Sherry Glaser
Sherry Glaser (born June 6, 1960) is an American actress, performance artist, and political activist.
Early life
She was born in New York and raised on Long Island. Glaser moved to San Diego in 1978 and attended SDSU. She developed her improvisational comedy skills with the feminist comedy group Hot Flashes. She then set out on a solo performance with the direction and co-writing of her husband Greg Howells. She is best known for her off-Broadway performance Family Secrets and her autobiography, Family Secrets: One Woman's Look at a Relatively Painful Subject, published by Simon & Schuster. She also writes a weekly Tuesday evening editorial on California station KZYX.[1] Sherry is also a featured writer in the Anthologies, "The Other Woman" and "He Said What?" (Warner) She is also a writer in the Anthology "Warrior Mothers" Edited by Thais Masur.
Family life
Sherry met her future husband, Greg Howells, through her comedy career. At the time Greg was a friend of a friend of Sherry’s next door neighbor. Glaser and Howells' shared passion for comedy brought them together. Glaser and Howells had their first child Dana. Sherry then had her second daughter, Lucy. Glaser commented that, "I had always wanted two (so they could have someone to talk to about their crazy mother)". Greg Howells disappeared on June 18, 1997. He was golfing at Rancho Canada when he disappeared. Glaser now lives with her current wife, Sheba Love, in Albion, California.[2]
Career
Glaser's inspiration for solo performance came while practicing improvisation in the early 1980s in San Diego in the company of Whoopi Goldberg, Mo Gaffney and Kathy Najimy. Sherry Glaser become well known when she played five different roles in Family Secrets in 1994. Family Secrets is a Broadway show that gives a portrait of five members of a Jewish family who migrated from New York to California in the 1980s. Glaser won numerous awards for her role in Family Secrets. [3]
Glaser then played Ma and Miguel in her one-woman play, Oh My Goddess! Ma was depicted as the Great Jewish Mother of us all, reminding "us of the simple and sacred nature of life on earth".[4] In 2004 Sherry collaborated with Thais Mazur on a theater/dance project called Remember This (An Intimate Portrait of War through the Eyes of Women) which debuted in Mendocino and then went on to San Francisco.
Political activism
Breasts Not Bombs
Breasts Not Bombs is a grassroots political movement based in Mendocino County, California. The group focuses on the intersection between top-free equality and social justice through non-violent public protests involving street theatre and toplessness in order to bring attention to what they term the "immoral injustices of war.[5]
On November 8, 2005, Sherry Glaser and Renee Love, members of Breasts Not Bombs, went topless on the steps of the California State Capital to protest the policies of California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. They were arrested on suspicion of indecent exposure, disorderly conduct and violation of the terms of their protest permit. If convicted, the women would have been required to register as sex offenders. In the court battle that followed their arrest, they argued that women should have the same right to go topless as men. In November 2008, the courts awarded the women $150,000. The court also required that California Highway Patrol officers assigned to the Capitol Protection Section be provided training in First Amendment rights of protesters.[6]
She comments on her website, "Their bare breasts were called 'indecent', so I thought, let's use this incident and our equal protection under the 14th Amendment to show what real freedom and decency look like. She realizes, words alone can be easily disregarded, but bodies are harder to ignore."[7]
On her website, Glaser has written that "It's ironic that Arnold Schwarzenegger can grope and molest women's bodies and become Governor yet we stand in power exercising our first amendment rights and we get arrested. I Protest! Sheba (my partner) and I have decided to continue with the demonstration and give it more of a theatrical atmosphere." Glaser began a political movement claiming breasts are not indecent, wars are. Glaser and others have been protesting topless in order to give public awareness to the deaths which occurred in the Iraq War. Glaser has her own website where she discusses her political actions and upcoming productions as well as making her weekly radio commentaries publicly available.[8]
Other activism
She was instrumental in a recent Tsunami Relief benefit which raised over $10,000, she has done benefits for women's shelters, environmental agencies, and the homeless, and she has taught workshops in radical emotional transformation and Organic Improvisational Theater.
References
External links
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