THE AGE OF FABULOUS WOMEN
by Garrison "Garry" Minstone

March is fabulous women's month. But back when I was in high school girls hardly ever played sports. Swimming was about the only sport I remembered them being able to indulge in. So now I watch with awe and joy as those young Olympic women fly into the air on snowboards, turn somersaults on skis, or race down silvery ice on thighs as powerful as steel girders, or shoot and ski and race and pant and sweat and win and lose in front of the entire world. Yes, I keep thinking, we have finally entered the age of fabulous women. And I'll tell you that that doesn't hurt my feelings none!

It's not only in the Olympics that we are seeing this fabulousness of women emerging. The New York stage happens to be full of it -- fabulous women reveling in their own fabulous lives. Last year, for example, in New York I saw the prize-winning "The Syringa Tree," a fascinating one-woman show written and performed by Pamela Gien. Brought up on the Lower East Side, I was very familiar with all of New York City. Even so, the theater, a tiny jewel box located on the Upper East Side, was new to me. I had to call the Transit Authority to get bus directions.

The play is set in Johannesburg, South Africa. It begins in 1963, in the early days of apartheid, when the heroine, Elizabeth, is six years old. Gien, barefooted and slender in a full-skirted dress, is the high-spirited Elizabeth, taking a spellbound audience through her experiences as the daughter of a white doctor who treated blacks when it was dangerous to do so, through the struggle to end apartheid, through to her maturity. After the play, I was still so spellbound that I forgot all about the buses and had to walk 45 blocks back to the apartment where I was staying with my cousin.

I went back to New York again just a few months ago to see another fabulous woman, Elaine Stritch, in a one-woman show at the Papp Theater. Sold out months before, we couldn't get tickets at the box-office. However we were determined. My cousin and I sat in the theater lobby from 2 p.m. until 7:40 when two tickets finally became available. Grabbing a much-needed sandwich, we gobbled it down and entered the theater on a puffy cloud of expectation. In our orchestra seats we sat frozen, transfixed and transported by the witty, rueful and wry Stritch as she talked and sang about her experiences in the American theater. Her experiences included dating Marlon Brando and still keeping her virginity, and discussing her serious drinking problems and what that addiction cost her. She was in fine singing voice as she interspersed her monologues with incomparable Stephen Sondheim songs. She has since moved onto Broadway.

Another fabulous diva whose work I've loved for years, Bea Arthur, is on Broadway now doing her own one-woman show, so I'll be going back to New York soon. And the marvelous Anne Bancroft opens Sunday in Edward Albee's new play about the dramatic sculptor Louise Nevelson. Meanwhile, HBO this week gave us another fabulous woman, Eve Ensler. Her "The Vagina Monologues" has played all over the world, but now we can see at home an entire play built around a word we certainly didn't speak out loud when I was a young boy. The fiercely intelligent and entertaining Ensler has spent years interviewing and collecting stories from women all over the world. Her sensitive and character-driven monologues painted verbal pictures of their varied experiences. Taking us on a journey of being in love, giving birth, being raped, battling loneliness and coping with new adventures, her renditions were poignant. Her work has been turned into a worldwide movement to stop violence against women.

And speaking of fabulous women in show business, my 84-year-old mother called on Sunday to tell me how her latest play is going, down at her Florida condominium. This is her 26th musical, I believe, one she wrote and is now directing and choreographing. According to her, the clubhouse is filled with people painting sets, practicing dances, and building props. Between the performers, the backstage people and the audience, over 1,000 people get involved in these shows every year. My mother struggled all of her life to reconcile marriage and children -- the only real option she had when she was a girl -- with her love of musical theater.

In the rush of second-wave feminism, some women started magazines, others went back to school and started careers, and still others founded organizations that helped other women. Thanks to the radical, terrifying, heretical idea that women can do whatever they want, we got the precious Title IX, which mandated sports for women in schools. More than anything else, it has led to what we see now at the Olympics. We also got female corporate executives, female journalists covering the war in Afghanistan, women like Oprah and Martha Stewart who have built financial empires around their own interests and personalities, Rosie O'Donnell finally coming out, Hillary Clinton going out on her own, civil unions, and many other things, some good, some not.

Of course there have been steps backward, too, such as First Steppford Wife Laura Bush, and those tacky retro ice dancers in their expensively tattered clothes. The number of women leading Fortune 500 companies is still in the single digits, and women in other male-dominated fields are still having a hard time. The working world is unkind to people who want to parent. The military is trying, but it's not entirely reconciled to women in traditional male roles. You may have a long way to go, baby, but in my lifetime I've seen women become an accepted part of the greater American culture. It's great to see them achieving fabulousness on their own and being rewarded for it. There aren't as many firsts as there used to be, although two Tuesday nights ago, we watched the first black athlete ever to win gold at a winter Olympics -- a woman on a bobsled, no less.

As a male journalist, it all makes me very, very happy to know that strong, fabulous women are in my future.