One Woman Performance
Written and Performed by Lou Montgomery

"Kali's Follies: Midlife at the Millennium" is a one woman performance piece that comically dramatizes attitudes, trends, and dominant Western cultural projections towards women in menopause- framed against the backdrop of Apocalyptic "millennial madness". Kali, the Hindu goddess of creation and destruction, whose fierce compassion heralds sudden transformation is having the last laugh as the planet careens headlong into breakdown or breakthrough pursuing its wreckless "follies"!

The audience is taken on a wild and stimulating journey through past millenniums of Patriarchy in an interweaving of serious historical scholarship and creative fantasy. Characters ranging from Eve and Pandora to Christopher Columbus, Francis Bacon, and Sigmund Freud are hilariously parodied- demonstrating how negative projections toward aging women and untamed Nature have taken up residence in our collective psyche and colonized both the body of Woman and the body of the Earth.

Here at the millennium, an unprecedented 70 million women are currently entering menopause. Kali's Follies celebrates the wild, passionate, outspoken, wise, and outrageous energies that are being unleashed as both women and men shed old stereotypes and share responsibility for planetary stewardship and the well-being of future generations.

Kali's Follies grew out of my studies of the archetypal, mythological, psychological, and spiritual dimensions of midlife, women and aging, and millennial issues-as well as my own personal descent and spiritual crisis concurrent with menopause- a profound initiatory life passage that unfortunately for many women is still unacknowledged and culturally stigmatized. But to the extent that we can laugh at ourselves we can increase our capacity to heal ourselves and our world.