The Glamour of Being Real

The Glamour of Being Real is a book, a performance, and a workshop.

Book

Excitement from readers like you~

The world needs this book.
Dianne in New York

It is Amazing. We will be talking about this for the rest of our lives. I'm just sorry I didn't have this to read when I was, say, 30 years old. It would have been life-altering.
Suzanne in Illinois

It is exquisite. It is vast, beautifully encompassing so many sources and retelling knowledge in a wonderfully new post-modem (my term) world. Thank you for this gift to us all.
Kathleen in Arizona

Description

209 short aphorisms spell out the glamour of being real, which is the art of self-creation, of trusting oneself. Passionate and insightful, and sometimes paradoxical, this helpful guide expresses simple means for overcoming bodily and everyday dilemmas. From the necessity of change to intimate relationships to eating, aging, and everyday life, The Glamour of Being Real is filled with eloquent activism about the pleasures of soul-and-mind-inseparable-from-body.

The Glamour of Being Real evolved from my work as a scholar, teacher, and artist whose books and performances celebrate beauty and the body. My multifaceted focus on those subjects includes research and experience, such as my study of emotions and sensations and of the female body in art and culture and my engagement with yoga as a continuing education of soul-and-mind-inseparable-from-body.

The Glamour of Being Real is a sutra, which is a series of concise, related statements, each one also being a sutra, whose aphoristic nature is intended to make possible memorization by a student. See more about sutras in the Art Works section.

Photos

I asked the photographer Frances Murray to photograph me for the book. I've modeled for her since our meeting in 1983 and we're close friends who have lots of fun together in the making of art and in conversation, sharing confidences and eating food that we love. Our photo session took place on the back terrace of my home on a perfect Tucson autumn afternoon—temperature in the mid-80s, sunshine with intermittent clouds, a breeze whose intensity was occasionally surprising.

Supporting the Local Community

The Glamour of Being Real supports my local community, Tucson, AZ. The designer, printer, and seller are all in Tucson, and the debut performance is in Tucson.

Performance

Using my characteristically direct and simple staging and presentation, I speak the text, with some singing, and also spontaneously go where the written words, my thoughts and feelings, and the audience take me.

Debut performance: Pima County Tucson Women's Commission, February 25, 2012.

Workshop

Goals and Intentions

Workshops facilitate participants being true to themselves through practices of self-transformation and conscious self-creation.

I bring to this workshop my 35 years of teaching experience as a university professor, my decades of bodily and scholarly research into soul-and-mind-inseparable-from-body, and my desire to help women in particular transform the negative habits of mind and body that pervade our culture in regard to women. I received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women's Caucus for Art in 2008 for satisfying that desire; as that organization wrote, “for helping forge a positive image of women as they experience life passionately.”

What We Do in the Workshop

The book The Glamour of Being Real is composed of 5 chapters, Glamour Defined, Change, Body, Relationships, and Everyday Life. The basis of each workshop is the first chapter, which gives participants new ways to think about and activate trust in themselves. Then we focus on one of the chapter topics. Conversation and effectively simple body and mind practices are the methods for exploring self-creation and self-transformation—and for having fun.