Berlin continues!

We had a great weekend at Ladyfest, where we met loads of amazing people and heard some awesome bands. (More details to follow!) We're co-organizing another event with Lady Gaby (who contributed to Adventures in Menstruating #4) tomorrow night - details are below - please forward and repost to anyone you know in Berlin! :) I had the great pleasure of meeting Brittany Shoot yesterday, and I'm really psyched that there will actually be four contributors reading at the same event!

Cheers,
Cx


Vintage Women – Reclaiming Time!
Wednesday 22 July 2009
14:00 until late
20:00 Doors open for evening performances
Lady Gaby presents @
Wonderbar Wienerstr 45. Berlin XBERG
Entry: Suggested donation 2 euro

Daytime Workshops:
Adventures in Menstruating on 50s adverts – deconstructing the media and creating your own spoof ads; Gender stereotypes – subverting oppression through comedy exploration of representation.

24 Hour Zine Thing – Create your own zine response with ad collages and captions using materials provided or vintage ads/images/text you bring. The completed zine will be available to trade or buy on the night as part of July’s International Zine Month!

Coffee, cakes, brownies, cookies and treats at 1950s prices!
Swap shop: bring vintage clothing and accessories to trade and share! Fabric pens available for quick modifications – bring your own sewing supplies/ribbon if you’ve got some!

Knitters and crocheters welcome!

DJing by Mary from The Baby Cheeses

Evening - Doors open 8 pm – Comedy sketches, poetry and spoken word from Lady Gaby, Adventures in Menstruating’s Chella Quint and Sarah Thomasin, Brittany Shoot and more!
Live Music from The Hairy Marys!
Retro set by DJ Girl Detective

Meanwhile, back in menstrual superhero land...

One word:

Vajewellery.

You heard it here first.



-Chella

Thanks to Brittany Shoot for the link.

The Great Red Spot of Jupiter, huh?

My writing buddy, Rich, sent me this link today - it's a doodle done on paint (it appears), in a seemingly hurried and off-the-cuff sort of way. It's surprisingly accurate, though. (More accurate than Sarah's vague paint rendition of US geography, which is hilarioius and she has allowed me to disclose this here.) I'm disturbed by the Langoliers*, but their presence makes sense.

I LOVE the real photocheck of Jupiter because I'm a complete astronomy geek. The way Buzzfeed (which I've never looked at before but seems like an excellent procrastination tool to add to my inexaustible supply) works seems to involve an elaborate system of tagging - I count mostly LOLs but only one CUTE, with quite a few WTFs and, sadly, too many EWs (and one TRASHY, which seems a bit of a stretch, to me...).

Anyone want to do a definitive work on this with a Venn diagram and everything?


Chella


*The 'chompers' look remarkably similar to the Steven King bad guys from the film version of the book. They eat leftovers, so I suppose it's fair enough, but that film scared the crap out of me.

PS. Edited to add that we're both really curious about the artist! We'd like to give credit we're credit is due and neither Rich nor I could find the source. :) So yeah, answers on a postcard, please.

Berlin!

We're going to Berlin! 17 - 27 July! We'll be there for Ladyfest and will probably do some more readings and stuff there the following week. Stay tuned. (And get in touch if you will be in Berlin and want to collaborate.)

Chella

not!menstrual

Anyone know who designed it? It's amazing where you can allow yourself to see tampons while you're editing the next issue of your menstrual comedy zine.

Correction, I guess...It's amazing where I can allow myself to see tampons while I'm editing the next issue of my menstrual comedy zine.

I just finished the cover and it's in for printing.

We've got an interesting new sponsor, as well - whole back cover ad!

Hehehe...kidding.

Sort of.

By anyway, that's where I've been the past couple of days I should have been posting.

Chella

Wrapped in plain brown paper?

Readers of my zine will know I always judge a feminine hygiene product by its cover - packaging is an instant indicator of the taboo-breaky-ness (that's the technical term) of the pad or tampon company in question.

So I like the way Jeff Krichmar designed these:I like that the name is a riff on both 'time of the month' and 'rhythm'.

I like that the waxing of the moon and graded darkening of the boxes correspond to both the passage of time and (from what I can infer) the heaviness of your flow each day.

I like the colour not being pastel pink, the imagery not being abstract.

I like menstruation being linked to scientific fact, not misogynistic fantasy.

I really like the chart motif.

And what I like even more is that the writer of What Made Me Look said this about it when she posted a link to it on her blog:

"I wish there would be a tasteful packaging like this that you are not embarrassed to carry around in your handbag."

Awesome that the embarrassment factor comes from bad design.

Further thanks to Tina at swissmiss for indirectly making me look at what made me look.

Chella

Licentious? Nah...

No joke - in the UK you have to have a tv license to pay for public television. When I first moved here, I was amazed to learn that if you had a television, you had to get a license for it, for about £130 a year. If you don't have a license for your television, you can be fined. Well geez, I used to panic about this. Up until a few months ago, I actually thought people would demand to see the license if they knocked on your door, and I'd have to prove I had one by having it at the ready, like they were my identification papers during the war. So I used to keep this very official bit of paper under the tv in safe place so I'd have it to hand when that knock came. There was a VERY convincing television ad that gave me this impression several years ago, I swear. But it turns out they have the info on a database and you don't actually need to show anyone a bit of paper. If they see that you're not paid up, and you've got a satellite dish or cable wire going into the brick, or an antenna on the roof, someone from the tv license people may knock on your door and demand you pay for a tv license, but that's it. No terrifying knock, no frantic scrabbling around for passports...

But despite this odd practice, the BBC are good people. A couple of weeks ago, a programme called QI jumped into the top mainstream comedy slot at 9 pm on BBC 1 (the one occupied by Friends in the 90s, if that gives you an idea). QI is a 'Quite Interesting' comedy panel game where if you guess the most obvious-seeming yet wrong answer, you lose loads of points and quite a lot of self-respect. Scores are regularly in the negative numbers at the end of each episode, and its facts are so esoteric and forgettable that my friends and I can even watch this in reruns and feel clever and stupid by turns. It's hosted by one of my favourite gay, Jewish panel game hosts, Stephen Fry (the other one is Simon Amstell).

QI used to be on BBC2, which covers the 'clever and quirky' demographic quite nicely. When it was moved to BBC1 for its most recent season, I was worried it'd dumb down and go mainstream. How delighted I was last week in the Flora and Fauna episode when the very first question name-checked menstruation in a big way. The episode is still available on iplayer in the UK, and I seriously hope it arrives on BBC America and elsewhere soon enough. The question was about the significance of the camellia flower in a book called La Dame au Camellia (and in the film and opera based on it). All the guests, including this week's token woman, Jo Brand (who has never shied away from huge amounts of sexually themed and menstrual comedy in her stand up act) joined in with the discussion of wearing a white camellia flower 25 days a month and wearing a red camellia for the other 5. (Now THAT's regular!) Women were not the butt of the jokes! Menstruation wasn't considered disgusting! Best bit: Stephen Fry in role saying 'Sorry, I can't, I've got a period on,' and Jo Brand guffawing as she gently corrected him: 'Stephen, it's EITHER/OR! Either 'I've got my period' or 'I'm on!'' A good third of the show was devoted to menstrual comedy. It's quite sad that I'm so shocked and pleased by this, but wanted to log the praise where it's due. It also taught this menstrual maven a thing or two about the history behind Germany's arm of Kotex branding its pads Camellia. (Actually I wish the US arm (wing?) would depart from their 50s medicinal moniker and head the same way - it'd mean the To Bleed Or Not To Bleed sketch I do in our live show (it's about menstrual suppression) would be able to end with 'the fair Camellia' in both countries. "The fair Camellia! Pad, in thy soft layers/Be all my blood collect'd!")

I sat down to write about this all last night but got engrossed in a BBC Radio 4 programme called Am I Normal doing an entire episode deconstructing stereotypes around menopause (recommended reading from one of the interviewees was Mrs. Dalloway - so now that's two books, an opera and a film to add to my reading list), directly followed by Call Yourself a Feminist, which turned out to be the first of three documentaries tracking different waves of feminism. (Which one are we on now? Third, right? Do we all graduate to fourth at some point? I've been in third so long I'm starting to feel like I got left back.) I was fascinated by comments from an oldskool feminist called Sonia adamantly insisting that feminists weren't humourless, and that it was irresponsible of the media to only show the drier side of feminism. Right on, sister!

So yeah, the BBC is on message. They are ready to acknowledge that feminists can be funny, and comedians can talk menstruation. Perhaps I should send in a sitcom idea about women who work in a tampon factory. Actually, I think I will. You heard it here first, folks - it'll be called Up Yours (with its own comedy tampon packaging to get my design!brain going). Look for it at 9 pm on BBC1 in a couple of years...

Chella

Happy New Year

What a long strange hiatus it's been. Things are stirring in menstrual zine land, which I'll get posting on. In the meantime, please enjoy the following New Year's greeting photo and explanation courtesy of the H2G2 for our friends outside of Germany. :)



Here's a video link if you'd like to re-live New Year's Eve. One of these years we'll have to perform the lesbian zine girl version in Berlin! All the best for 2009.

Chella and Sarah

Election Fever, Literally

So, to quote my friend (and Official Adventures in Menstruating Bluestockings Gig Groupie, so some of you may know him) James, a lot of us had the best Guy Fawkes Day ever because of this guy. Our collective buzz was harshed the next day when all the votes were confirmed in California to be supporting Prop 8. Please don't hate on California as a whole, tempting as that is, or you'll be forcing all the hip and liberal Californians to pretend they're from Oregon, just like we Americans abroad always had to say we're Canadian...until Wednesday. But yeah, it was amazing to hear Our Barry say 'gay' on national television and use it as a normal adjective, so let's hope there's more good news to come.

If you're not suffering the credit crunch too badly and are in the area, you might like to attend Ladyfest Manchester this weekend. We'd been planning to but have been stymied by the flu, so just a quick heads up to people who were expecting us that we will be taking a lot of vitamin C and waiting for next time, unfortunately.

I've been kicking around an idea for a while to do a blog about our wedding, tracking it in retrospect so there's a bit of distance to reflect on it and really share what we did and why and how and what it meant. It was difficult to find the time to do it as we were planning, and I didn't want to just throw another blog out there if I didn't need to...but I'm feeling more like even if people choose not to use any of my ideas for their own weddings, at least another lesbian wedding is out there in the public domain, just kind of...being visible. What do you think?

In the meantime, bed and the US remake of Life On Mars for us, I think. Night!

Zinecore Radio

So I have always had the opinion that if you do three or more of something, you're in it for the long haul, probably ever since tenth grade geometry when I started plotting points with feeling. Hannah Neurotica is getting ready to do her fifth episode of her radio show and wants some readers and listeners. Check it out.

Speaking of three of something...the new issue of AiM isn't ready just yet- it's the live show we're fixin' to do, that flyer below. For some reason it's uploaded in blue, but it's actually meant to be red and black! I'll speak to my adobe-wrangling friend John about vectors when he gets back from Canterbury, but in the meantime, enjoy the purdy colours.

Chella

Cheap(er) tickets to Menopause the Musical

Hey, gang. Guess what I got in my email?

"I am so glad that you see it for what it is: a lighthearted look at the changes in life and not some Chekovian disaster evening! We have more fun for sure!!! We would be pleased to offer your readers what we call our Supergroup Rate. What it means is that an individual can call the Shaw Box Office (0870 033 2626), ask for the “Intranet Offer” and receive £10 off a single ticket (this is the group rate but offered on an individual basis). This rate will be valid for all shows through June 3. Additionally, students can purchase a ticket on the day for £19.75 with a student ID. All success to you!"

- Menopause the Musical's press officer

So if you want to see the show for yourself and form your own opinion, that's how you can do it for cheap(er). Don't get me wrong - that's a lot of money to spend all at once, and the show does have a few snags. But it's a kind offer and I'm happy to pass it on. I certainly enjoyed myself when I went. The Guardian sensibly edited out my admission of a moment of madness but I'll confess here - I actually joined the audience participation bit at the end of the show - complete with kick line and jazz hands.

Chella

Yesterday's News

About two weeks ago I went to see Menopause the Musical. I liked it. From the reviews, you might think I was the only one laughing. But no. I wrote about it, and the Guardian blog published it.

Check it out by clicking the title of this post.

Chella