Day 2: Beautiful Daughters

This movie documents a production of The Vagina Monologues featuring transgendered actresses. Jane Fonda apparently came up with the idea & produced the play, and a lovely transgendered woman named Calpernia Addams leads the auditions and is one of the four actresses who are featured in the documentary. She is super darling and could play Drew Barrymore's sister in a film, which I totally hope happens some day. Drew, if you're reading this, cast Calpernia in your next movie!

Eve Ensler, the writer of the Vagina Monologues, met with the women and interviewed them in order to write some monologues specific to transgendered women. Her interviews are incredibly touching, and in them we learn how Calpernia's true love Barry was beaten to death with a baseball bat when his friends found out that his girlfriend used to be a man. We get to know Lynne, an older woman who transitioned in the 60's, and who's had a successful career in the technology industry (she was one of the first people to make microchips) and a loving marriage, and whose mother finally accepted her daughter when on her deathbed. There's also a ridiculously stunning woman named Leslie who worked in the sex industry in her early days living as a woman, but now is a real estate developer. She's also recently decided to be "out" and has started giving lectures to college students about being transgendered. And then there's Valerie, a six-foot tall woman who's kept her penis and is still all-woman. She totally nails her over-the-top "My Vagina" monologue. And her pastor at Unity Fellowship Church is AWESOME.

Thanks to "Beautiful Daughters," I learned that transgendered women have great skin (none of that greasy testosterone floating around) and that it would really, really suck to start dating someone and falling for him and wanting so badly for it to work out, and then have to tell him at some point that you used to be a dude.

Rating: Thumbs up!