5 april 1989-march for women's lives, women's equality (600,000+ attendance)

[niyad]

(singers are holly near and ferron)

[DURHAM D]

1. I was there but

can't find myself in the crowd. I think I hear Ronnie Gilbert singing with Holly.

[niyad]

2. what an amazing experience that must have been. what were your impressions? what do you

remember? I will have to look more closely at the women behind holly--the only one I recognized right off was ellie.

[DURHAM D]

3. Just getting to the Mall on the Metro was an experience

as it was way over-crowded. DC can swallow up a half-million extra people without much disruption but as you get closer to the Mall the buzz grows. I was at the 1987 LGBT march and I felt right away this crowd was much larger.

I don't remember much about the speakers as we started out way at the back. To be honest it is always hard to follow the speakers at a march because there is always something to distract you around you.

But, we worked our way up toward the front. Once there I remember wanting to survey the scene from a higher vantage point so we built three person standing pyramids so we could get up higher and look back at the crowd and get a sense of the energy. We started it and pretty soon a whole bunch of people were doing it and we held up others who were alone or there with just one other person.

It was a celebration and no one could have predicted the success of the War on Women in what we all thought was a rational country.

[niyad]

4. I can just see all those pyramids (too bad the video did not capture them!!) like you, I felt that

it was a celebration, and that we lived in a (at least marginally) sane society. even having read "the future histories" and "the handmaid's tale", and seeing how quickly things could twist around, that possibility seemed pretty unlikely.