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"The revolution will not take place between my thighs," say Rasheeda, a character in writer/performer Sarah Jones' one-woman show Surface Transit. Blowing off catcalls as she waits for the bus, Rasheeda's revolution is happening between her ears-just as Jones' own revolution happened years ago. "I remember hanging out at parties on the hip hop scene, and you would get groped. I saw one rapper starting to sexually assault a woman at a club, and when I tried to get a bartender to help stop it, people thought I was crazy. But the real revelation came when I was standing on the dance floor, and the song 'Bitches Ain't Shit but Hoes and Tricks' came on. I thought, something is wrong here. So I dropped out of the scene and started doing more poetry." Her Impassioned verse led her to win the prestigious Grand Slam at New York's Nuyorican Poets Cafe, and to the development of Surface Transit, a tour de force that has earned her comparisons to Anna Deveare Smith and Whoopi Goldberg. When the international women's right group Equality Now saw her work, they invited her to develop a show based on the experiences of women around the world. Women can't Wait!, like Surface Transit, is a multi-character piece that illuminates and humanizes issues of race, class, nationality-and especially gender. It's an unabashedly feminist work, and Jones, while she's struggled with the term and its associations, is an unabashed feminist. "People want to distance themselves from feminism," she notes. "They think it's bad for your image, that people will think you're a lesbian. But it all depends on the context in which you learn the word, and what you think it means. I remember wondering, 'Can I love my boyfriend and still be a feminist?' These are the things that cross your mind." Ultimately, though, she decided: "Feminism feels great. It is great. It is loving being a woman, being sure that being a woman is an amazing thing." Now that she's been on the cover of Ms., and been featured in Spike Lee's film Bamboozled ("All my scenes are on the cutting room floor," she laughs. "Now all you see is my butt making it's way out the door.") She's taking Surface Transit to LA, performing in The Vagina Monologues, and see script after script with roles for black girls that look suspiciously the same. "High class call girl. Espionage call girl. Low down dirty mentally ill call girl. It's disappointing," she says, then brightens. "But I'm optimistic. It's like I'm going in there trying to change the whole world. I'm confident though, because others have done that." Areola and Girlbomb
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