AmySimon

Amy Simon is a mother, actress, playwright, improviser, published writer, producer, and self-proclaimed Cultural Herstorian. She has been acting in and producing theater for most of her adult life. Her first play Cheerios In My Underwear (And Other True Tales Of Motherhood) holds the record as the longest running solo show in Los Angeles. SHE’S HISTORY! plays in theaters, schools, libraries, military bases, museums, for conferences, women’s groups, fundraisers, political and social justice organizations and retirement communities. SHE”S HISTORY! is fiscally sponsored by the Women’s Museum of California (http://www.womensmuseumca.org/). Always interested in hearing and presenting what women have to say, Amy directed, co-produced and performed in Los Angeles with GAL-O-RAMA and OVARYACTION at The Improv, The Laugh Factory and The Upfront Comedy Theatre. As the creative force and co-producer behind HEROINE ADDICTS, the four-year hit all-girl variety show, Amy worked with and was inspired by many of the most talented female writer/performers in Los Angeles (including Jane Lynch) at Hollywood’s bang Studio. She created and produced Motherhood Unplugged and Moms Who Write, a mom written and performed story and music salon and stage show (to benefit Beyond Shelter) with LA Parent Magazine and Mamapalooza (Moms In The Arts). It inaugurated and is featured on Los Angeles’s KPFK Radio’s Pacifica Performance Showcase. Working as a consultant on the 2008 launch of the Broad Stage Theater in Santa Monica, Amy performed a variety of duties, including stage-managing the thirteen member cast of American Voices: Spirit of the Revolution, Stephanie Glass Solomon’s original play based on The Federalist Papers, directed by and starring Dustin Hoffman, a truly wonderful man, whom she assisted. As the cast understudy she actually got to play Abigail Adams going in for Annette Bening in dress rehearsal. A frequent guest on local and national radio, Amy was a guest commentator for American Woman In Fact And Fiction, a three part series that aired on Pacifica Radio Archives FromTheVault.org series. She is also a regular guest on the Nicole Sandler Show Radioornot.com. Amy plays California Pioneer Maude Younger in California Women Win The Vote, the documentary/film produced by Wild West Women, Inc. (www.wildwestwomen.org). Her work in the classroom, as an educational specialist teaching improvisation and theater games inspired her to create a curriculum related interactive presentation of SHE’S HISTORY! for Middle School. As a “Herstorical” humorist, Amy writes, blogs, performs and entertains on the radio, online, and onstage furthering her mission to turn the world on to all the fabulous females no one knows anything about. She is a single mother of two glorious and "challenging" teenage daughters who can tell you all about the first woman to run for President.

Women’s History Month 2010

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Mar 052010
 

By Amy Simon

It’s Women’s History Month 2010! Yay!  Another month to call attention to the gals.

March 2010.   Hmm.  Let’s see.  How are we gals doing?  Well, we have Sarah Palin out there doing stand up and shoppin’ for a reality show. She is just breakin’ all the rules.  Gosh, I remember when she first came on the scene.  I was intrigued, curious and hopeful, as I always am about a new woman on the scene.  Then she got everyone all charged up with her (speechwriter’s) lipstick jokes and I became (and remain) terrified that she’ll end up on a poster next to Eleanor Roosevelt.  God Forbid.

We’ve got Diane Sawyer, Katie Couric and Candy Crowley anchoring big news shows.  Good.  Sonia got in, Hillary’s keepin’ the  peace and Obama’s got lotsa gals doing big jobs.

And Maria Shriver’s October Women’s Conference was just da bomb, with everyone from Eve Ensler to Richard Branson addressing all the challenges we women face, especially in light of the big news that for the first time more than fifty percent of American workers  – PAID American workers that is – are female.

But.  The kids still know a lot more about Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan than they do about Abigail Adams and Lucretia Mott.

MY daughter is turning thirteen.  Becoming a woman and all.  We’re Jewish and having the big B.M. (bat-mitzvah – bar for a boy). It’s a beautiful important right of passage.  She has been studying and preparing for years!   I am so proud of her.  And I can’t help but notice how she stuck it out  – when she was tired or frustrated or just not in the mood – but she didn’t quit.  Did ya hear that Sarah Palin?  She didn’t quit.  Maybe someday she’ll grow up and be the president.  She is learning now about how the right choice is the hard choice and how when you make a commitment – be it to do your chores or learn your Torah portion, you keep it.  I wanted to quit several times.  I wanted to quit reminding her of her responsibilities and I wanted to quit schlepping her every Sunday morning since she was four years old and then Tuesday afternoons and then Tuesday AND Thursday for tutoring.  But like a lot of good woman (and jews) I suffered through it – though never silently.  That’s just not my style.

Anyhoo, I like being a role model for my girls.  I’m a divorced working mother.  I don’t know.  Maybe if some big book agent came at me waving a big fat check I could be persuaded to quit my job and go off and write about all the neat and not so neat stuff that happened to me in the last year.  Of course, my children would probably think it’s OK to quit too, ‘cause ya know it’s not what ya say it’s what you do right?  I have a sixteen-year-old daughter as well who really has her nose to the grindstone taking all those A.P. (Advanced Placement) courses for college.  I admire her as much as I admire her sister.  Ya see, high school has been really hard on her.  It’s really hard anyway but then all this icky stuff happened with her dad and he split and she kinda dropped the academic ball a bit and she had to grow up a little faster than she should have.

I look at my daughters and think about how Victoria Woodhull (the first woman to run for President in 1872) was just fifteen years old when she tried to escape a horrible slave driving religiously fanatic abusive father and mother by marrying, only to learn she married an abusive philandering drunk.  She learned that when she had her first baby at sixteen.  Sixteen.  But she didn’t quit or run off.  Nope.  She hung in there.  Being a women’s history freak has given me the most wonderful appreciation of my daughters.  As my sixteen year old prepares for college I think about all the gals who couldn’t go to college.  Their parents wouldn’t let them.  The school wouldn’t admit them.  Society wouldn’t allow them.  So they fought.  Hell, Lucy Stone saved for nine years until she had enough to go to Oberlin – the ONLY College open to the gals ‘cause when she asked her dad he said, “what is the girl crazy”?  She was thirty years old when she finally got in. She hung in there and became the first gal to debate in public and she was arrested for not paying her taxes (she said “well if I can’t vote I won’t pay taxes!”) and of course founded the Woman’s Journal and kept her name when she was married – oh I could go on an on.  SHE – like so many of the gals I just mentioned was a real maverick. And Elizabeth Blackwell – America’s first female doctor – well she only got in to Geneva College on a prank. The all-male student body voted yes thinking it was a joke.  And Belva Lockwood – the second women to run for President and the first woman to practice in front of the Supreme Court – well she went though hell every time she tried to get an education.  She fought to get admitted to College, then to Law School, then to get her degree issued after she earned it (they didn’t wanna give it to her!) then to practice in front of the Supreme Court.  She had to fight for every single solitary thing she got.  But she didn’t quit.  Nope.  She stuck it out. “Stick–to– it-iveness” is what they called it when I was growing up.  Perseverance.  Look it up Sarah.

Now I have issues with organized religion with its history of sexism (see Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s The Woman’s Bible), but a big fat tenet of the Bat and Bar Mitzvah ceremony is “whoever teaches their child teaches not only their child, but also their child’s child and so on to the end of generations. They are motivated to make a difference, to pursue peace and justice, and have the tools to succeed.”  Yeah, this is right out of the “My Bar/Bat Mitzvah” Booklet given to us by our Temple. I LOVE my Temple.  It is very feminized if you will.  Our head Rabbi is a woman, the temple President is a woman, and there are loads of women runnin’ the place doing amazing things, role modeling and inspiring my girls. I love it!  Social justice, giving back, being part of the community, helping those in need  – this is what my children have been learning all these years at my Temple. The same things Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. and Victoria Woodhull and all the gals fought for and sacrificed for.  I love the kind of women my daughters have grown up around and been exposed to.  The kind of women who – for the most part – say what they mean and mean what they say. Who are hard working, terribly decent and highly principled with a social conscience. These are the kind of women my daughters have been taught and encouraged to be; by me, the school, the community and all those mavericks I keep talking about – the ones that never gave up or backed down.  Ever.

My daughter is about to become a woman.  She can do many things.  But for some reason she cannot tell a joke.  Not everyone can.

I’m glad Sarah Palin can.  I just wish she could handle being the butt of so many.  And, she should only be the kind of woman my daughters are turning into.

Fabulous Female Fact: Lucretia Mott

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Mar 032010
 
Lucretia Mott
Lucretia Mott: 1793-1880.

“I have no idea of submitting tamely to injustice inflicted either on me or on the slave. I will oppose it with all the moral powers with which I am endowed. I am no advocate of passivity.”

Lucretia Coffin Mott did a lot; of vindicating of women’s rights.  Born one year after Mary Wollstonecraft’s radical A Vindication Of The Rights Of Woman was published, this Major Mommy of the women’s movement inspired and guided generations of feminists from Elizabeth Cady Stanton, to Lilly Ledbetter.   Abolitionist, reformer, minister, organizer, wife of fifty years to a guy who sounded an awful lot like a real partner, and mother of six, Lucretia Mott was first and foremost a Quaker. She grew up on Nantucket Island, where the men went out to sea and the women did – well – everything.  Lucretia helped her mom, who was very busy running the business, the house, raising the family – your basic nineteenth century multi-tasking Quaker woman. The peace loving spiritually guided religiously persecuted group was founded on the principles of equality and justice and did she ever practice what she preached.  And she did actually preach. The Quakers or The Society of Friends as they were called were the only religious group to allow women preachers (see Anne Hutchinson).  She was an ordained Quaker Minister at the age of twenty-eight, becoming America’s most beloved, respected and well-known advocate of abolition and women’s rights. She talked the talk and walked the walk, like not using any slavery-produced products (cotton cloth, and cane sugar) and her home was also a stop on Harriet Tubman’s Underground Railroad.  She formed the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society after being told No Girls Allowed in The American Anti-Slavery Society.  Elizabeth Cady Stanton (the first real Architect of The Women’s Movement) first heard her preach in 1840 when they were both on the same ship to London where they were to represent America at the World Anti-Slavery Convention.  It was there that the two women, twenty years between them, bonded after being told – again – No Girls Allowed. This of course inspired America’s first Women’s Rights Convention eight years later (see Seneca Falls). Who knew that just saying no could be so motivating?  In 1866, Mott became President of the American Equal Rights Association and spent the rest of her life peacefully fighting for equality.

Fabulous Female Fact: Frances (Fanny) Kemble

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Mar 022010
 

3346928 FRANCES ANNE ‘FANNY’ KEMBLE (1809-1893). English actress. Stipple engraving, 1873, after a painting by Sir Thomas Lawrence.; (add.info.: FRANCES ANNE ‘FANNY’ KEMBLE (1809-1893). English actress. Stipple engraving, 1873, after a painting by Sir Thomas Lawrence.); Granger.

 

“To Be Or Not To  – HEY!  That Should NOT Be!!!!”

Breadwinner, Actress, Wife, Mother, Poet, Author, Playwright, Divorcee, Family Savior, Abolitionist, Bloomer-Wearing Trendsetter….

Beautiful, talented British Fanny Kemble of the famous English theatrical family, was keen on acting but when her father was facing bankruptcy, she took to the Covent Garden stage playing Shakespeare’s Juliet and saved the family from financial ruin.  A few years later, the family again fell on hard times and again she saved them when she toured America, where she thrilled the masses, became a famous beloved actress and met her future husband.   Pierce Butler was smitten.  A gentleman from a distinguished and wealthy Philadelphia family, his famous grandfather “Major Butler” was a Revolutionary War Veteran and an author of the Fugitive Slave Act.

They settled in Georgia and by the time their two daughters, Sarah and Frances were born, Mr. Butler was no longer so impressed with his wife’s artistry when instead of devoting all of her time to him, she spent some of her time writing, including a treatise on anti-slavery that HE FORBADE her to publish.  Guess he thought one author in the family was enough.  When he inherited an island full of slaves and The Butler Family went to stay (for four months) Fanny was appalled, aghast and against the inhumane treatment of the slaves. Her husband was not interested in her feelings or thoughts so like any great writer she wrote them down in her diary, which later was published.  In the meantime, she fervently protested to her husband, but “me thinks the lady doth protest too much” and the marriage ended.  Badly.  Mr. Butler sued her for her divorce on the grounds of abandonment.  Yes she abandoned a life married to slavery.  But, as was the case in those days she lost custody of her children.  Although she did gain more fame and respect and quite the honorable place in history as an abolitionist when her diary of life on an island with slaves, Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation, was published, turning British sentiment against slavery during the Civil War. She is also known as the first gal to wear the pantaloons, the Turkish costume that became known as the controversial Bloomer Costume. Fanny Kemble spent the rest of her life writing and performing, choosing to be or not to be.

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