A THOUSAND VOICES

Theresa was the invited speaker at the annual ART/NY Curtain Call presentation at the Laura Pels Theater on March 15, 2010. The following is the text of her speech:

A THOUSAND VOICES

Because I am someone who believes in the power of storytelling, I am going to tell you a story. It is the story of a play, and the story of things that happened to me, because of that play.

The play is called The Butterfly Collection. I wrote it in 1999. It is about a family of artists, and the tensions that rise between the father, who is a successful novelist, and his two sons, one of whom is a struggling actor, and the other who is an antiques dealer. Tim Sanford at Playwrights Horizons fell in love with this play and said he would produce it in the fall of 2000, and he talked to the guys who run South Coast Rep and they read it and included it in the new play festival that spring, so that we had a chance to work on it out there. The workshop was great, and we were the hit of the festival. When the play came to New York the following fall, we had a thrilling cast—Marian Seldes and Brian Murray, in their first production together, Reed Birney, Betsey Aidem, and the young Maggie Lacy in her New York stage debut. Bartlett Sher directed, and there was enormous excitement gathering around the production. A lot of commercial producers came, as people felt that it could potentially move. Nine regional theaters were circling to produce it. American Theater magazine called my agent to ask for the script because they were interested in publishing it (in one of those cool inserts -- I was very excited I’ve always wanted one of those). Audiences were thrilled with the play. Lincoln Center Library of Performing Arts was filming it for their collection.
When the New York Times published its review it was not what anyone expected. The reviewer, who shall remain nameless, dismissed the play—which was about art and family—as a feminist diatribe. He accused me of having a thinly veiled man-hating agenda, and in a truly bizarre paragraph at the end of the review, he expressed sympathy with the director because he had to work with someone as hideous as me.
The review was horrible and personal and projected all sorts of terrible things onto me. I was shocked, a lot of people were shocked. And there was real outcry in the community. A lot of letters were written to the Times—someone told me it was sixty letters, and I don’t know how anyone would know that but it made me feel better, even though none of them were published. Apologies were made behind the scenes, none to me but to other people. The heroic Tina Howe went to the Dramatists Guild council and read the review aloud and insisted something be done about this; she and a lot of other people made the excellent point that if anyone at the Times had ever dared to publish a review as racist or homophobic or anti-Semitic as this review was, in its bigotry—well, the review would never have been published. So there was a flurry of upset. But with a review that bad, the play closed. All the other productions went away. American Theater magazine went away. Everybody knew that that was a crazy mysogynistic review. But no one would produce the play. Ever again. And you should know that many people consider it my best play. Still.
This is what happened to me in the months after that.
People couldn’t get over it. For about a year and a half, I had people come up to me at least once a week and this is what the conversation would be:
NICE PERSON: Hi Theresa, how are you? I saw The Butterfly Collection! Wow it was so beautiful! What a great evening of theater!

THERESA: Thank you.

NICE PERSON: That review was crazy! So mysogynistic! Wow, how could he write something like that?

And then this nice person would go on and on and on about that crazy mysogynistic review, so I got to live through it all over again.

I cannot tell you how many of these conversations I had. Maybe 200. Then one day I did a joint interview with the great Chuck Mee, and after the interview was over, and the reporter had left, Chuck said to me, “I saw The Butterfly Collection. It was really beautiful.” And I said, “Thank you.” And then I waited, for the rest of the conversation, about that crazy review, and Chuck didn’t say it. All he said was, “that play was beautiful,” and for a minute, I had my play back.

The other person who repeatedly and heroically gave me my play back was the wonderful actress Lynn Cohen, who was really angry about what happened and who would speak to me with such courage and compassion about it that even though I didn’t want to really talk about it, she always made me feel better.

This is another thing that happened: A whole lot of people decided I should change my identity. This is the conversation I had with other well-meaning people:

NICE PERSON: You know Theresa everybody knows that your work is terrific but the New York critics don’t like you personally.

THERESA: How can they not like me personally? They don’t know me!

NICE PERSON: Hey! We love you. But you know what you should do? You should produce your plays under a male pseudonym.

THERESA: You mean, I should pretend to be a man?

NICE PERSON: That’s right. That’s the only way they will accept you. Or the plays! They would like your plays, if only you hadn’t written them!

Okay I know that sounds crazy but I swear I had that conversation at least a dozen times. Arthur Kopit, who really is great and I love him, thought this was a hilarious idea and he had a lot of fun figuring out for me how I would pull that off, becoming a man. We never went as far as surgery but there were lots of other clever ideas about what I might do to trick people into thinking I was a man, which is what I needed to do, to make my identity acceptable.

This is another thing that happened to me: One of my friends who was a producer in New York told me that this was all a sign, that I was being told by the Times that I am not welcome in New York and I should think of something else to do with my life.

This is another thing that happened: A close friend of mine who is a theater director started screaming at me in restaurants and he told me I wasn’t an artist.

This is another thing that happened to me: My agent said, you know Theresa, how you’ve always wanted to write a novel? Maybe you should do that. Which is not necessarily bad advice, but it’s also not particularly advice you want to hear from your THEATRE AGENT. He also told me that my next two plays, Omnium Gatherum and Bad Dates, were unproduceable and that he couldn’t represent them.

And, I couldn’t get produced. He was right about that. No one wanted to touch The Butterfly Collection and no one wanted to touch me. And then I fell off of the map. I got really depressed because of all this, as you might imagine, and I couldn’t think anymore, and I was spending way too much time lying on the couch all day, and I was drinking white wine a lot, in one-inch increments, I would lie on the couch and tell myself I wasn’t turning into an alcoholic because I was only drinking white wine one inch at a time. And then one day my son, who was five years old at the time, came up to me and said, “Mom, are you all right?” And I looked at him and I thought: GET UP. It is your job to take care of this kid and it’s not his job to take care of you and you are not going to turn into this person. So I got off the couch.

And then a bunch of other things happened that were equally or more hideous. It’s not like getting off the couch solved everything. I did start writing a novel, although that’s a whole different story. But I really was off the grid, for two years, and then one day I went to see my friend Sinan Unil’s play up at the Long Wharf, and I caught a ride back to the city with John Eisner, and we talked for three hours and he said, “you should come up to the Lark.” And then the next day Arthur Kopit called and told me as well, “you should come up to the Lark.” And the Lark saved me. They saved my sanity and they saved my career and I thank them for everything they did for me, and what they do for a lot of playwrights. There is no organization, in my mind, that does more.

And that is the last time I am telling that story. I am never telling that story again. But I tell it today because I don’t want to hear from anybody that there isn’t, or hasn’t been, a real gender problem in the American theater. I really did think about what I might talk to you about today and I had no choice, honestly. I felt like my whole career as a playwright has been so hyper-defined by my gender—sometimes I feel like it is strangely blinding, even. And it’s time for all of us to look at this, and talk about it--without just saying, “oh there’s not really a problem” because there IS a problem—and then start talking about what we, as a community, are going to do to solve it.

This is an important point to realize: before I came to New York and started working in the theater, I was never told that being a girl was going to be a problem for me in any way that I took seriously. It’s not like I was a stranger to conservatism. I know a lot about the Republican party and the Catholic church because I was raised, basically, in both. Both my parents were staunch Ohio Republican Catholics until a point when my mother got a clue and switched parties. Now she’s a Democrat and my father is still a Republican, and since then they’ve done nothing but fight incessantly about politics. My father, who is as I said both Republican and Catholic, thinks I’m insane BUT there was a moment in my childhood when some of his buddies got into ribbing him about having so many daughters. He had four daughters and two sons, and someone apparently even expressed pity one day, the story goes; one of his golfing buddies said something like, “Poor George, what is he going to do with all those girls?” And it pissed him off, and he came home and said to my Democratic mother, “Those girls can do anything the boys can do.” And that is what the expectation was in my house. Then I went to an all-girls Catholic high school where the nuns were all quietly radical liberation theologists who were secretly agitating for women’s ordination. Then I went to Notre Dame, which was more traditionally conservative, but I couldn’t take it too seriously because they had things like panty raids there. I thought it was just too dumb to be believed. And then I went to Brandeis, where I read a lot of feminist literary theory and considered questions like, “Is the Gaze Male?” This was in the EIGHTIES; that’s more than 25 years ago, for people who are counting. And at the time there were fantastic plays being produced all over the country by Wendy Wasserstein and Tina Howe and Marsha Norman and Emily Mann, and I thought it was a cool thing, to be a woman playwright. I thought, I’m not in the Catholic church anymore, and the world is saying we haven’t heard from the women, and now we’re ready!

And then I began my career as a professional playwright, where I was told that since I’m a woman, if I write about women, that meant I had a feminist agenda and that’s BAD. I also got told that when I write about men, since I’m a woman, I clearly have a feminist agenda, and that’s bad too. I couldn’t write about anything without hearing that I had a feminist agenda. It turned out that being a woman playwright was just in itself suspect; if you were a woman playwright by definition you had a feminist agenda, which was so bad, it annihilated the work itself. The other word for woman playwright might as well be “witch.”

As an aside let me add that I would rather be called a witch than a man-hater. Honestly, “man hater” really does need to be simply OFF THE TABLE. It bugs the shit out of me. I have a husband and a son and a lot of men in my life whom I love a lot and it’s creepy that people would toss that ugly accusation at anyone in the jovial spirit of name-calling. Someone actually called me that at a party a couple of weeks ago and I wanted to hit him. BUT I DIDN’T. Anyway, if you need to call me a name, “witch”--the preferred insult would be “witch,” or “madwoman in the attic” is also acceptable.

So those are some of the ways I know there actually is a gender problem in the American theater. This is another way: because so many people—not just Arthur Kopit—have told me, over the years, that in order to have a career that is commensurate with my talent, I should pretend to be a man. This is another way I know there is a problem: because the extraordinary Julia Jordan ran the numbers for us.

Two years ago, in what I think was an act of inspired intelligence and courage, Julia Jordan conducted a series of town hall meetings at New Dramatists, which put the question of gender parity on the table for the American theater to discuss. She invited women playwrights to come and present their situation and they showed up in droves. Then she invited artistic directors and literary managers to come and confront the situation with us. And this is the situation: plays written by women are not being produced. In 2007, the one year I opened a play on Broadway, I was the only woman playwright who did so. That year, nationwide, 12 per cent of the new plays produced all over the country were by women. That means 88 percent of the new plays produced were written by men. (Back in 1908 before women had the right to vote, the percentage of new plays in New York, written by women, was higher. It was higher before we had the vote.)

Generally, over the last 25 years the number of plays produced that were written by women seems to have vacillated between 12 and 17 percent.

This is a disastrous statistic, and it is related to another disastrous statistic, which is the number of women writers and directors in Hollywood. This year 6 percent of films were directed by women, and 8 percent of produced screenplays were written or co-written by women. That means 88 percent of all plays were written by men, 94 percent of all movies were directed by men, and 92 percent of all movies were written by men.

Women playwrights like myself have a lot of anecdotal evidence to support some pretty coherent theories about why this is the case. People in the power structure seem more mystified and often they don’t seem sure that there is a problem. (One of them actually said to me, not too long ago, “But Theresa, where ARE the women playwrights?” Seriously, he looked me in the face and said that.) Several artistic directors have expressed concern at the idea of “quotas.” They really don’t like the word “quota.” I don’t like that word either. Other words I don’t like are “discrimination,” and “censorship,” and I wish I could get them to dislike those words as much as they dislike “quotas.” “Boys club” is another couple of words I could very well live without. But since there is so much murky territory in language, I think this discussion of numbers is very useful.

Here is what the numbers say to me: if we lived in an ideal world, the balance of new plays produced in theaters all over America would come out to, roughly, 50:50. The Dramatists Guild—of which I am a proud member, I serve on the council and it’s a great organization, everyone who is a playwright should belong, here’s a shout-out to Gary Garrison and Ralph Sevush, you are excellent, and so is Stephen Schwartz, our excellent president. Anyway, the Dramatist Guild tracks the percentages of women and men who enter graduate school as playwriting students, and it also tracks the numbers of people who apply for membership, and those numbers either stick to the 50:50 ratio OR there is a higher number of women. So in the ideal world, those women and men who are over the years developing their craft as playwrights should rise though the system at an even rate. This is not what is happening. Women are being shut out, at different levels of development and production, and you end up with this crazy 17 percent number, which seems to be the highest percentage we can get to, year in and year out. Seventeen percent of fifty percent is thirty four percent of a hundred percent. (Bear with me, I’m not making this up, I’m actually pretty good at math.) That means that sixty-six percent of the best plays by women—the plays that SHOULD be rising to the top, the plays that in a fair world would move into the culture as the stories we are telling ourselves—sixty six percent of women’s stories are being lost. Every year.

And I have to reiterate: the premise of those numbers is that playwriting is NOT in fact a gene on a Y chromosome, and we are NOT losing women playwrights because they decided to run off and have babies. The reason we lost all those women playwrights is: we buried their work, and we sent them away.

I would also like to note that in January a lot of reports came out about the recent study of the American Council on Education, which informed us that last year women earned more than half the degrees granted in every category—associate, bachelors, masters, doctoral and professional. The actual numbers nationwide stand at 57 percent women, and 43 percent men, and they have stood somewhere in that vicinity since the year 2000. USA Today asks, is this “cause for celebration, or concern?”

When I read all these accounts, I thought: 43 percent, wow, women playwrights would be so happy if our numbers got up to 43 percent. We would be throwing parties. But the people who do the studies and write these reports up are in fact WORRIED that it’s not fair to the boys that they only have 43 percent of the slots in the college population. This is a bad thing, we are told, for a lot of reasons, chief among them that smart girls won’t have enough men to date. (That is how the New York Times reported the story.) A lot of colleges have admitted that just as they might consider race or geographical diversity in building freshman classes, they similarly look for gender parity, which means they are letting boys in over more qualified girls—which does look like affirmative action, or shall we say “quotas,” which apparently are okay when they favor boys.

So women playwrights live in a world where we are told it is a bad thing if women are 57 percent of the undergraduate population, because that’s too big an imbalance, but it’s an okay thing if women are only getting 17 percent or 6 percent or 9 percent of the best jobs in show business (and elsewhere, in America), and if we tried to rectify that it would be unfair because it would involve “quotas.”

Now let me tell you something: a lot of people will think that what I just pointed out was a “feminist” statement. But I don’t actually see it that way. I see these contradictions as just kind of comical and even, well, stupid. As an indication that there is just something truly, systemically unfair going on here. That’s not a feminist agenda. That’s the truth.

I never had an agenda. I just wanted to write plays that told the truth. Some of those plays told the truth about what it is like to live on this planet as a woman. Why would that be off the table? Why would that story be something that they only do in fiction, or on cable TV? Why can’t we do that in the theater? I just don’t think that we theater people want to align ourselves with the backward-looking institutions of culture. We want to see ourselves, I think, as a relevant and intellectually rigorous and culturally progressive community. It’s past time to acknowledge the fact that that means welcoming the voices of women into the cultural discussion.

There are a lot of ways to do this. Primarily, I think, we need to encourage theaters and producers and foundations and boards of directors to extend to women playwrights the kind of excellent programs which have been put in place to encourage the work of minority playwrights. All across America, and here in New York, there has been strong and necessary support for these voices, and wonderful writers have emerged because of that support. I have been told so many times over the years that theaters and foundations are interested in “diversity” but that doesn’t mean women. That needs to change. We need to stop discussing why the numbers are so bad, and stop asking where are the women playwrights, and we need to start recognizing them where they are—which is right in front of us--and hold them up and celebrate their voices, and produce their plays.

In that context, I would like to report that this year, in New York, the following plays were produced:

Circle Mirror Transformation, by Annie Baker
Or, by Liz Duffy Adams
This, by Melissa James Gibson
The Vibrator Play, by Sarah Ruhl
The Understudy, by me
Smudge, by Rachel Axler
Happy Now, by Lucinda Coxon

All of these plays have received wide critical recognition; most of them were extended and all of them played to packed houses. In short, there were a lot of plays by women in New York this year, and they were not only fierce and dazzling and interesting: they also made a lot of money. Tim Sanford, over at Playwrights Horizons, who has long been an unacknowledged champion of women’s plays, is having a truly sensational season, in a worried, recessionary economy. He deserves it. Julia Crosby over there at The Women’s Project is also having a sensational season, and she and they deserve it too.

Which brings us finally to another couple of statistics which I think are worth noting: women buy more tickets. They buy 55 percent of movie tickets and anywhere from sixty to SIXTY FIVE percent of theater tickets. So opening our stages and our hearts and our minds to women playwrights is not only cool and relevant and interesting and just—it is also a sound business model.

Sir David Hare recently made news by informing the London Telegraph that “many of today’s best plays were being written by women, but that ’macho‘ theater managers were failing to capitalize on the trend.” That is a direct quote, and here’s another: “I don’t think the repertory of most theaters is reflecting what seems to be happening in terms of the most interesting new theater. We would hope to see management in theater reflecting where we think the creativity in playwriting is coming from.”

A friend of mine was worried about me after all that shit went down with The Butterfly Collection, so she got me a session with an astrologer named Coral. So Coral did my chart, which was apparently in very poor shape at the time, like me. And she got very specific about the names of the stars and the planets which were passing through my heavens, and apparently there’s a planet out there named Chiron. It’s not actually a planet. I think it’s one of the moons of Jupiter, but Coral informed me that Chiron is the wounded healer, and Chiron was just all over my chart. Then, and now, I apparently have been claimed in every way by Chiron, the wounded healer. And there is no question, I am wounded. But I offer you all this information as a hope that I might actually provide one of the healing voices in this discussion. I really do believe that if enough people stand up and say “this cannot go on,” it will not go on. After a season like this one, where so many plays in New York were by women, and were so relevant, and important, and successful, both in what they achieved dramatically and the way they drew in audiences, we will not go back.

There is a Native American saying, “It takes a thousand voices to tell a single story.” And Walter Cronkite told us, “In seeking truth, you have to get both sides of the story.”

It’s time to hear both sides, to hear all voices, to build a culture where stories are told by both men and women. That is the way the planet is going to survive, and it’s the way we are going to survive.
Thank you very much.

When did art get so dull?

Barack Obama's inauguration was as joyous as it was serious. So why, save for Aretha Franklin, was the culture on show so boring?

OK, like everyone else in America - and many people around the world - yesterday I watched the inauguration of Barack Obama on CNN. These were my favourite parts:

1. Our new president, who is incredible

2. Two million people on the mall, also incredible

3. Supreme Court Justice John Roberts messing up the oath of office, also incredible, but in a different way

4. Michele Obama's avocado-coloured gloves, fantastic

5. Dick Cheney in a wheel chair

6. Aretha Franklin

7. Aretha Franklin's hat

There is another list one could dream up of one's least favorite parts. Because this is a time of celebration I'm not going to even bother writing down what mine would be. We're done with the last administration and we should all be looking to the future, is all I'm going to say about that. However, I have to admit two things that would be on my least-favourite list, if I were to make one, would be the string quartet and the poem.

I didn't like the art. The song the string quartet played was beautiful, and there is no question that Yo-Yo Ma looked great slashing away at his cello up there in the wind. But the piece was slow and portentous. And then the poem! Elizabeth Alexander seemed nice, but delivering every word in a monotone was a mistake. CNN had lots of shots of people wandering away down the mall; they were leaving the inauguration of the first African American president early, during the poem. That's how bored they were.

So aside from Aretha and that fantastic hat, the art at the inauguration was high-minded and intellectual and serious-minded and kind of dull. The religious guys, on the other hand, were electric and lively. I thought Rick Warren, whose politics often offend me, was humble and eloquent and I also loved Joseph Lowery, who ended the proceedings with those resounding "Amens". Both spoke with passion and appealed to our hearts to celebrate this moment when America has embraced true and truly needed life-affirming change.

Since we're changing everything else, maybe we could just change art. I'm not talking about anything radical, just changing it back to like it was before, when it was also entertaining. Remember Jane Austen, Molière, Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles? Remember people gathering in the streets to grab the next installment of the latest Dickens novel? Remember groundlings? Remember the impressionists and the pre-Raphaelites, how pretty and moving and strange those paintings were? Remember narrative? Remember how it all kind of fit together?

When did appealing to hearts and minds at, you know, the same time, turn into such a dumb idea?

Anyway, being an artist at Obama's inauguration is the quintessential tough act, and I do salute those musicians and writers. But I would like to take this moment to publicly endorse Art. Art is great. At its best it engages the intellect and challenges the spirit; it connects us across history and reminds us of our humanity. I think we should all just remember that, as long as we're taking the time these days to think about fixing the planet.

And at the next inauguration maybe Steve Colbert could write the poem.

Pasadena Playhouse Special Offer: 2-for-1 Tickets to MAURITIUS!

Pasadena Playhouse is please to offer 2-for-1 tickets to the exciting West Coast Premiere of Mauritius by Pulitzer Prize Finalist Theresa Rebeck at Pasadena Playhouse (starts March 2009).

Filled with scams and double-crosses, Mauritius tells the story of two half-sisters vying for the rights to a recently inherited (and dazzlingly valuable) stamp collection. Throughout their farcical escapades, the pair come face-to-face with a couple of machine-gun mouthed con artists who ensnare them in their own brand of beguiling trickery.

Tickets for Mauritius go on sale to the general public today! As a special benefit, you can get 2-for-1 tickets to select performances with code “MA21”. To receive this great discount, you must purchase your tickets before December 22.

Call (626) 356-7529 for your tickets today! Offer not available online, but please visit our website at www.PasadenaPlayhouse.org

Broadway's Glass Ceiling

The majority of plays on the Great White Way this year are about men and written by men. Want to hear some scary statistics?

Boys, boys, boys! This year on Broadway it is a celebration of boys! Step aside, girls - it's time for the boys!

The New York Times tells us this week that this is the Year of the Man. This year is nothing like last year, when there was actually one new play, written by a woman (me), on Broadway. At the tail end of the season a revival of Top Girls by Caryl Churchill snuck into the lineup too. And then lots of awards went to Tracy Letts - who is a man, but whose name sounds like it could be a woman's name. So that's TWO women and one guy whose name sounds like a woman's. It was exhausting dealing with all that estrogen. Time to give the men a chance.

Could we get real? Every year is the Year of the Man, with a couple of women who manage to crawl their way into the lineup. In the 2008/2009 season, as it has been announced, the number of plays written by women on New York stages will amount to 12.6% of the total. Want to know the same figure for the 1908/1909 season? Let's see, it was ... 12.8%!

One might put this trend down to something like, hmm, discrimination. But actually what we're told is that the plays that are produced are just the plays that were worth doing, and that playwriting is in fact a Y-chromosome gene. So women should just back off, because putting plays written by women into production because maybe audiences might like a really well-written play that was well-written by a woman would be pandering to ideas of political correctness. And art doesn't do that.

What art does is celebrate the lives and struggles of men.

It also apparently celebrates big nasty women who wreck their children's lives. Last season, Mama Rose once again held the stage; the mother in August: Osage County is a real monster too. So two terrifying women in plays written by men were up to their old tricks. This, we are told, is really what made last season a woman's year. That and the fact that the audience is at least 60% female. Which, by the way, we wouldn't want to pander to either. Letting women writers speak to an audience that is mostly women? It's a grotesque idea. We might as well sit around and knit sweaters. Forget it.

There's some feeling in rehearsal halls and writers' retreats and drunken dinner parties, that maybe the American theatre participates rather too enthusiastically in the supposed gender bias that the American media tosses about willy-nilly while discussing candidates for higher office. Mostly it is women playwrights who feel that way; male playwrights think the system is really, really fair and that women playwrights who raise these questions are whiners or dirty feminists. After all, everyone is discriminated against! It's show business! Nobody's happy! We're all narcissistic egomaniacs, you can't expect it to make sense! This is about the work. Which means, apparently, that any woman who cares enough to raise her voice about the fact that women's stories are not reaching the stages for which they are intended is a whiner, a dirty feminist and a lousy artist too - because a true artist wouldn't care.

Honestly I am not making one word of this up.

"Who owns the stories, owns the culture." For the life of me I can't remember who said that, but by God it is true.

(Reposted from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2008/sep/09/broadwaysglassceiling)

The Greatest 'It Girl' Moments of All Time

This is my top ten list of great It Girl moments through history:

1. Marilyn Monroe singing the most mind numbing version of Happy Birthday imaginable, to the president of the United Sates, in front of the entire country.
2. Paulette Bonaparte (Napoleon's little sister) posing naked for Canova. When shocked socialites asked her if she was uncomfortable doing it, she apparently replied, "Not at all, his studio is heated."
3. Princess Di dancing with John Travolta at the White House.
4. Anne Boleyn getting Henry VIII to divorce Catherine of Aragon and marry her. She did end up getting her head chopped off for it BUT she also changed the course of history and gave birth to Elizabeth I, arguably the greatest ruler in British History.
5. Brooke Shields bending over in those blue jeans and saying nothing comes between her and her Calvins. Wowwee.
6. Joan of Arc leading the French into battle.
7. Marlene Dietrich doing anything in a tux.
8. Ava Gardner peeing in the lobby of some ridiculously fancy hotel. Yes she really did this! I read about it in her biography; I just can't remember the name of the hotel right now. She was never allowed back in the place, as you can imagine.
9. Cleopatra killing herself with an asp. (Okay it is possible that this is one that Shakespeare made up but it is good nonetheless.)
10. Audrey Hepburn's profile.

All right I am sure I have missed some great ones. I have somehow managed to leave off Clara Bow, the actress for whom the term was so famously coined. Madonna was an ongoing It Girl phenomenon for so long it's impossible to distill all that into one moment. It was apparently pretty sensational when Ingrid Bergman ran off with Roberto Rosselini but that's more like marital discord than an It Moment. I liked it a lot when Drew Barrymore stood on David Letterman's desk and flashed him, but I started thinking that I couldn't have so many contemporary It Girls and I had to get some historical figures in there. Jackie Kennedy Onassis most certainly belongs on the list but her It Moments were so tragic you could hardly put them on a list of favorites. Also it is strange and odd to me that Julia Roberts and Katherine Hepburn and Greta Garbo didn't make the list but the more I thought about it the more I thought well just being a great actress doesn't make you an It Girl. Something else makes you an It Girl. Not that they didn't have It, just that It didn't make them It Girls. It made them Stars, which is different than being an It Girl, although many It Girls are also Stars (see Marilyn Monroe, above.)

Okay I'm spending a lot of time thinking about It Girls right now because as I think I've mentioned on this post last week, I wrote a novel about some normal girls who become It Girls. (It's called Three Girls and Their Brother and it's coming out on April 7 and I hope that you, dear reader, will buy it.) But the point is, because I wrote this novel everyone thinks that I actually know something about It Girls and so I'm getting a lot of requests, this month, to write about It Girls. I actually don't know much about anything except what's inside my own hapless brain. But I have some smart academically minded friends, one of whom pointed me fortuitously toward someone who does know a lot about It Girls: Joseph Roach, the author of the book It. I also have a standing one-click account on Amazon.com. After a few mishaps (everytime I clicked on "IT" a Stephen King novel showed up) I managed to get my hands on a copy of It.

Mr. Roach has a lot of interesting things to say about It Girls. He elegantly defines It as "secular magic," and observes that the person who has It seems to hold a "precarious balance... between polarities like egoless self-confidence or unbiddable magnetism." He quotes Eleanor Glyn, who blathered on about It incessantly in 1927, as being the kind of things cats are good at rather than dogs because dogs try to hard. "An air of perceived indifference counts heavily in the production of this special allure, which must appear to be exercised effortlessly or not at all," Mr. Roach explains.

He also starts his introduction with the greatest quote about It that I have ever heard:

"I belonged to the Public and to the world, not because I was talented or even beautiful but because I had never belonged to anything or anyone else." That came from Marilyn Monroe who as usual completely underestimated her own talent, her own beauty and her own intelligence, while she effortlessly zoomed in on something else that It seems to entail: a kind of nothingness, a floaty quality, a sense that the It Girl maybe belongs to Me even though I've never met her.

After thinking about this stuff way too much I finally became a little worried about the current crop of It Girls. Whenever I ask anyone who are the It Girls now, the same list gets recited back to me: Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, Nicole Ritchie, Lindsay Lohan and the Olsen twins. And when I started to think about It, through history, even recent history, and when I started reading Mr. Roach's excellent book about It? I thought you know, these girls aren't really It Girls at all. They're party girls who get in a lot of trouble and then get written about in slightly trashy magazines.

I would like to resurrect some sense of respect for the quality of It. As Marilyn so shrewdly observed, It has a lot to do with a kind of empty possibility upon which much can be projected. But endless possibility is not the same thing as nothing. And anyone who thinks that It Girls don't have to have talent should go back to the top of this post, and read my list of the greats. It Girls can be awesome. And they are.

It Girls

In October of 1999, The New Yorker magazine ran a picture of two pretty teenagers dressed in really snaky dresses. They sort of loosely held onto pillows in which they were not even vaguely interested; they looked at the camera with a sultry teenage confidence as if to say, ah, you've interrupted us in the middle of our girlish pillow fight but we all know this pillow fight thing is really sham, a wry set up cooked up by this photographer to give some sort of narrative to a picture which is actually merely being taken because we're young and pretty and rich. It is a sensational picture. The two girls are Paris and Nicky Hilton, and they were 18- and 16-years-old at the time.

They were also -- we are told by the column of copy accompanying the photo -- New York's new "It" Girls. It's a charming little piece about how their great-grandfather was Conrad Hilton, and how they would swan around New York and stay at the Waldorf and go to parties. The issue which presented this fabulous picture of these two at the time completely unknown teenage girls was titled The Next Generation. The premise being, that in the waning months of the 20th Century, The New Yorker would tell us which rising stars we should take note of, as they were going to be Big in the New Millennium.

Other folk who were featured in this issue were David Howell (an eight-year-old chess champion), Sergio Garcia (some golfer), Zadie Smith (babelicious young novelist), Haley Joel Osment (11-year-old movie star), Vincenzo Sarno (11-year-old soccer star) and McSweeney's, a literary quarterly begun by ultrahip lit guru David Eggers.

To date, of all those people-and-things-to-watch, the one we've heard the most from is Paris Hilton, hands down. Those New Yorker editors were definitely right about her. The question does remain, however: Why would The New Yorker run a picture of Paris Hilton in the first place? Isn't The New Yorker supposed to be about culture and art and literature? Why on earth is The New Yorker publishing puff pieces about pretty girls who go to parties?

So, naturally I started obsessing about that picture and I got it in my head to write a novel about It Girls, and what it would be like if cultural lightning hit a relatively normal family and relatively normal girls got abducted, more or less, by the media machine, and transformed into It Girls. So then I started reading alllll the magazines that obsess about those girls. I also looked at the pictures. Mostly I conducted my research at the gym, where a lot of people tended to leave these magazines lying around. So I would go through the leftover magazine rack, and find old copies of OK and Celebrity Life and Style and Us, and try to get a sense of what the appeal was.

My friend Julie calls these magazines "crack," and she knows of what she speaks. Within no time, I had opinions about a lot of things I know nothing about. I could hold long discussions with near strangers about who I liked better, Angelina or Jen. I developed a preference for issues that covered the awards shows because it was so much fun to look at everyone wearing those long pretty dresses. I found some It Girls boring (Britney, sorry, couldn't care less) and some fascinating (Lindsay Lohan, seems like a nightmare but I used to like her red hair). Before I started conducting my "research" I spent my time at the gym listening to books on tape, or sometimes I even listened to lectures on tape, say, about the Fall of the Roman Empire. But bettering my mind was no longer on the agenda: All I wanted to know was who Cameron Diaz was dating.

My husband, meanwhile, had no interest in these magazines, nor did my son, a healthy 13-year-old boy who thinks that Jessica Alba is a really good actress, especially when she's wearing her superhero spandex. While both of them seem to be red-blooded heterosexuals (my son once Googled "Lindsay Lohan naked" on my computer) they could not be less interested in the It Girl narrative of glamour and destruction. When I bring these magazines home, they couldn't care less. They don't look at the pictures of pretty girls in fabulous clothing; they don't read about Brad and Angelina; they don't even check out Rihanna on the red carpet.

Not so long ago my feminist education taught me to ask the question "Is the Gaze Male?" The answer, apparently, is yes, which is why so many movies and television shows are about men, and not women. Our distorted media culture sees men as subjects and women as objects; Woody Allen gets older and older and still dates 20-year-old babes; movies about women are called "chick flicks" and men make fun of them. Because women's stories are about women and men don't want to understand women; they want to look at women, as long as they're young and beautiful. Because the gaze is male.

But if the gaze is male, then why don't guys want to look at endless pictures of gorgeous It Girls, doing crazy things? Trust me, Britney Spears isn't dressing like a slut because she's trying to get the attention of a bunch of ladies at the gym. But it's the ladies at the gym who are buying. Why? Because Us magazine, and Ok, and Star, are chick flicks. It Girls, apparently, are the objects of male desire who have found themselves in a chick flick.

So we've created a culture that celebrates girls as sex objects, turned that into a cultural ideal, and moved it to the center of a bunch of addictive narratives for women. It's not a brilliant equation, frankly; it's like turning athletes into meth heads and sending them out to play the Superbowl. Whatever. In any case, I'm done with it. All these gorgeous young girls getting drunk and partying and sleeping around and ending up in rehab, or jail, or the morgue? Come on; there's a better equation out there; there has to be. Maybe somebody should buy Lindsay some books on tape. I recommend Our Mutual Friend.

Movie Stars in Brooklyn

Okay, movie stars live on my block. I can't tell you who, but they are pretty big movie stars. They show up in magazines all the time and the wife especially seems to be considered Hollywood royalty.

Only here's the thing: I don't live in Hollywood, I live in Brooklyn.

There are other movie stars who live in Brooklyn. It happens that movie stars do in fact occasionally move to Brooklyn. When it happened to our block when the movie stars bought Doris's house everybody was abuzz. Mostly they were abuzz because it got reported in the Daily News, and people were actually really excited to hear how much money Doris got for her brownstone, which frankly needed a lot of work. My neighbor Ray, who has lived on our block for forty years, was particularly tickled that the Daily News described our street as "upper class." All of this seemed particularly hilarious to him since when he moved in houses on our block were going for maybe eleven thousand dollars and the neighborhood was far from "upper class."

Anyway the movie stars bought the house, and then they did a lot of work on it (which as I said it sorely needed) and then they moved in. And they seem like nice enough people, not like they're trying to be anybody's best friend or anything, but not all snotty and weird, either. When we had our block stoop sale, they came out and sat on the stoop with their baby, and sold junk that was pretty much like everyone else's junk. And while of course we all know that they're movie stars, and they know we know, there's a general sort of "let's pretend they're normal" thing that happens, which makes everyone feel better.

So today reporters showed up on our block. They were wandering up and down the street, asking people, "Do you know the movie stars?" My husband reported this to me before I saw them myself; he had heard it from Gary, who lives further up the block. "If I did, I wouldn't tell you," Gary told the reporters. Then as he headed down the street, he passed my husband and warned him, they're out here looking to get quotes about our movie stars. I passed them a little while later, on the way to the gym, and then I passed them again, on the way back home from the gym. Apparently, they spent a good portion of the afternoon focusing telephoto lenses on the front of the house of the movie stars, and trying to get photographs of people inside, and passing by.

The reason there were creepy people on our block asking about our neighbors was, of course, immediately apparent to all of us: Heath Ledger's terrible and unexpected death. There is some reason to assume that our movie stars knew Mr. Ledger; no one denies it. But having people stand on your street, clearly trying to spy on your neighbors doesn't happen in Brooklyn. And it is, frankly, unnerving.

Nobody on our block knew Heath Ledger except, of course, our movie stars. But everyone on our block was upset by his death. And we were also upset that there were total strangers hovering around trying to make a buck off of the grief of our neighbors. Maybe it's hard to imagine, but trust me: When movie stars move to Brooklyn, it's because they don't necessarily want to be in magazines all the time. My block felt violated, not only on behalf of our movie stars, but on it's own behalf. We don't expect to be their friends. But we want our movie stars to feel safe. And when the press is out there going after whatever it is they think they have a right to go after, even at a time like this, on a sleepy little block in Brooklyn? We all felt it. None of us are safe.

Oh well. I think America is a pretty bizarre place to live. But I like my block.