Lighten up, please. I’m all for a show about penises (penii?)–I have seen the VM and some of it deals with rape and the whole “good girls don’t”, as well as What Would Your Vagina Wear? (which gave me pause). Let’s work on a script for the male genitalia–afterall, VM was not a sure fire hit when it first came out. Why not one for the penis? Possible topics: Circumcision or not; writing your name in the snow; size and self image; toilet seat: up or down; does the scrotum matter? (ok, I’m kidding with that one); sodomy, stupid jokes about male genitalia–I dunno, I dont’ have one–you think of more. (I am kidding-insert laughter or slight smile here)
Breasts are mentioned in Christmas carols? Which ones? :eek: I can’t call any to mind.
Oh, come now. Plenty of people have been suspended and still gone to lead active, fulfilling lives. They even go on to college. Some are even able to be happy.
They took their stand and now they take their licks. You pay your money and you take your chances, as my mother used to say. I don’t hold this against any of the girls; I doubt the principal or anyone else does, either.
Not to speak for GLWasteful, but judging from the rest of the post, I would suggest that the point was probably that if these girls had actually wanted to perform the play in some meaningful way, they would most likely have been able to had they not chosen this insignificant little Open Mic Night to read a small portion of it and “take a stand.” Now, since they’re known liars, it’s probably unlikely the school will cut them the slack that would have been cut previously in order to perform the full play, or indeed anything slightly controversial.
But they’re not adults. They’re kids. They weighed the punishment and decided it was worth it to make a point.
Anyone who forbids the use of the word “vagina” in a reading from **The Vagina Monologues ** is desperately trying to be hip, but missing the boat entirely.
Yeah, but only with the icky words bleeped out.
See my quote a couple paragraphs up. They knew their fate.
You’re attributing something to me that I simply didn’t say. Your tendencies toward erroneous thought aren’t my problem. Give it a rest.
If they wanted the audience to know what to expect, why didn’t they tell them up front? It was their duty to inform them if they thought it would create all the heartache and distress they anticipated when they censored the girls. I call bullshit on the superintendent’s after-the-fact statement. If he was willing to let the kids perform it as written, the incident would never have happened. They had every opportunity to give the audience a heads-up and maintain the integrity of the piece and they pussed out. Fucking cowards.
He’s wrong in the opinion of most sensible people.
I’d have told him to grow a spine and get his brain out of the frat house and into educator mode.
You may be right. And the kids will take it as a challenge and burn him again. Heh-heh.
I’m guessing you just pulled this out of your ass, but do you have any indication at all that it’s true, given that they’ve said they’re ok with it as long as the audience knows what to expect when they walk in the door?
Of course. No matter how fair you try to be about it, the laughter and slight smiles are never very far away.
In The Bleak Midwinter for one. It’s not included in all editions and it’s sometimes bowdlerised, but Christina Rosetti wrote:
Enough for him, whom cherubim
Worship night and day
A breastful of milk
And a mangerful of hay;
Enough for him, whom angels
Fall down before
The ox and ass and camel which adore.
And some older carols (“Upon my lap my Sovereign sits And sucks upon my breast” is one that I’ve sung before). But ITBM is unusual, I suppose, in being so blunt for a Victorian carol.
Oh, and it’s “penes” if you want the correct Latin plural. “Penii” would pluralise “penius” (as “genii” does “genius”).
Just a guess, based on how they handled this oh-so-difficult situation. They had every opportunity to warn the audience when they did the excerpt. They chose not to. Why would they handle the full-blown version more liberally?
Presumably, an audience who bought a ticket to the VAGINA Monologues after hearing about a play called the VAGINA Monologues being performed at the school, and then buying a program which said VAGINA Monologues on it before going into the auditorium might have a better idea of what to expect than one going to an “Open Mic Night.”
A simple sign on the door or mention in the program (or a posting on the school’s website!) would have clued everyone in. Simple. Their approach kind of takes the “open” out of Open Mic Night, don’t you think?
So. . .you did get the super duper version. Because none of that appears in the Fox link in post #1. And this:
Yeah, uh huh. In unison and in solidarity. . .they’re not the IRA ferchrissakes.
And the one thing that I most recall kids wanting when they (read: we) were adolescents was to be taken seriously. To be taken as adults. I kinda doubt that kids have changed all that much in the intervening years. And the first step toward being accepted as an adult is (are ya ready for it?) to act like a fucking adult. Hell, if that message could penetrate my addled pate as a lad, I imagine that these young ladies were smart enough to put two and two together. Of course, excusing them by saying “They’re kids,” is easier. But another thing I remember about adolescence was that nothing was easy.
So. . .they. . .manned up?
Y’see, this is where your inability to read the written word is getting in your way. Go back and read the OP, then read the link. Then show me where the superintendent said that the play could be performed with the word “vagina” Really, now. “icky bits”? And here you were the one saying that there was nothing obscene about the word. bleeped out.
Once again, I will be waiting here when you finish your little exercise in futility.
Why, pray tell, should the administration tell a group of parents and kids that things have changed and this year, they need to know that there will be use of the word “vagina” in tonight’s Open Mic Night? Was it done at last year’s Open Mic Night?
Or, maybe, and I know this is gonna sound way out there, but stay with me here: The students could have performed the play, unredacted, in full flower and glowing from within, so long as they let the intended audience know in advance.
Since it seems to have been missed last time, I’ll throw it out there twice:
The fucking superintendent said that they were welcome to perform the show.
The fucking superintendent said that they were welcome to perform the show.
Have you ever been to an Open Mic Night? A talent show? Why should the school have given a heads up to parents and siblings (or so I imagine in my fevered imagination) that certain language would be used that they might find offensive? In what version of reality is that even the slightest possibility? These audience members, after all, were there to see Erasmus and Hank do their horse impersonation. Shit the bed, man. You’ve gone round the fucking bend here.
And ultimately, it doesn’t matter what you call bullshit on. The quote is out there. Just as the overwrought stamping of feet and tossing of pretty hair quote that you used is out there. This is all sound and fury.
Which is precisely why I don’t want you anywhere near the education of my child. For you see, you’re an idiot.
No way. This principal won’t, I’d wager, give these kids even the barest inkling of a skoshiest possibility of a snowball’s chance in hell of burning him. Again, you don’t understand public life.
Holy hoo-hoos, the boards just explode when you don’t watch them, don’t they? I’ll keep up as best as I can…
Then my apologies for misconstruing, Cowboy8647, but I do feel that the title is inaccurate, if WhyNot’s statement is to be taken into consideration. The girls were suspended for breaking the rules, including lying to the principal (if, indeed, they were always intending to say the word, which, I don’t believe, has been established, so I am fully ready to retract that). I doubt that a science teacher would be in trouble for saying “vagina” or a student perhaps doing a biology report and saying it any more than a student in one of my classes would be in trouble for reading a curse word out of the text while we read together. I will also not punish kids who refuse to read what they consider curse words from a book, and in fact have an excellent student this year who won’t say “God” or “Damn” when we come across it in a story. She just says “hmm-hmm” or something and keeps on going. As an aside, the word my students have the biggest problem with is “niggard” or “niggardly” when it comes up in Shakespeare. It makes the white students too uncomfortable, even after I’ve explained it to them.
Heh. I guess this is a case where every person on the Dope needs a cell phone or millions of people will die. The productions I’ve seen make damn sure the kids don’t say it, or the understudy is performing the rest of the play. It might be a discipline issue, but every theater teacher is different. Some let them get away with it. Couple years ago the theater teacher was tired of the tradition seniors had to ad lib and goof off at their final performance, so she told the kids if there was any of that, not only would seniors never be cast in the final musical again (and you can bet the junior class was NOT happy to hear about that), but every end-of year activity would be cancelled, their last two months would be a living hell, etc, etc. There was no more goofing off.
Agreed, but it was on the spooky, but most definitely specific, “forbidden word” list, and that’s enough.
Agreed again, but is an open mic night with specifically laid out rules the place for that?
Oooh, gotta disagree on that one. That’s the *job * of the principal, to take into account the prevailing attitudes of the community.
Thank you! I’ve been meaning to get my feet wet for years…but you guys are so damn intimidating (terrified…TERRIFIED of Diogenes). As far as forensics goes, I always told the kids to play to the audience. After a while they get a pretty good feel for the judges, and if it’s the elderly matron type, clean it up. If it’s a college kid you recognize for doing the raunchy humor piece last year, spike it up. I’ve had kids lose because they said “damn,” and I’ve had kids win with Glengary Glen Ross. I’ve had parents complain because the piece I gave the student dealt with breast cancer, and the only time in 13 years I’ve gotten in the least bit trouble was when I gave a kid a copy of Drew Carey’s *Dirty Jokes and Beer * to cut a piece from. The assistant principal said it was inappropriate, dutifully slapped me on the wrist, and then asked to borrow the book so he could read it himself. That’s how it goes.
My two most successful pieces ever were a cutting of “Dream of a Thousand Cats” from the *Sandman * comic, and an absolutely hysterical cut an Hispanic kid did of Bill Cosby’s Himself.
There’s so much more, but I think it all boils down now to people who think it’s appropriate and those who don’t, and I can’t imagine anyone saying anything one way or the other. I guess I leave with this thought: if a babysitter comes over with a copy of *Cinderella * or Kill Bill, and I ask him not to watch Kill Bill, and he watches it because he thinks that there’s no reason kids shouldn’t be exposed to that and I was supressing his free speech, there’s gonna be a problem. The principal truly, truly is the parent to the school, and the principal truly, truly gets to say what is appropriate for the school. He or she was placed there, for all intents and purposes, by the community (who voted for the school board who made the decisions). If the principal does NOT serve the community, he or she will be out the door. And at the next interview,
“Why were you fired from your last job?”
“Because I fought for three teenage girls’ right to say ‘vagina’!”
Not going to happen.
One last thought: on-campus suspensions. At my school, at least, an on-campus means you attend your classes but it counts as an absence (which could affect class standing, school awards and honors, expulsions and things like that). If you hit your maximum absences, you will not be granted an appeal if you had suspensions contributing to your total (as opposed to being pretty much automatically having an appeal granted for illness). You are also not allowed to participate in any activities that day (pratice, games, club meetings), and that might lead to other consequences from the coach. So, yeah, it can be a pretty big deal.
I wouldn’t even say the principal got burned here. (Well, here he did, but this is after all a BBQ Pit.)
I tend to think along the same liines as WhyNot, though her post was five pages back and I’m paraphrasing here. The principal OK’d this performance but asked the girls not to use that one particular word. They agreed not to and did anyway. The girls got in trouble - not gigantic, ruined-their-lives trouble, just suspended. Action = consequence. The girls seem to have gotten a little militant about it, but hey - when you’re a teenager, you’re testing boundaries and practicing at making a stand for what you believe in. This very minor act of civil disobedience let them accomplish their goal, and the punishment fits the “crime.”
From what I read in the linked article, the principal isn’t even that badly bent out of shape that the girls disobeyed him. He doesn’t seem to have a personal issue here with the word, nor does he seem SHOCKED, SHOCKED I TELL YOU, that he was disobeyed. This was a little rite of passage, IMO, and everyone played their part as expected.
If it DOES get into lawsuits and “call the ACLU and NOW and get Jesse Jackson in here, too, while you’re at it” - then someone has taken things too far.
I still think it’s unbearably silly to OK a reading from The Vagina Monologues and insist that the word “vagina” be struck from the reading. BUT - that’s not what the article is about, really. Were I the principal, I would not have OK’d the reading in the first place. I would have suggested that there are plenty of other feminist readings that could have been performed instead, and are far less likely to stir up controversy. I think the girls wanted controversy - not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Well, I can see the girls getting in trouble for saying something they agreed not to say, but it saddens me that the word “vagina” was considered so offensive that it shouldn’t have been spoken.
Back in 1968, when I was a sophomore in high school, I had to write a poem for my Speech III class. Naturally, I waited until the last minute and dashed something off in the class just before - a little whimsical poem based on the STAR TREK TV show, a new show that had only been on the air for a few months.
Apparently the work of the other students in my class was pretty poor, for the class and the teacher thought my poem was the best piece submitted that day and I was praised for this twenty-or-so line of fluff that was thrown together in five minutes.
The next day the teacher informed me that there was going to be a student assembly in a few days and some of her students were going to read some of their compositions at that time, and I was one of the lucky ones. Oh boy, lucky me.
There was just one problem as the principal was upset about some of the wording.Two of the lines went something like “The captain has had a bit too much, and it’s all gone to his head”, which inferred that the captain had perhaps consumed some alcoholic beverage and was drunk. This was not acceptable. The offending lines must be changed so that no inference about alcohol can be assumed.
I thought the whole idea of changing the lines was totally stupid and considered it censorship. Everyone in school knew that people drank and got drunk and saw it shown on TV all the time, so mentioning it in a parody poem is going be a problem?
I refused to change the lines and was not allowed to perform the piece, nor was anyone else. Good thing because I certainly didn’t want to do it in front of the student body and thought the whole thing was stupid. I was also pissed off at being censored for such a simple little poem.
So, things haven’t changed or improved that much in the last thirty nine years.
Damn. This fight against ignorance seems to be a losing battle sometimes.
That’s what the school is supposed to do. You’ve got the hierarchy upside down. The students aren’t there to run the school. Meanwhile, you’re dismising the school’s standards in favor of imposing your own. And you don’t even have a kid there! Same same for the religious right. They want to impose their rules on everyone else. Just like you do.
You got it, too. Read the whole thread, genius. It’s all pertinent. The other link is on the first page. The fact that you don’t want to see it doesn’t mean it’s not there.
If “adult” means sucking up to authoritarian morons, the world could use a few million more kids like these. Maybe in your world, where bowing to incomprehensible stupidity is the order of the day, no one ever challenges authority. Luckily, we’re not all living with our heads in the sand.
What the fuck are you talking about? Get a grip. Take your meds. Come back when you’re feeling a little less disconnected with the conversation at hand.
Jesus, you’re an idiot. I was responding to YOUR FUCKING STATEMENT:
Maybe you need to lay down and take a nap. This is obviously too taxing for you to follow along with.
The bigger question would be, “Why wouldn’t they if they thought the word might be offensive to a few people in the audience?” I realize you don’t think children have the right to express themselves regarding subject matter that may be controversial, but the community appears to be siding with the students; not the principal. In fact, according to The Journal News http://www.thejournalnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070306/NEWS02/703060363/1209:
It sounds like the principal didn’t know the community as well as he thought he did. He underestimated their intelligence and is paying a higher price than he would have if he’d have just let them perform it as written.
Regarding your misquote of my use of the term “icky bits” get your fucking sarcasm meter checked.
You’re off the beam, dude. I pity you.
And maybe you’re the one who has no fucking clue regarding what the “Open” part of Open Mic means. Hint: it ain’t a talent show. And what makes you think the audience didn’t also contain friends and family of the girls who uttered the forbidden word?
What he said he *would have * allowed and what the school *actually did * are diametrically opposed. If they were so fearful of community reaction to the single utterance of the word “vagina”, I have a hard time seeing them allowing the whole performance, which is considerably more controversial, both in subject matter and language. The word is used over 100 times in the entire performance.
Undoing the psychological damage you’d have done to a child would be a lofty goal, indeed.
That’s the beauty of it. He doesn’t have to “give” them anything (as evidenced by this incident). They’ll just take it. Heh-heh.
I missed the edit window. I meant to say it isn’t a talent show in the traditional sense of the word. I’m pretty sure there are no vaudeville two-man dancing horses. I’m pretty sure there are a lot of talented kids trying to express their thoughts and emotions.
Mm-hm. Likely, as has been mentioned already, to shock people who have bought tickets to The Vagina Monologues and are attending a performance of The Vagina Monologues expecting to hear people talking about vaginas.
Never bathe in mercury, Kalhoun. You’d sink.
Now I’ll let you get back to screeching “You Go, Girls!!!111one111!”
Um. Yeah, but they already did a reading from The Vagina Monologues and weren’t allowed to say the word. What’s the difference? Why would the work, in its entirety, make any difference at all? It wasn’t **The Vagina Monologues ** they had a problem with (because they allowed the reading). It was the word “vagina.” They were specifically not allowed to say that word. The surprise factor is meaningless because they had every opportunity to warn the audience (as they would if they performed the complete work) and decided (erroneously, it appears) it was a little to risque for the community. There’s no difference!
I don’t get where you think I’m “screeching” about anything. It’s not about “You Go Girls.” It’s about the principal being a wuss and wrongly attributing antiquated, puritan sensibilities to the audience. Would you have advised these kids against taking their stand? They were fully aware of what would happen and stood up for what they believed in. I know some people don’t get that these decisions (and their consequences) are part of the growing process, but teenagers have always tested boundaries and always will. It wouldn’t matter if it’s The Vagina Monologues, the blue mohawk, the tongue piercing, the objectionable T-shirt, mini-skirts, or reading “banned” books. The fact that the principal has the right to punish them has little to do with the point they made (and made well, I would add). They’re learning how to pick their battles. The whole incident is probably the most useful thing the girls (or the principal) will learn this year.
