Five Years a Writer

  January 1985: Hecate's Players performing in Fort McMurray,  Alberta, at the invitation of  Women of the North.  From left, Amanda Le Rougetel, Kathryn Ivany, Lisa Walter.  Look at at those serious faces (and bad hair) from more than four decades ago. Oh my goodness. I want to believe we didn't take ourselves as seriously as these pics suggest, but in 1985 we had so many things to say about the plight of women in this world, and say them we did. To each other, the general public and to politicians, at meetings, around tables and from stages. I have always enjoyed performing on a stage (ever since I played the shoemaker’s wife in Grade 2), so establishing a feminist theatre collective in the early 1980s with a bunch of university friends was not a stretch for me. Indeed, it was a natural outlet for my burgeoning politics. We named ourselves Hecate’s Players, after the goddess in ancient Greek religion and mythology “variously associated with crossroads, night,...