Day 11 of the Tour: 9-19

Linda Green, anthropology professor at the University of Arizona, hosted this salon fund raiser in her beautiful desert back yard with a ramada strung with colored lights for a stage and picnic tables covered in oil clothes. It was a hot Sunday night outdoors, and we could have used amplification (some loud planes overhead) but the conversation afterward was lively. We had very few written comments and no scribe that evening to record the live dialogue. There were about 25 people there.

Here is some of what was said:

"Glad you brought these voices forward. Really found the piece about the pow wow---the inability to speak---very significant! It really brought us back to the silenced voices of women! "Coming in Hot" clearly opens the space rather than claiming triumph. Thank you for that honesty."

I am paraphrasing the below from memory:

One audience member was struck by just how much of a sense of the individual, and independence, came through in all the pieces. A loneliness under harsh conditions rather than a connection to others? This is particularly American.

Another audience member stated how conflicted she felt about her response to the play: being proud of the strength and courage depicted by the women warriors and at the same time being aware of how deeply anti-war she is.

Someone else raised a question about the status of women in the Israeli army, guessing that they do not experience the same levels of harassment and abuse that women soldiers in the US military do. He also wondered what women vets face when they return, what kind of community do they form or can they look to be received back into? As a Native American, he noted that the Pow wow is a place for warriors to return to and find a home in.