"The Good Body" by Eve Ensler: A Celebrity Heroes Review!

Hi everyone, (well the 2 of you that comment here). It’s me, Ronnie Richter-Quegle (alias rr) your Celebrity Heroes blogger doing my first review! My theater company – the Coon Rapids Players, (we jokingly call ourselves, “the Coon Rapids Playas, yo!” because we’re down like that!) were thinking of doing Eve Ensler’s latest ingenious work “The Good Body”, given the previous success we had with our version of “The Vagina Monologues” back in January. Coon Rapids may not have been ready for the word “vagina” to be uttered publicly but we gave it to them – boy howdy - and had quite an audience! And they paid $5 a head admission at that! Not only that, but I gotta hand it to our very own CR player, Jim Larssen. What a good sport he was to dress up like Julianne Moore, get up in front of an audience and say, “I love hair. I mean.... hair vagina, hair is vagina, the vagina is hair, I‘d like a lot more hair. Actually I’m a redhead and everything is red. I mean it’s just red, red , red, red, red, red, red.” He brought the house down doing it, to boot! By the by – a big shout out to the women of the Minneapolis Fire Department and the entire women's’ Gopher Basketball team as they came out in full to lend their support! Thank you ladies!
Well, Eve has done it again. She’s written yet another groundbreaker that promises to raise awareness about how insecure we women feel about our own bodies. She may have well called it “The Stomach Monologues” but instead called it, “The Good Body”. Rather than focusing on Eve’s vagina and how stinky, crusty, saggy, scabby and hairy it is, this time she focuses on how much she hates her stomach: how it craves food that goes straight to the thighs, (boy! Can I relate! No need to ingest – just strap-er-on to the old saddlebags!) how it growls when it’s hungry and how unsightly it can be when in a swimsuit. It’s educational too as she mentions that women around the world have their own ways of adhering to feminine cultural standards of beauty. For instance: did you know that women in the Orient have doctors surgically put creases in their eyelids? Or that Iranian women get nose jobs to look less Iranian? Did you know that women in the 1950’s wore girdles? It’s all TRUE! And today – as more women get botox, liposuction and boob jobs – we need to like ourselves and be okay with whom we are. So what if we’re over 40! So what if we have thin lips! Eve says all of that is okay because beauty comes in all shapes and sizes and we need to just give ourselves a great big hug and get over it already! I really love Eve and feel like she’s my best friend sometimes because when I’m on my third Twinkie and can’t fit into my jeans, I stand in front of my full-length mirror and tell myself, “Girl powers activate!” and not only go ahead and eat that Twinkie – but finish off a pint of Hagen Dazs just to spite the patriarchal world in which we live. Tawanda!