay aka Lady Vagina

It is on the same day as the all-day NOIR CITY Dashiell Hammett film screenings at the Castro Theater in San Francisco. Mr. Acorn and I will be going in our retro outfits, as we did last year. So, we’ll be meeting early in West Oaklandia to power shop with Lady Heather (minion of Pig) and then head over to the film festival. Here’s one of the coolest posters for a 1932 film that’s on their program web site.

Any road, here are pictures that Mr. Acorn was kind enough to take for us.

NOTE: The musical accompaniment that assisted in the completion of two pillow covers are listed below the photographs. Happy New Year!

Music that helped me complete this project:

The Band (the brown record)

Mel Torme sings Songs of New York

Frank Sinatra Songs for Lovers

Robin Williamson Songs of Love and Parting

Bruce Springsteen Unplugged

Sarah Vaughan with Clifford Brown

Mr. Cinders (1983 revival original cast recording)

K.T. Tunstall Live in London 2010, in which KT does her impression of an audience member: “MORNING LOVE. I’M OFF TO WORK, NOW.” in her Biggest most Boring Voice, ever.

Fires of Wisdom 2006

We went about doing interviews with the eldest of our college alumnae and Mills friends. We wrote curriculum and researched training methods for teaching volunteers how to conduct oral history interviews; we drew on the work of other oral history groups like the Regional Oral History Office at University of California at Berkeley. We initially found assistance from professors at Mills and at other schools across the U.S. who were implementing this type of research. This was all done by volunteers like me, with no funding to speak of from the college or the Alumnae Association until many years later when we combined forces to archive our interviews with the Oakland Living History Project.

You can see the archives of the Fires of Wisdom project in the Olin Library here.

Mills College differs from the many colleges in the San Francisco Bay area in that it is — to this day — still a womens’ college for the undergraduate programs. The graduate programs are coeducational. One of the most famous graduates is Dave Brubeck. You may have seen an amazing interview with Mr. Brubeck, a native of California,  in Ken Burns’ jazz documentary.

Through our interviews we learned what campus and off-campus life was like in various decades before the 1990s. We heard  about past traditions at the college, student perspectives on historical events and about the formidable personality, mission and rhetorical skills which comprised the character of one Aurelia Henry Reinhardt, the college president from 1916-1943. During her time at Mills, Aurelia experienced two world wars and addressed issues of these conflicts openly and with a compassion that makes her unique. Her commitment to womens’ education was inspiring. We began dedicating our work to this intriguing past president of the college when our  volunteer group began doing Dramatic Readings at Mills College Reunions, complete with slide shows of our interviewees (also known as narrators) and with our group dressed in vintage dress to represent the decades of women we interviewed.

2009

For this project, we made every effort to locate and interview alumnae of color and find people with diverse economic and cultural backgrounds, not just the famous folks with the most successful careers or those who already had the most written accounts or interviews of their lives. Those had already been done. We wanted to create a kind of mosaic of perspectives on life in the SF Bay Area during the tenure of President Reinhardt.

While I was at Mills College, (1992-1994) as a Resuming Student, I commuted to campus. I was a member of the the Mary Atkins resuming students’ lounge, where nontraditional-aged students could form study groups and support each other as we returned to school. Many of my classmates were over 40 years old, some were in their seventies. Many had children to support and jobs while completing their undergraduate degrees. I was 29 when I graduated with my Bachelor of Arts degree in American Studies, after many years of working and attending college part-time.  The Olin Library on Mills campus was a refuge for me as was the Reinhardt Alumnae House, where I did much of my research and met up with advisers, interviewees and volunteers for the project.

During my 11 years of volunteering for the Alumnae Association, I made a lot of friends who were alumnae. I met students and college staff members. To thank volunteers for their time, we had to find a fun way to gather. So we started having tea.

2008

Through Fires of Wisdom, which we named after the college’s anthem or hymn, the core group of volunteers started some  new traditions and reclaimed some others. One is based on stories of Holiday Tea with the President Reinhardt. Several members of our group collect vintage clothing. Many of us just like hats. We all seem to like tea. So, we dress up, with our hats, gloves, shoes, purses and enjoy High Tea at Lovejoy’s Tea in San Francisco..

Although we have since archived all of the interviews we did with Mills College Alumnae and friends at the Olin Library, we still like to get together, dress up and share our stories. Here is this year’s photograph of our participants:

Fires of Wisdom 2011 Tea at Lovejoy's in San Francisco

The other members of the group in the 2011 photo are, left to right: Moya Stone, Erika Young, Beth Woolbright, Jane King, Cecille Caterson, Kathleen McCrae and on the far right, Malvena Pearl’s Emporium proprietor, Suzette Lalime Davidson.

Please note that my dear friend Jane Cudlip King is at the center, here. She graduated from Mills in 1942 and has done decades of volunteer service with the college. She currently prepares young people to take the S.A.T. and has the best memory for the works of Shakespeare quotations that I’ve ever encountered. She also does a great impression of President Aurelia Henry Reinhardt, with all of her vast elocutionary skills.

Two people who I meant to have in this photo were the other founders of the project: Kristen B. Caven and Penny Peak. I have also lost touch with a young alum named Valerie who is in light green dress in the 2006 photo, at the top. We trained more than 30 volunteers for this project and only a handful are as enthusiastic about “dressing up” as we are.

We are grateful to Nancy MacKay, formerly of the Mills College Library, for assisting with the archive of all the interviews;  Professor Marianne Sheldon, Professor Andy Workman and Professor Sherry Katz.

This yellow, red and orange piece was for C. at the lovely wedding of R & R.

So, another friend wrote and asked me if I could make something to go with a festive tropical dress she has, that she wears to a holiday party each Christmas season. Here is what I came up with. This piece did not work for my friend’s Ensemble. It is now For Sale on the Malvena Pearl Etsy web site:

My friend Laura is an inspirational seamstress with a great sense of humor. This photo above was taken at Costume College in 2009, when we first met. She’s on the right.

The Costume College experience was overwhelming to me. It was the first time I’d attended and the folks I knew there were all caught up in different aspects of it: the classes, the events, preparing for the events and taking day trips to local museums and schools around Los Angeles. I didn’t know I was going until the last minute and most of the classes were filled by then, so I sat in on several workshops and presentations and met lots of new people.

I met Laura in a board room in the hotel that was set aside for Costume College attendees who needed to complete a sewing project. We needed space outside of the room we were sleeping in to “make it work,” as they say on Project Runway. It was also a place to show up and get help, if you needed help. It turned out that we spent hours in that room and stayed up very late. There were many people sitting around the table. I was assisting a young woman who had talked her mother into flying in from Canada to go to this weekend-long event. She needed help with a lovely 1870s-era dress (a la Anne of Green Gables) for the Gala the next night.

Meanwhile, Laura was sitting down the table from us, making very funny remarks and completing a truly amazing outfit. Laura’s outfit was a Tudor era woman’s costume made in modern fabrics out of camoflage-patterned parachute silk trimmed in reflective tape.  She said she had a posse back home that usually offered a lot of help and I think she was missing them. I would have been missing them, if I were her.  So we ended up in this room, working side by side with other costumers.  I really liked her approach and her friendliness. That feeling of “we are all in this together.”  If it isn’t fun, let’s find a way to make it fun, or heck, just move along. Let’s remember why we are here. She looked great at the event the next night. But the best part was the process: making something and sharing that experience with someone who laughs with you, is willing to help and share stories while you sew.

We kept talking all weekend, into the wee hours. She even let me crash in her room and we found that we shared a love of science fiction. It turns out that Laura had been making costumes with –and for– her friends for many years. They had a regular “Day of Wrong” tradition at their Renaissance Fair:

Laura said her group also attended the Dickens Fair in their area and were active in organizing costume events. She said she’d been making a living sewing Santa Claus outfits and called herself the “accidental seamstress.” I met a lot of people that weekend but Laura and I kept up our dialogue.

After Costume College we kept in touch via e-mail, shared our stories and tales of what was happening in our costuming and creative lives. She made me an “honorary member” of her posse, even though I live several states away. She and her husband came to visit California and we got to have dinner and enjoy a great visit. Her blog is called the Eleanora Project and she’s documenting her birthday and all the creative hoopla leading up to it,  as well as her ongoing costume projects.

Here’s the latest photo of one of Laura’s recent creations for a holiday Steampunk event:

Now that I no longer have a Feline Overlord named Roo, I am an official Minion of the Wench Posse. We have found that we have a lot of fun talking, planning projects, sharing materials by mail and just egging each other on. Through Laura, I’ve gotten to know several other incredibly creative, weird, fun-loving and fabric-obsessed people. In 2012, we have plans to meet up at two different costume conventions where I will get to meet several of Laura’s Wench Posse in person. I plan to assist them them with the assembly of a project or two. I am so looking forward to that!

Laura is a kindred spirit. And I am very grateful for her friendship. Happy Birthday, Laura!

If you like live music, live theatrical performances, dancing, games and general holiday fun set in the time of Charles Dickens’ city of London, then you may want to go to the Dickens Fair.  Happy Christmas!

“Why are you selling tattoo care products on your web site?” I have four pieces of body art. Mrs. Greenbalm’s is the best product I have found to take care of them. Many people in my family have tattoos. Many friends of Malvena Pearl’s Emporium have tattoos. My uncle Louis Ira Robbins had a tattoo parlor in Maine for many decades. His mother was Malvena Pearl and she proudly showed me photos of my uncle at a tattoo competition in the 1980s.
I support small businesses and I met Martha (creator of Mrs. Greenbalms) at the Tattoo Expo in San Francisco, when I got my first tattoo.

I designed and made the quilt square using fabric from my stash and  gave it away, here. It will be part of a quilt that raises funds for a national domestic violence prevention program called Becky’s Fund.

Skull A Day quilt square donation

Jan was kind enough to join us for the Costumer’s Bazaar, so we’re headed her way to give her a hand. Her collection is extensive and she enjoys identifying each piece as well as seeing that it goes to a good home. If you’d like to see a few of the great pieces she offers, we have a few listed in our shop, here on the Malvena Pearl Etsy page.