People don’t seem to understand what it takes to reclaim your life after rape. I have a few thoughts on the subject. The first time I was raped was even longer ago than the attempt on Dr. Blasey Ford. I was seventeen and four guys jumped over the wall on Central Park South and held my date and made him watch while they raped me. The memories of that event crop up in my mind like flashes in different parts of my brain. It’s taken years of therapy for me to put the pieces together and a meeting with my date 25 years after the gang rape to confirm that it actually happened. It’s so hard to believe that such cruelty is possible. In my play “KICK” #Kicktheplay which deals with rape, Rockettes, and religion, my director, Lynne Taylor-Corbett and I couldn’t even use that episode because we could never get the audience back for the comedic parts, so we chose to balance the comedy and pathos as a way of getting our story across. I couldn’t write about that until my parents had passed away and my son was grown, knowing that that would’ve killed them. I finally am addressing that first rape in my new piece, a monologue which is also about rape, Rockettes, and religion… called ”Sex and Power”. I obviously had more catharsisizing to do. But inspired by the harrowing stories I’d heard from audience members, I set out to discover how men are acculturated to treat women badly in hopes of preventing it from happening so damn much! I long for the day that I can move on to a more pleasant subject – like death.