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I remember...I was wearing leather pants”: Archiving the Repertoire of Feminist Cabaret in Canada T. L. Cowan Emira and I spent last night—about five hours of it, starting at 7:30 and ending well past midnight—at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre soaking in the brilliance of twenty or so freaking amazing artists at the Choice Words Cabaret. This year’s Rock For Choice benefit was expanded to include this night of mostly words, some music and a bit of dancing, and Lordisa, was it powerful. So powerful I’m sure I’m going to be full of the sounds for days. So powerful I wanted to kiss every performer. Powerful enough I need to tell you about every single woman who took part. I’ll try to be brief...but then, I can’t be too quick or you’ll lose out on the flavour of sitting still for five freaking hours with your knees and ass aching but not wanting to get up ‘cause you can’t bear to miss any of it. —“choice words: You know what we did last night” Lauren Bacon, Soapbox Girls, Jan. 12, 2001 tara said she would interview me about it. maybe she can jog my memory. was ivan coyote there? i am a fun guy to ask for memories as my ADD and 80s drug damage renders me pretty useless. but sometimes you can shake something loose. —Lynn Breedlove, Message to the author, Aug. 21, 2009 “ 6 5 6 6 t. L . c o W a n Yes, I do recall the cabaret, now that you have mentioned it. What I do recall has to do with feelings and emotions—that we were a part of something powerful and meaningful. My group members and I were there for each other, and we wanted to do our best. We must have read some solo pieces, and one or two shared ones. I remember one of the members from another group giving us a thumbs up and also telling us where the backstage was. It was quite a flow or a wave, so it was not specifics I focused on but it felt like the audience and our group connected. I/we were simply honoured to be invited to share. Seema, Helen and I were part of a group from Monsoon: Asian Lesbians and Bisexual Women of Vancouver, who were interested in getting together to share our voices and our creative work. —Sook C. Kong, Message to the author, Aug. 29, 2009 I have told this story before. When I was twenty-six, I organized a spoken word cabaret called Choice Words for the Rock for Choice Festival in Vancouver .1 The show was at the Cultch (the Vancouver East Cultural Centre). It was 2001. The San Francisco-based all-girl spoken-word circus, Sister Spit, was coming to Vancouver for the show. I was nervous. The rehearsals early in the afternoon were chaotic. There were two pianos that had to be interchanged in the middle of the show. It became clear that none of the performers were going to stick to the fifteen-minute time limit I had allocated. It also became clear that I had invited too many performers, and that the show was going to go on forever. The festival organizers, Meegan Maulstaid and Denise Sheppard, were hanging around, bringing in food for the performers, and checking things out. I was sure they were going to take over the show, since it was clear that I had seriously botched the job. I was an emerging performer on the scene, one with a habit of saying yes when people asked me to do things like organize shows. For my own part in the show, I was planning to do a new performance poem—a piece about my childhood experiences attending pro-life/anti-choice rallies with my very religious parents—accompanied by a friend who was playing bass in public for the first time. I was also hosting the show, something I was not yet comfortable doing. The only thing that wasn’t going wrong in that moment was that I was wearing a new pair of motorcycle boots. The shiny success of the boots was mitigated substantially by the fact that, earlier that week, inspired (I imagine) by the punk aesthetic of a number of the other performers in the show, I’d given myself a dye job in stop sign red and a helmet-style haircut. It...

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