Stop fixing your bodies and start fixing the world,” advises writer/performer/activist Eve Ensler. “We are dangerously distracted by this self-absorption with our thighs and our hair.” That’s the message she conveys in her one-woman show, “The Good Body,” at the Lincoln Theatre through Sunday. Productions of “The Good Body” are opening throughout the world in many languages.
And not-so-perfect bodies
“Doing this show is really painful each time I perform it,” said Ensler. “The degree to which women hate their bodies is profoundly sad. Let’s just put off our self-hatred for 10 years, take over the world, and then we can obsess again.”
Freed by ice cream
When asked if she has a favorite part of the show, Ensler told me: “Eating ice cream.” It’s vanilla, her second-favorite flavor to pistachio, but “they wouldn’t have pistachio in Afghanistan,” she said. “It feels like I get to be free at that moment.”
Launch of V-Day
Ensler, a New Yorker, has spent a lot of time in Afghanistan and in Iraq. “What’s going on for women now is awful,” she says. That’s why she launched V-Day. Inspired by her successful show “The Vagina Monologues,” it’s a global movement to end violence against women. Democratic fundraiser Beth Dozoretz did a V-Day event with Ensler this week.
What’s next for Ensler?
“No more body parts,” she said. She’s just finished a new play that looks at torture — how we justify what we do and what torture does. This gal never slows down. While on tour, she’s also writing a book on our “obsession with security.” “What if we actually embraced insecurity? Maybe we’d really be free,” she told me.
Colombian verve in the District of Columbia
Nohra Pastrana, the very chic wife of Colombia’s former president and new ambassador to the U.S., Andres Pastrana, is already a big hit on the social circuit. She is the first “first lady” to become an “ambassadress.” You may remember that her husband was kidnapped for a week in 1988. He is a lawyer and was a TV journalist in Colombia as well as the mayor of Bogota. One of his big efforts in Washington is to promote a U.S.-sponsored anti-cocaine initiative. Nohra is interested in promoting Colombian fashion and art. At tennis coach Kathy Kemper‘s welcome luncheon at her Wesley Heights home in Nohra’s honor on Tuesday, Washington’s first lady, Diane Williams, gave Nohra a pink Nats’ hat and an invite to sit in her box at a home game. Other guests included Isabel de la Cruz from the Washington International School, Ina Ginsburg, Elsa Walsh, Nancy Bagley and Norah O’Donnell.
Which master-slave relationship?
Sen. Hillary Clinton‘s controversial remarks about plantations and the House of Representatives to an audience in Harlem on Martin Luther King Jr.‘s birthday reminded many Democrats of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich‘s words about them in 1994, when the Democrats had just lost the midterm elections and before Gingrich became Speaker. “Since they think it is their job to run the plantation, it shocks them that I’m actually willing to lead the slave rebellion,” Gingrich said. Have the Republicans forgotten?
Sightings this week
Franco Nuschese gathered an “A” list for yet another party celebrating Mort Kondracke and Marguerite Sallee‘s engagement, this time at Cafe Milano: Sens. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., and Susan Collins, R-Maine; Brit and Kim Hume, Wolf and Lynn Blitzer, Carolyn Deaver, Harry and Tricia McPherson, and Tom and Ann Korologus … Former Rep. Tom McMillen at Rasika in the Penn Quarter Wednesday evening … Bill Regardie, ESPN’s Roger Cossack and Charlie Brotman at the Palm talking about former Detroit Mayor Dennis Archer coming in to mediate the dispute between Major League Baseball and the District, and that it wouldn’t be a surprise if Major League Baseball held on to the money-making Nationals for another year. Regardie also talked up the idea of starting yet another publication, possibly a newspaper this time. . . Academy Award-winning actor F. Murray Abraham at the Woman’s National Democratic Club Tuesday … Allyson Palmer and Elizabeth Ziff of the rock group Betty backstage after Eve Ensler’s Tuesday evening opening at the Lincoln Theatre.