Inspiring Women : November 2020

university adjunct professor. I founded a production
company in New York City to develop and deliver
customized entertainment and educational workshops to a
wide variety of audiences across the US from corporations
to underserved communities.
I found my work with, and in service to, marginalized
communities the most rewarding. Whether working with
civilians or professionals, I’m a creative arts practitioner who
finds creative performance and writing work most
meaningful when it amplifies the voices of all participants
and resonates with issues and ideas that are personal,
communal, and universal.
After a long and varied
career in the arts,
something magical and
surprising occurred for
me personally and for
my Berlin community
when I staged and
directed productions
of Eve Ensler’s The
Vagina Monologues in
both 2017 and 2018.
The American
Women’s Club of Berlin
(AWCB) had recently
relaunched in 2015. I’d
never been in an
The AWC Berlin cast of The Vagina Monologues
organization of women
and actively avoided them. Suddenly, despite my aversion, I found myself in the middle of a growing
community of women for the first time. When women come together, I discovered, they can be quite
powerful — inclined, as I began to see, to tend and befriend — this was evident in the outpouring of
support for the initiatives I had created to support the refugee women and children who’d poured
into the city.
I wanted to create a
project by and for the
AWCB membership
that would also serve
the greater good for
women and girls. What
better project, I
thought, than TVM to
make this ideal and
intention manifest?
Back stage with the TVM cast
56
So, we, the AWCB
membership and local
volunteers, including
some of our teens,
presented TVM in 2017
and 2018 as part of V-