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Menstrual Monday Concerts |
Still, it’s fun to think of a mosh pit that only
menstruating women are allowed into…
I
imagine a sort of Woodstock – let us call it Bloodstock – people dressed in
shades of red, pink, brown and tan; costumes, hats, flow-dyed (or faux-dyed)
t-shirts; leias of strung cranberries, baskets of pomegranates; “Faberge”
tampons adorned with rhinestones and fake pearls. Yoga lessons. Tai
chi. And the hardest drugs you can find
there are evening primrose and St. John’s Wort.
I
make reference to Woodstock rather than Lilith Fair or other women’s music
festivals, in order to heal from my own musical scar tissue – read I Need a Vacation from Gender for the details, if
interested. And then as a poet, I guess
I’ve got a bit of a chip on my shoulder, when it comes to your typical “Son of
Beatles” (as John Lennon put it) men’s band – I can remember pointing out to
someone that poets rarely get paid, no matter how good they are, but bands
usually do – and he practically yelled at me, that “they have to carry all that
equipment in, you try lifting those speakers,” etc., making me wonder that, if
it were true performing artists got “paid by the pound,” then perhaps I should
bring a 200-pound opus to my next poetry reading, as well as my own set of
speakers (in which I’d carefully hidden several lead bars.)
But,
continuing on, they really didn’t have most pits back at Woodstock, did
they? Still, it’s fun to think of a
mosh pit that only menstruating women are allowed into. I guess I can remember back to my own
difficult adolescence (Bloodbath) and how
sometimes, caught unawares, I would bleed into my jeans during school…I imagine
dozens of women dancing in a most pit, bleeding into their jeans…and then those
stained jeans being washed, the stain not completely coming out, the stain a
badge of honor, a status symbol: “hey,
I was in the mosh pit at Bloodstock…”
And besides, this would be the perfect way of testing out the
hypothesis, that dancing makes cramps go away!
I
have to admit, I’ve always found Jimi Hendrix’s solo version of the national
anthem a bit…tedious…and I never really liked the original all that much anyway
(I think it’s the “bombs bursting in air” part.) But I think it would be great to get some of that sheer virtuosity
going at Bloodstock. Although poet
Adrienne Rich writes in “Transcendental Etude” that she has “come to distrust”
virtuosity, I still have a place in my heart (and ears) for a technically
brilliant performance. Bloodstock would
certainly benefit from such “playful” competition.
…And
in the spirit of playfulness, maybe at Bloodstock all the backup singers
would be male, but the backup bands female. Who says feminists don’t have a sense of humor?
“And
a good time was had by all.”
Let
the good times flow!