Sunday Morning in Madison, NJ: Peace Circle at the Sisterhood of Salaam Shalom Third Annual Muslim and Jewish Women's Leadership Conference at Drew University

(Video courtesy Azra Baig)

Tuesday Evening on the Lower East Side: Julia Serano and "Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive" at Bluestockings

(Video courtesy Efrain John Gonzalez)

Saturday Afternoon in Tompkins Square Park: Alpha Women Attack the Lower East Side!

This afternoon we caught about 90 minutes of "Alpha Women Invade the Lower East Side!" - a four-hour concert and political rally uniting women and their comrades (we fall into the latter category) of different art backgrounds and music genres including: rock, punk, perverse poetry, alt-performances, and musical comedy.

It was co-emceed by the subversive yet comically musical Killer Killy and the fetching yet powerful Our Lady of Perpetual PMS of the Gorgeous Ladies of Bloodwrestling (GLOB)

and featured the following performers:

JENNIFER BLOWDRYER: (LES writer w/Tales from The Lower East Side)
RACHEL CLEARY: (political storyteller)
MICHELLE LEONA: (haunting and horny accordian songs)
ROSIE REBEL: (showcases her bra inventions...on roller skates!)
SARAH B.: (punk teen poet sensation)
NEOANGIN: (one man electronics-gone-mad-art band from Berlin w/paintings & masks
www.neoangin.info)
JESSICA DELFINO: (raunchy, insurgent rock & folk)
RACHEL TRACHTENBURG AND THE OH MY GOD GIRLS:
(debut of the Teen Girl Indie Pop-Rock Players!)
LONE VEIN: (Day of The Dead-inspired "gloom tunes" www.lonevein.com)
RUBBER ROOM RATS: (Female-fronted freaky post-punk www.myspace.com/rubberroomrats)
DETHRACE: (a theatrical art rock experience...10 ft. tall fiberglass super-robots,
playing 666 volts of metal! www.myspace.com/dethracemf)

plus some surprise guests. Here are some of our lousy cellphone pics:

There was a clothing swap. Actually, you could just take what you wanted to wear. Unfortunately nothing was in our size.

A table for Brooklyn-Queens NOW, the National Organization for Women, whose national political action committee - seriously - endorsed us twice when we ran for Congress in Florida, 1994 and then in 2004. NOW is still necessary.

A table for Fertility Awareness, which we didn't spend too much time at, being 58 and post-menopausal.

Michelle Leona performing one of her haunting and horny accordion songs. "Lady of Spain" was not among them :(

Punk teen poet sensation Sarah B hawked her chapbook like mad (she needs to finance her wine-and-baguettes-in-Paris habit) and filled in the time between musical acts with her poems. Like a limerick titled "My Encounter with the Man from Nantucket." Or her ode to "Beer," which detailed the various ways she imbibes that beverage ("with red meat/not on the street"). She read that ditty twice because Justin, to whom the poem was dedicated, showed up late. Sarah B, who's starting NYU next year and really really really deires a cute punk boyfriend, said she appreciated the fake applause from the crowd. Later there was a fake raffle "won" by Harry Krishna.

Rachel Cleary was both funny and interesting as she told some politically charged stories.



The versatile Rosie B. highlighted her many bra inventions in a frenetic routine. But first she needed to remove the scarfs from her bosom. It reminded us of a scene in "Alien."

We were recruited to hold some art paper (we do teach at the School of Visual Arts, after all) while Rosie Rebel poured red, yellow and blue paint on it. Then she started using one of her bra inventions. But we think Mary Cassatt patented something like this like a century ago.

Breast paintbrushes + apple = driving heterosexual men wild. OK, wilder. (As we were leaving the park later, some NYU frat boy-type was telling a long story with the final line, "So in the morning I bagged her." Where are alpha women when you need them?) We can't remember if this pic was taken when Rosie Rebel was on roller skates.

This was so hot. The "Bloomberg - Worst Mayor Ever" sign was a big turn-on, even though it saddens us that no one remembers William O'Dwyer anymore.

Rosie Rebel's invention for the harried homemaker who needs serve citrus juice to her family. While on roller skates. This got a bit sticky but was also hot. Also clever. Rosie and her numerous inventions are keeping the Patent Office up late at nights. Well, one worker there, anyway.

Here Rosie is showing off a set of terrific guns. And bubbles come out! Lawrence Welk would have killed for this.

And she can ride a non-mechanical bull too. What an alpha woman! Go, Rosie Rebel! A great performance loved by all, including Rosie's mom and dad. Who wouldn't be proud of a daughter so versatile?

The co-hosts Our Lady of Perpetual PMS and Killer Killy handled their emcee chores adeptly, introducing acts with aplomb. Also, at one point, with a plum. In addition, they debated the merits of armpit-shaving.

Jennifer Blowdryer read her work, sang a little, and observed that a year ago all the girls were wearing Faster! Faster! Pussycat! T-shirts and now it's all tuxedo hot pants and bondage boots. Either way, East Village girls are hot. She read a poem, "She's Hot." When a girl, like us, started taking pics of the crowd, Jennifer Blowdryer asked her, "Are you a little Diane Arbus Jr. or what?"

Another Jennifer Blowdryer classic was a poem in the voice of a male lawyer she met in a bar who went on and on about some court case. The audience ate it up. Fortunately, before she had finished.

Jennifer Blowdryer's performance spurred us to contribute to the tip box so the performer can maybe take their instruments home in a taxi or so Sarah B can buy some baguettes and wine in Paris. It was at this point we realized both co-hosts were wearing polka-dot outfits. Also, it gave us a chance to reflect on Rosie Rebel's boobie bubbles (her term, kids).

This alpha woman was a man, Jim, who was German and had actually flown in from Berlin. Well, maybe not just for this event, but he's here only for a limited time, so it was a rare treat for us North Americans to see him perform. As Neoangin, he's a electronics-gone-mad-art one-man band. He did the painting in the back too. It fell down a couple of times, but that's show biz.

Here Neoangin (Jim) is performing his song "The Happy Hobo" maybe, who lives a more pleasant life than "people who sit at computers."

Maybe this is him singing "I Didn't Want to Make All These Friends," about the perils of social networking, a song in which the title is repeated about 46 times with minor variations. Sort of like reading Facebook updates.

Neoangin had many haunting lyrics, like this from "I'd Like to Be Somebody Else": "I'd like to fuck someone/I've never fucked before." His autobiographical "A Friendly Dog in an Unfriendly World" was touching, and his song about Berlin surprisingly informed all of us that the German capital (sorry, Bonn) is not a 24/7 party town.

These people are stars! And the mom taking the pic is famous, too.

If you haven't heard Rachel Trachtenberg, singing and playing her ukelele, alone or with the OMG Girls, here she is with Syd Barrett's "Bike." Enjoy!

And here they are with Kate Nash doing "Brand New Key":

A table for The Shadow, "NYC's ONLY Underground Newspaper (since 1989)!"

Who can forget The Shadow's classic headline:

The crowd grew to several hundred, a very varied group. Some teen boys in yarmulkes and tsitsis were ogling the Oh My God Girls. Or maybe Tina Piña Trachtenburg.

Our Lady of Perpetual PMS laments the expenses engendered by needing an endless supply of fake blood. Did you know that premenstrual syndrome was actually a hindrance, not an edge, in the wrestling ring?

A serious moment about a serious subject: sexual assault among college students. Jerin Alam of the Young Feminist Task Force discusses the proposed CUNY sexual assault policy that students at the city university are trying to implement. One out of four women and one out of six men are sexually assaulted in colleges nationwide. For information and help, go to RAINN, the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network or call 800-621-HOPE.

At this point the sleeve of our Brooklyn College T-shirt was being tugged on by a companion with shpilkes, reminding us we were due elsewhere. But we wanted to stay to see Jessica Delfino. She went to art school so she can wear whatever she wants. Sometimes called "a dirty folk singer," Jessica told the audience that perhaps this would be a good time to take little kids to get ice cream. Most of the parents in the crowd stood their ground, an encouraging sign that they were contributing to their children's growth as human beings.

We love her "Lullaby" and were glad to see her perform it.:

Children should learn about disappointment and frutration and boredom every night, if you ask us. Jessica's friend made her guitar out of garbage. Here she sings a poem she wrote on a beautiful day in this very park, totally conducive to her sitting on a bench, relaxing and writing songs about how much she hates everybody. Maybe before Jessica goes on tour, she would enjoy our new book from Canarsie House publishers, I Hate All of You on This L Train.

We had to leave Tompkins Square Park and Alpha Women Attack the Lower East Side with regret - it was a wonderful event we're grateful for - and we also left with Jessica Delfino's "A Message to All Men" ringing in our ears, reminding us of the important things in life:

We're sorry we missed the rest of the show and are sure it was great, too.

Thursday Night at Bluestockings: Min Jin Lee and Rebecca Wolff for WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly

This report by Richard Grayson first appeared on Jeff Bryant's blog Syntax of Things (go there for the original links) on Friday, July 27, 2007:

Bluestockings, on the Lower East Side, is one of my favorite bookstores in New York City. In the past year, I've gone to over two dozen events there. Most are free but I usually try to give a small contribution when they pass around the bucket; even for the events that have an admission fee, nobody's ever turned away because they can't pay. It's that kind of place: proudly radical and feminist, it always seems comfortable to someone like me, who came of age in what seemed like a more radical time. Mr. Peabody, get the Wayback Machine:

Gail Collins, now a New York Times op-ed columnist, ends her magisterial 2003 epic history, America's Women: Four Hundred Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates and Heroines, on August 26, 1970, the fiftieth anniversary of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, which established women's suffrage. Ten thousand women and a number of male supporters -- including one very callow 19-year-old boy from Brooklyn -- gathered in Manhattan to celebrate and support the second-wave feminist agenda.

Mayor John Lindsay -- whose re-election I'd worked for the year before, in both the June Republican primary (lost) and the November general election (won, as the Liberal Party candidate) -- denied the group a permit to parade on Fifth Avenue, asking that they march only on the sidewalk. Parade organizer Betty Friedan surveyed the unexpectly huge crowd swelling around her, and issued the command I was to hear a number of times during the next few years:

"Take the street!"

Here are some photos I took early that morning 37 years ago as we gathered at City Hall Park.

That's Betty Friedan in the top row, and below are Congresswoman Bella Abzug in her trademark hat and NYC Consumer Affairs Commissioner Elinor Guggenheimer (who'd finished fourth in the previous year's Democratic primary for City Council President, beating only writer Jimmy Breslin, running on Norman Mailer's mayoral ticket). I can't find the photo I took of Gloria Steinem, who would found Ms. Magazine the next year when it first appeared as an insert in New York Magazine.

Around that time, as a Poli Sci major at Brooklyn College, I'd take my required seminar in Sex and Politics and do my undergraduate writing requirement on feminist health issues, particularly in regard to gynecological care. We students successfully petitioned and demonstrated until the college hired its first staff gynecologist.

Twenty years later, in Gainesville, I'd be one of three guys in the first Women and the Law class (our text: Feminist Jurisprudence: Taking Women Seriously) offered at UF Law School and volunteer as an escort at a women's health center at a time when North Florida abortion providers were being killed.

The only national or state political action committees that endorsed me when I ran for Congress from Florida in 1994 and 2004 were those of the National Organization for Women.

On my 19th birthday I rather idiotically wrote in my diary: "I commit myself to radical social change." Um, yeah, Richie, right. I guess I was a pretty pretentious kid, but 1970 was a pretty heady time.

That year, a collective of feminists started The Feminist Press to publish work of notable women writers, such as Zora Neale Hurston, that had gone out of print. People like me sent in small contributions to get them started. Two years later, they began publishing a stapled newsletter in the new field of women's studies; by 1981, that newsletter had become the academic journal Women's Studies Quarterly. The press and the journal eventually came under the aegis of the City University of New York.

Tonight's event, organized by Lauren Cerand, in my opinion New York's best literary publicist (and compiler of the weekly event listing The Smart Set at Maud Newton), celebrates the latest issue of WSQ, the current incarnation of the now-venerable and very important publication in feminist studies. It now includes creative work -- poetry, fiction, drama, creative nonfiction and visual art as well as scholarly articles. This issue's cover art by Renee Cox, "Olympia's Boys," is of course Manet revisioned. (Cox is one of the artists who royally pissed off Rudy Giuliani during his mayoralty -- in her case, with what he felt was her blasphemous photograph, "Yo Mama's Last Supper.")

Nancy K. Miller, one of the general editors of WSQ and a CUNY Graduate Center professor, follows Lauren to the podium and discusses this issue's theme, The Sexual Body, and introduces the evening's readers -- first Rebecca Wolff, a poet and the editor of the literary magazine Fence.

Rebecca lives upstate now and says she doesn't get to Bluestockings very often but feels at home here. She reads for about twenty minutes, poems on the evening's theme, though she says she's interested in the literary sexualized body. Poems like "The Trick of My Life," "Don't Know What to Call Him But He's Mighty Like a Rose," and "Chinatown, Oh" ("Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?". . . "My brother. My lover. My brother. My Mother. Slap slap slap". . ."This can't be heterosexuality / This must be heterosexuality") and her recent "Man Tits" ("Look at that pair / On that man over there") were all provocative, as were the poems she read in opposition to the work of the monstrous but inevitable Sharon Olds.

I hope she'll forgive me for probably misquoting her. My favorite poem she read was "The Bawdy Mothers," but I can't find any of last night's poems online (you'll have to buy Manderlay or her other books); the best I can do is this link to Ron Hogan's Beatrice for her poem "Dana Plato Fatality."

Min Jin Lee, if you've been living on Saturn, is the celebrated author of the debut novel, Free Food For Millionaires, number one BookSense pick, heralded in The New York Times and just about everywhere else. Prior to moving to Korea with her husband next month (her next novel will about Koreans living in Japan, and she said she finds the prospect of the new environment frightening and exhilirating), she's been on a hectic book tour around the country -- but she said she would not have missed coming to Bluestockings (she didn't say it, but it I will: for an event that was not specifically to sell her own book).

Part of being a feminist, Lee said, and others later agreed, is to give back to the women and the community who helped and shaped you. Free Food was actually the fourth novel she'd written and that Nancy K. Miller had been instrumental in helping her with it. Lee also talked about the importance of Rebecca Wolff's work helping other poets with Fence.

She read a passage from the book that's excerpted in WSQ, one in which the narrator, Casey Han, having broken up with her Korean boyfriend and unable to reach him due to a disconnected phone, connects instead with the rake Hugh Underhill, who after sex "does the gentlemanly thing" and goes out for Haagen-Dazs.

In his absence, looking for something to wear, Casey finds a porn video called "Pearl Necklace," featuring an older Asian woman who wears one with two younger unattractive white men. Casey tries to be liberal but is kind of nauseated by what she sees -- and even more so, what she hears, because Hugh had used the same exact phrase to her during sex that one of the men did in the porn video.

Anyway, it was enough to make me decide I'm going to beg the book's publicist -- the best literary publicist in New York, did I say that already? -- to get a review copy. Ahem.

A question-and-answer period followed the readings, and audience members asked questions regarding the pitfalls of writing abaout sex (Rebecca Wolff said she never thought of writing about sex differently than any other subject matter; Min Jin Lee discussed her struggles and initial discomfort in writing sexually explicit scenes); about what one woman perceived as the current pro-pornography attitude of most New York feminists; and about threesomes: why men fantasize about them and why men are actually threatened by them. Both authors and the editor had interesting responses to all the questions.

After the reading, I hung around Bluestockings, where I can find titles that for some reason the book department at the Apache Junction Wal-Mart SuperCenter doesn't carry: Pat Califia's Public Sex, Philip S. Foner's The Black Panthers Speak, Edith Thomas's The Women Incendiaries, Sheldon Rampon and John Staur's Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq, Julia Serano's A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity, Craig Steven Wilder's A Covenant With Color: Race and Social Power in Brooklyn, Dreena Burton's Vive Le Vegan!, Megan Seely's Fight Like a Girl: How to Be a Fearless Feminist, H.G. Carrillo's Loosing My Espanish, Abram Shalom Himelstein and Jamie Schawer's Tales of a Punk Rock Nothing -- and there, on the fiction shelf, three of the legendary Ann Bannon's masterpieces: Odd Girl Out, Journey to a Woman, Beebo Brinker...

Four years ago I got to shake hands with Ann Bannon in the women's bathroom of the Fort Lauderdale Gay and Lesbian Community Center. The men's bathroom was closed for repairs, and when I came out of the stall, I saw a woman of a certain age so classy I knew had to be Ann Bannon. If you haven't read her books, go out and find one. Even if you're not a lesbian. Especially if you're not a lesbian.

There's only one little bathroom here at Bluestockings, and I needed it before I returned to Brooklyn. As I waited for cooperation from my prostate, I stared at the poster in front of me: a drawing of a woman in a headscarf, holding a baby and looking scared by the large tank menacing her. INVADING ARMIES HAVE NEVER LIBERATED THIRD WORLD WOMEN AND WOMEN OF COLOR, it says.

As I made my way out of the store, I took one last look above and below the counter. There were T-shirts: SALUD. DIGNIDAD. JUSTICIA. A Native American warrior on a horse (MY HEROES HAVE ALWAYS KILLED COWBOYS). BIKE: PUT THE FUN BETWEEN YOUR LEGS.

And buttons: PRO-CHILD, PRO-CHOICE. Swastikas with slashes through them. I (HEART) MY CUNT.

And postcards for WBAI, Code Pink New York and the documentary Soma: An Anarchist Therapy.

Although tonight's Bluestockings event features Domenic Priore, who I just saw in Brooklyn last week, I'm sure I'll be back there sooner rather than later. If you're a book-lover who lives in New York or are just visiting, Bluestockings is always worth the trip.

Tampa National Organization for Women Political Action Committee (Tampa NOW PAC) Endorses Richard Grayson for Congress

The Tampa National Organization for Women Political Action Committee (Tampa NOW PAC) today (August 22, 1994) announced its endorsement of Richard Grayson for the U.S. House of Representatives in Florida's Ninth Congressional District.