My Vagina Monologue

I am avoiding The Vagina Monologues. It is not because I think it is indecent, or because Rudy Giuliani thinks so. It is just that I know I could not sit still through it. At some point I would start to squirm, want to shoot my hand up and yell out like a hyperactive six-year-old, "Hey I've got one! My turn! Let me tell one!"

Ticketholders can relax. A fear of being wrestled to the ground by a tentative volunteer usher keeps me a safe distance from the theater. Rest assured that I am securely ensconced at home, minding my own business, quietly chuckling to myself as I recall my own vagina monologue.

It began around a wobbly table in a Panda Express. Some college friends and I had gathered to eat cheap Chinese food with plastic forks. Our bright recent-graduate status had eclipsed, and we were bemoaning the darkness of our dues-paying days. We had the bad timing to graduate from Northwestern University in 1987?the year the stock market crashed. While we thought our degrees in history, film and rhetoric made us interesting and "well-rounded," employers were not impressed. Meanwhile, computer science and engineering majors?who taunted us at graduation by waiving "Geeks Make the Big Buck$" signs and chanting "We've Got Job$!"?were indeed buying food and paying rent.

My friend Christopher, an assistant to a local casting agent, was particularly frustrated at his job. He was having difficulty reconciling his delicate sensibilities and driving ambitions. His dream was to cast great dramas of the London stage, but his reality was placing "talent" in leaden industrial films for corporations like Amoco and United Airlines. Christopher's dramaturgic instincts were challenged by his latest assignment: a training video for the American Society of Clinical Pathologists entitled "Pap Smear: Collection, Handling and Quality Assurance." He could not find one actress in Chicago willing to risk her career for the money?or the wide exposure.

After initially laughing at Christopher's predicament, I became more thoughtful. It saddened me to know that no one was willing to take on the role of "Pap Smear." What misguided modesty, I thought. "Pap Smear," after all, seemed less demeaning than the insipid dialogue and formulaic titillation actresses routinely accepted for "legitimate" work. I considered how I depended on my gynecologist's ability to collect and interpret my own Papanicolaou smears. I began to feel a little outraged. Women's health, indeed their lives, depended on "Pap Smear" getting produced! Surely someone had to step up to the speculum.

Weeks later I found myself splayed out on an examination table, wearing a scanty hospital gown and silently repeating an "It's all in the name of science" mantra. At the foot of the table, just inches away from my spread feet, was a cast of strangers pointing hot lights and running cameras at my privates. Meanwhile, the grandfatherly chief pathologist at Presbyterian-St. Luke's Hospital excavated my cervix, pausing periodically to explain, slowly, every move to the camera.

The doctor's excruciatingly thorough explanations, the light that needed replacing, the repositioning of the microphone and the endless union breaks gave me the impression that time was moving backwards. Waiting out the interruptions was the worst part. When the camera paused, I had to stop being a pap smear professional and be a real person. That I couldn't do. Fraternizing with the crew?particularly with the cute sound guy?would have crushed my stoic resolve to just get the thing done. I opted instead to pass the breaks alone, shivering in a cold bathroom stall.

When the "Pap Smear" shoot was over, I walked away from the set and never looked back. I had no desire to see the final product. I took my $500 and paid my delinquent college loans. My embarrassment faded as I accepted the fact that baring my privates for science made good sense. It also made people happy: Christopher, the clinical pathologists and my creditors, to name a few. Even I was happy?but only after I filed away the contract and ceased dwelling on those words "create, copyright, use, reuse, publish, and/or republish" as they related to "visual reproductions of me, my character or my form." Although I did it under a fictitious name and kept it a secret, I was proud that I had used my genitalia for a common good.

More than a decade has now passed since then. Christopher is living his dream in London, casting important stage and film dramas and hobnobbing with Helena Bonham Carter. I live in New York City, home to Eve Ensler's Off-Broadway hit. The time and place seemed hot for writing my vagina monoscript.

The only problem is my name, Discretion. When my mother plucked it from an ancestor's tombstone, she did not foresee the burden I would carry. All my life people have expected me to be discreet. Starring in "Pap Smear" was not so discreet. Telling people about it is definitely not. But 2001 is the beginning of a new millennium. Why, just the other day the Standard & Poor's index had the steepest decline since the 1987 crash. It's time to go for broke. It's time I reach my age of indiscretion.