Women's Voices, Women's Power

Friday and Saturday Fun

Dear Email Devotee,

Do you know how much I feel like the speaker in Marie Howe’s poem “What the Living Do”?

For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,

I’ve been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,

I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush…

Just now I saw my trashcans outside, tipped over, after a rainstorm. I have to go pick those things up. I have to put them away.

I have to do my dishes, almost every day, and clean a litter box, and sort my clothes into piles or hang them up, or launder them on the weeks when laundering clothes is necessary. (I try to skip the laundry machine for as long as I can.)

I have always really connected with this poem by Marie Howe, about a person who is trying to come to terms with the mediocre every day tasks a person needs to perform, as she remembers the loss of someone she loves.

The tasks of life just keep showing up. Some people like checking the boxes and feeling productive. I just feel like it takes me out of my dreamland where I am envisioning myself winning the Oscar for directing a movie

(I don’t even direct films…yet. So…yes, dreamland is correct.)

Anyway, this public announcement comes to you, to remind you, that every human being on this planet comes out of a woman’s body.

Every single one!

I know, it’s shocking. So far, we have not seen human beings created from Elon Musk’s rib, and so, we have to accept that women are actually really relevant right now. Our voices must matter! We are divine creatures which must be imbued with some special sauce!

(It makes sense, don’t you think?)

Therefore, I hope you will come celebrate with us artists this weekend, for International Women’s Day, at Christ Church in Old City, Philadelphia. We have performances by dancers, ensembles, and individual female-identifying theater artists for a night of inspiration.

After we dance and speak and all that jazz, there will be cake.

We shall all eat cake in this Great Land of Americanish!

Read about our group of performers here in the Broad Street Review if you want to know more:

Broad Street Review:

https://www.broadstreetreview.com/previews/the-bsr-weekly-arts-and-culture-roundup-march-6-12-2025

Purchase tickets here at www.needanse.com .

I will be performing a trilogy of poems which includes “What the Living Do” above.

Last year, I performed one of my favorite poems by Titilope Sonuga, “This Is How We Disappear.”

You can watch that performance here.

OH and I made a mid-week vinyl playlist because this is a special kind of week.

Hi!

Also I reviewed East Side Sushi in this month’s Weaver’s Way Co-op newspaper called The Shuttle.

If you have not seen this film on Amazon Prime, it is quite gentle and lovely and sweet and unassuming.

(Do you think Jeff Bezos will ever birth a baby and sell it on Amazon? Perhaps he has a machine that is working on it?)

Enjoy your life if I don’t see you around!

I will be living mine!

(Cause remember, I’m like that person in Marie Howe’s poem. Read it—it’s so good. Or wait and come hear it performed aloud on hardwood floors.)

Namaste,

Ms. Wonderful