Thursday, June 22, 2006 (SF Chronicle)

Sherry Glaser has a lot to say about what's decent and what's indecent.
And Emily Post she is not. A free-spirited activist, playwright and
performer, Glaser is on a mission to use her activism and her art -- and
even her naked torso if need be -- to draw attention onstage and off to
how our society has lost its way on the road to equality, dignity and true
decency.
"Two of my friends were threatened with arrest for indecent exposure after
taking off their shirts and dancing topless during Mendocino's Fourth of
July parade two years ago," Glaser says. "Their bare breasts were called
'indecent', so I thought, let's use this incident and our equal protection
under the 14th Amendment to show what real freedom and decency look like."
Under the name Breasts Not Bombs, Glaser and fellow North Coast activists
staged their first topless demonstration later that year, proclaiming in
unsubtle terms that the war in Iraq is indecent, not their nakedness. "Our
breasts say more than our words," says Glaser, a writer who knows that
words alone can be easily disregarded, but bodies are harder to ignore.
Glaser has since taken the Breasts Not Bombs message to Sacramento,
Oregon, Washington, D.C., ("We were right at the front gate to the White
House in all our glory") and a San Francisco demonstration in Union Square
last summer. She plans to demonstrate again this Friday at the military
recruiting center in Oakland and again next Friday in front of Bechtel's
headquarters in downtown San Francisco. "Anybody can do it. You just take
off your shirt and make a sign about whatever indecency is pissing you
off. We hold signs saying, 'War is indecent.' 'Torture is indecent.'
'Lying to the American people is indecent.' Decency is compassion,
humanity, truth, purity -- everything Ma represents."
Ma? "The great feminine spirit, the Jewish mother of us all," says Glaser
outside a Potrero Hill coffeehouse before rushing over to the Marsh to
rehearse her one-woman show "Oh My Goddess," which opens tonight. "This
play is about the awakening of the feminine, the search for a connection
with the female creator we have all lost touch with."
When Glaser says she channeled the voice of Ma, the play's titular earth
mother deity ("God's better half"), while writing the script, she's not
just an author describing the process of deferring to her characters'
voices. Glaser means 'channeling' in the by-the-New-Age-book,
communing-with-spirits sense of the word. "I sit with my fingers on the
keyboard and in a kind of trance I hear Ma's voice in my head," Glaser
says. "She gives me material, tells me what to write, makes me laugh."
Glaser, 45, became an activist after establishing herself as a theater
artist and now sees her public and private lives as "a kind of theatrical
political event." In the early '80s, she was a member of San Diego's
all-women improv troupe the Hot Flashes. With the urging of her late
husband, Greg Howells, she developed scenes from her own family history
into what would become her breakthrough success, "Family Secrets." The
one-woman, five-character play earned Glaser a Drama Desk Award for
outstanding one-person show in 1994 and remains the longest-running
one-woman show in off-Broadway history. (Glaser now lives with her
partner, Sheba, and says, "I was a lesbian before meeting Greg, and again
afterward, but he was a great, 10-year-long hetero phase.")
Glaser has been developing and periodically performing various versions of
"Oh My Goddess" since 1995, including a local run in 2003 at Venue 9.
Glaser says the show is now substantially leaner, with fewer effects and
fewer costumes, and she is hopeful she has finally struck the right
balance between humor and sobriety.
In addition to portraying Ma and the show's other voices (a hot line
psychic, an ailing immigrant janitor), Glaser plays Miguel de Cervantes --
not the 17th century Spanish author of "Don Quixote," but a hapless,
yearning Mexican waiter in San Diego. Ma chooses him to be her humble
servant and messenger and demonstrate to the world how badly creation has
fared since she lay down for a 5,000-year nap and left "your father" in
charge of the children. Ma's witty laments against a patriarchal deity are
centuries-old pagan complaints, retold with a combination of contemporary
feminist irony and good old Borscht Belt humor. "He started acting like
he's the only (God) in the universe ... and let you play with guns and
bombs and missiles. Not in my house! ... Would you do me a favor and stop
killing each other ... and maybe you could stop shopping, just for one
minute."
"I like using a man in the show to receive Ma's message," Glaser says, "so
people don't think, 'Oh great, another feminist one-woman show about the
goddess, she's going to talk about her period.' If I put in a male
character, it's not so easily dismissed."
Glaser brims with lists of tips and stunts aimed at shaking people out of
complacency. Wherever she goes, she hands out copies of her "10 Things You
Can Do to Stop the War" list and the Bill of Rights. "I think originally
the founding mothers, not fathers, meant the Second Amendment to protect
our right to bare breasts, not bear arms," she says. "They knew that if we
could bare our breasts that the republic would be safe."
Glaser laughs about her imagined alter-ego, Super-Activist Mother. "She
drops the kids off at school and then rushes off to demonstrate somewhere,
kind of what my life has become. I'd love to do a TV cartoon about her:
'Today, Super-Activist Mother takes on the GMOs ...' "
Glaser is heartened by the public's fascination with feminist theology and
the possibility of a non-celibate Jesus. "The message in 'The Da Vinci
Code' that Mary had Jesus' baby and (their descendant) is here on earth is
huge.
"I'm not saying our creation story shouldn't have a father, or he should
be ignored. But we are way out of whack on earth, so if we restore the
mother and serve, honor, protect, pleasure her, everything will be all
right. I do believe that."