First and foremost, please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Leila Radan. I am the sister-in-law of one of Iran’s top actors, Bahram Radan, and currently reside here in San Francisco. I am part Iranian, part Danish and an actress in the official V-Day SF production of “The Vagina Monologues“.
V-Day is the organization behind “The Vagina Monologues” and uses the play as a sort of performance piece grassroots fundraiser aimed at uniting the community at large and at, of course, raising as much money as possible to submit to both V-Day’s cause of choice (this year it is for the women survivors of Katrina) and to local charities (SF WAR & Generation Five).
I write to you today per the advice of Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi. Being an admirer of his grassroots activism and of his political work and feeling a connection to him because of the shared “hybrid Iranian” status, I reached out to him for advice as to what groups of interest to contact.
Supervisor Mirkarimi welcomed me and our production’s V-Day SF Representative, Heather Moseley, into his office and was a great source of help and of advice. When I expressed to him my interest in reaching out to the Iranian community, he suggested that I contact you, among other organizations, and so here I am!
As the only Iranian involved actively both as a castmate [see video] and as a pseudo-organizer/media outreach of the show, I am placing out a call to the Iranian community to please come and join us! I just moved back home to San Francisco after 3 1/2 years spent abroad and am personally looking to reconnect with the Iranian community at large.
My unselfish and greater wish, however, is to represent the voice of our repressed Iranian people, of the women of Iran who endure human rights abuses that should not even be occuring in this day and age. “The Vagina Monologues” is a play, a collective cry of “NO MORE” where all the women involved symbolically add their voices to this shared declaration and, in doing so, hope to take it further and to add to V-Day’s current achievement of having raised $50 million in the past 10 years in order to further women’s rights.
I would love to use our current production of “The Vagina Monologues” as a springboard for both a show in solidarity with women’s and children’s rights from you, my community, and as a compassionate vehicle of greater involvement of our Iranian community within the American community at large. This is a fabulous video where Jane Fonda and Eve Ensler, the playwright and women’s rights activist extraordinaire, passionately and so eloquently explain our cause.
So what am I asking of you? If you can in any way help us to spread the word it would be greatly appreciated. Do you have any affiliations with websites or publications of any sort? Well then give us a mention or an interview or a feature or… the sky’s the limit! If using my relation to Bahram Radan is of interest and a good segue into promoting our play, then I am more than willing to sacrifice myself in this way.
Do you have a database of Iranians at your disposal? Then kindly send them an email blast and urge them to show up and support a fellow Iranian and to show their solidarity with the cause that is women’s and children’s rights, both of these being a mere fraction of the larger picture that is human rights of which we, Iranians as minorities in the US, are a part of as well.
This link explains the cause, where the proceeds shall go to and provide a link to ticketweb where the tickets are up for sale for our one and only shownight which is on Thursday, March 6th at 7:30 pm. Should you have any questions or concerns, or were you simply interested in saying hello :-), please do not hesitate to contact me organicyogi@gmail.com.
Thank you so very much and I look forward to seeing you at our play.[see video]
