That Takes Ovaries! Read Online Free PDF Page A

strange because there were lots of empty seats everywhere, but he chose to sit right next to me. Soon after, I felt something crawling around by my behind. It was his hand.
    I was confused, and my mind went kind of numb, like it usually did on the subway. Then, an unfamiliar and wild surge of energy built up inside of me and flew out. I grabbed his hand, lifted it way up in the air and screamed at him so loud everyone in the theater could hear: “Does this hand belong to you?”
    He got up and walked away.
    Iris laughed, shook my hand, and said some 1950s equivalent of “You go, girl!”
    Twenty years later, in the early 1970s, I was the director of a small theater on the East Coast. During intermission, I’d stand around in the lobby because I enjoyed listening to people’s conversations about the play in progress. One night, a distraught young woman came over to me.
    “Somebody took my wallet out of my coat!” She pointed to a man in a long tan overcoat at the other end of the lobby and said,
“That
man was sitting behind me.”
    Dressed in elegant garb, the guy looked as if he didn’t belong in the predominantly hippie crowd my theater drew, so without hesitating, I marched over to him.
    “Did you take something from the woman sitting in front of you?” I asked.
    Only for an instant did I consider I might be endangering myself by confronting him. At that exact moment I imagined myself Wonder Woman, my childhood heroine. That promptly squashed any rising fears.
    “No,” the well-mannered man answered, raising his eyebrows as if taken aback.
    I didn’t buy it.
    I pulled his unbuttoned overcoat open wide enough to reach in, fished my hand into the inside pocket, and grabbed the purse it easily landed on. I pulled the red leather pouch out, held it high, and called across the crowded theater lobby to the young woman, “Is this your wallet?”
    I was shocked by my own actions, but that soon turned to feelings of triumph, because the surprised woman at the far end of the lobby heard me and nodded yes.
    Thinking myself generous, I turned to the man, pointed to the exit, and said, “You can leave now.” We didn’t believe in calling the police in those days.
    bobbi ausubel, a beautifully aging crone playwright and drama teacher, actively misses hippies, because, in truth, nowadays there are hardly any left.

Amen for Sneaky Women

cecelia wambach
    The Pope was coming!
    Everyone was saying how wonderful this was because he had never come to the United States before and we all knew him to be special—he was a social change activist in Poland, after all. It was 1983. I was teaching at a Catholic women’s college in New York City, and like some kid might do with a rock star, I took off three days from work to follow the Pope around as he appeared at various locations.
    For the appearance at Yankee Stadium, a colleague gave me two free tickets. I gave one to my friend Bea. We were so excited. But when we arrived, we weren’t happy at all; our seats were very, very far back. We were able to see, but not much. Home plate looked like a speck. The stage looked like a dollhouse. Bea and I took off, determined to get closer.
    At each new level down we simply pointed south and told the ushers we had seats “down there,” and in each case they let us through without actually looking at our tickets. Before this I had had no idea how easy lying could be!
    As we proceeded down, we suddenly made it to a layer of cops. It was the honor guard for the Pope, made up of New York’s finest, and they all seemed to be Irish Catholic men. Now, you have to imagine the scene here. There were thousands of policemen in the stadium. I mean, the rest of New York was being totally ignored. These blue-uniformed officers paraded aroundthe inside perimeter of the whole stadium, three deep. Just as we made it down to this cop level, the police right in front of us started to line up and march forward. Bea and I joined their line and marched