I will live at home unbulled—
—beautifully dressed and wearing a saffron-coloured gown.
That’s from the oath Lysistrata gets her women friends to swear over a spilled jug of unwatered wine, to withhold sex from the men of Sparta and Athens until the insane war between the two city-states is ended and peace is declared. Which is not what I’d suggest, literally, in this day and age; no. We are most of us more enlightened these days as to one’s sex, one’s gender, and the roles they play in determining one’s destiny and fitness for combat, and anyway, it would open us up to charges of not supporting the troops, and we can’t have that, now, can we?
Instead, the ever–with-it James “The Goods” Capozzola points us to the Lysistrata Project, who are organizing readings of Aristophanes’s rollicking, ribald Lysistrata around the world tomorrow, Monday, 3 March 2003. (As well as a National Moratorium on 5 March.)
Portland area readings include:
- Bridgeport United Church of Christ, 7.00 pm;
- PSU (either Smith Memorial Amphitheater or Lincoln Hall Studio Theater), 1.00 pm;
- the First Congregational Church, 7.30 pm;
- and a reading at Lincoln High School (contact Erin Jones), the details of which are not as yet listed.
Attend a reading, here, or wherever it is you are if it isn’t here; read it yourself to your friends or your affinity group or your spouse or your dog (like our Rittenhouse Reviewer will); find snippets you like and quote them where you can and spread the word. —Live at home unbulled, because (Rabelaisian as it may be) that’s the key and the heart of it all, right there.
That we might all live at home, unbulled.
(Color of gown is, of course, optional.)
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