only the cutest, coolest boy in the whole seventh grade!    

They come from women. Women who must have taught them the adage "To whom much is given, much is expected." Today, the women would have been proud. Last year, Alecia Whitaker and Ellen Hagan, '96 and '97 alumni, proposed a project to GSA's Toyota Alumni Performance Fund. They wanted to affect Kentucky girls with the strength of the written Word, just as they had been affected in the Creative Writing classrooms of GSA.		Ellen Hagan in Becoming Woman, a spoken word performance piece developed with support from the GSA's Toyota Alumni Performance Fund.

		So they wrote. They locked themselves in an artist's retreat house, and they wrote themselves into Womanhood. They realized, pens in hand, that woman was first Girl, so they gave her a voice. She had so much to say! She had been so scared, so excited, so funny, so mischievious, so hurt... She had been so silent for so long-- bound by categories like "cool" and "lady" and "proper." Ellen and Alecia freed her from those categories, but they couldn’t stop with their own loosed tongues. They'd found a liberation they were hellbent on sharing. "We just wanted to empower young girls in Kentucky who may not be exposed to art.” After giving a writing exercise that is published in their chapbook, Ellen explains their motivation, using the F-word that has been banned in most upright Kentucky homes-- Feminist. It is a word that evokes bald women with clubs and combat boots, stomping men and bashing boys. On the stage today, Ellen and Alecia did neither. Instead, these young women, dressed in black tank tops and blue jeans (sans boots), embody the true meaning of the word. They shared memories, shared sentences, and shared strength. They were sisters.
They are sisters to more than each other. They embrace any girl who has ever had a bad haircut, whose body has failed her, any girl who has had a tumultuos relationship with her mother, any girl who has been violated. They are sisters to anyone who has been girl, any girl who has tried to become woman. They are sisters to any man who has known a woman or a girl... Ellen and Alecia’s sisterhood is so powerful that grown men swallowed salty lumps in the dark theatre. They are powerful enough to change Kentucky-- to give every girl the courage to be. Could they have known this, locked away in the house, armed with little more than pen and paper and purpose?
Their very existence plants a new prayer in the land that nurtures Kentucky women. Give me a mouth and I will sing myself free. Give me legs and I will dance myself free. Give me a pen and I will write myself free. Finally, in the tradition of Lucretia, Elizabeth, Sojourner, Margaret, and Audre, I won't forget my sisters whose mouths/legs/pens are still bound.