Describe the women who have most influenced your life and the formation of your character.

I grew up in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in a working class family. Lawrence was the scene of 20,000 mill workers walking out on the Bread and Roses strike in 1912, starting the textile revolution. My grandmother was a mill worker so I come from a working class, not very well-educated family, although my mother is educated and pretty rebellious. I have four brothers so I was an assistant mom.

My own grandmother, a mill worker, a Polish immigrant, who had a 6th grade education, who managed to take care of everyone, including climbing on the roof to fix it. My Irish grandmother was a teacher who taught until she was 87 years old. They begged her to stay teaching the 3rd grade, and she kept teaching and teaching.

My great aunt Nellie, who I'm named after, was a total eccentric, who drove to Mexico by herself in the teens and 20s, and never married. There are some eccentric and strong women in my family. My mother's aunt is the dean of the teaching college at University of Lowell. So I have strong women on my mother's side of the family who are educators and strong women on my father's side of the family who are laborers.

Do you consider yourself a feminist? Why or why not?

Absolutely. The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, by Shulamith Firestone, was the first feminist book I ever read. She wrote that art is in the purview of women because they can't get involved in the upper echelons of the economic system. The danger is that they can become kind of petty bourgeois entrepreneurs. When someone recently quoted that to me, I thought, oh my god, that sounds like us.

But to me, feminism is essentially recognizing the inequities that exist for women, the systemic inequities. The need to fight to change that. I don't have any hesitation in using that word at all. I think it's the big old propaganda campaign that has taught young women that feminism is a bad word. I can't imagine that; it's like being a civil rights activist. What's the problem with the word? And I'm a lesbian feminist. You put that together and people say, oh my god, but I think it's just about being a humanist. I guess I would have to ask the person why they have trouble with the word.

What would you most like to tell your daughter, son, the next generation about your hopes for women of the future? How would you advise a young woman to go about finding her own voice?

I tell my students a couple of really important things. The first is originality. I think that originality is the most important thing, that they have something in them that is their own gift, whether that be of language, of family, of story, of conflict that's going to create a great work, and that they have to find that, and not mimic. The second thing is being a Renaissance person. That's what the next century is going to require.

I am a producer, a writer, a manual laborer, a fundraiser, and I do a little drumming. You have to be a multi-dimensional person. The Reason why Brava has worked is that some of us senior members have traded roles. I will produce a play that Amy Mueller will direct, that would be written by Anne Galjour. We have this sense of handing off. Alleluia Panis is a general manager at Brava and she has her own dance company. She's an artist and an administrator. You have to be able to do both. You cannot leave behind the administrative part of it. If you're a filmmaker or a writer, if you can't figure out how to raise your own money to do your own projects, the chances are you're not going to succeed. I think that people can have an elitist attitude about it. It has to be much more democratic. I would prefer to be at home with someone paying me to write my own plays, but this is my day job. I run Brava and I write my plays in the evenings. I think if we had more of that attitude we would have more work produced.

I set out for law school, that's where I was heading. I have a pre-law degree. I took my destiny in my own hands and that's a hard thing for young people to do. Very hard. Every job that I've ever had, except for the fire department, is one that I've created. Most people don't say that, most people try to get into a track because economic insecurity is frightening. Professional insecurity is frightening.

And yet, I'm seeing these kids that are coming through the Running Crew, and they're 18 & 19 year olds, and they're writing their own ticket in terms of their time. They're getting paid $15-20 an hour, they have flexible schedules, they're writing something on the side, while they're directing a video for a friend, while they're running a show over at The Magic Theater, while they're building a set. They're getting a taste of all of it. That's because of their exposure here and I always get surprised. They come in and they get some other thing going. It's exciting because it's what you want to have in people, especially in that place where art and technology take place. I think the technologists are saying to everyone, you know, we need the artists because the creative part of this field is going to die if all we have is people who are just sitting at their stations, and doing the same old, same old. We'll have no creative juice to innovate.

It's taken me a long time to even call myself an artist because I come from a working class kind of place, but artists to me are everywhere.

The people that I've known in life, if you look at some really wonderful people, they are multi-faceted. They turn off the television and pick up something else. They march to their own drummer. They morph and merge influences. The best filmmakers also like sculpture, and they go to see theatre. The real eclectic people are the ones coming up with new things.

For me, I tell these kids that I'm teaching now, get your notebook. Have your notebook be the perfect thing that you want to write in, whatever color you want to write in. That's a really good friend, that notebook becomes your friend because your dreams, your thoughts that pass through your head, little fragments of poems that come up in your day, an interaction you have, that's what creates your originality. When you've laughed, when you've cried, when you've been really afraid, grab that book because that's what's going to put your experience on this earth, down for us to share. It's easier and safer to be unconscious. It's harder to write in your journal. It's harder to analyze something that you've been through that is painful. It's easier to just turn on the television. And I'm as susceptible as anyone else but I think that creativity begets creativity. If you're living your life with all your neurons buzzing, then it gives you more energy.

How do you define success for yourself? How would you define success for the next generation?

Success for me and for Brava! is, did I really stick with my mission? Did I keep my integrity on the way to try to do something that can, in every way, tempt you to lose your integrity. It's very difficult to raise money in a neighborhood like this without there being a great deal of commercial interest in it, for a project that is basically serving middle and lower income people.

If I were to think of myself, first of all, I would like more time to write. Secondly, I want to be making more money. Thirdly, not to go to bed every night with all this worry that I go to bed with. Adding up all the columns to see if they add up. How do I get there?

Success is that I feel that I've kept that integrity, that I feel like I've challenged myself a lot, that I'm still being human because you get so overwhelmed by the tasks at hand that you can turn people into cogs in the wheel, for your vision. I hope I don't do that and that I stay aware of my personal relationships.

What made you decide to pursue a non-traditional occupation?

By the time I had hit college in 1971, it was the beginning of the end of the Vietnam War. I got the very tail end of that kind of activism. The first political thing I did was to go take over a building when the invasion of Cambodia happened. That was completely out of my Catholic school parameters.

I got radicalized there at the University of Massachusetts. I read my first feminist literature, read my first Marxist literature, got involved as a student activist and when I was 19 years-old, I was the president of the student body. I started a bunch of organizations, including a food co-op, a law clinic, and a women's center. So it really started really there, in creating organizations in response to inequities that I saw.

Then I worked for about four years, right out of college, at a battered women's shelter and a rape crisis center. After my time there, an exhaustion took over. I said, well, I just want to go to the southern most point of the United States, so I chose San Diego. I'd never seen it and had never been to San Diego. I didn't know what it would be like to live there but I knew it was hot and I wanted to go there to relax and recover.

So I moved and switched from what I considered my mental development to physical: running, and weight lifting, and that's where I actually ran into some firemen in a park. They said, "You should really try out for the department." So it kind of happened serendipitously. But once I was in the fire department, it was quite an education from the other side, to be in an all-male society, which the fire department is. And really experiencing, for the first time, virulent hostility. I worked there for three years. I was one of the first female firefighters in the San Diego Fire Department and one of the first in the country, in 1981. At the time, I was writing about what I was experiencing and that's what eventually turned into my first play, The Roof's on Fire!

What challenges have you dealt with at work or at home due to your gender? What benefits?

I think that if I were a man running this project, he would have had this building built by now. I'm a very competent, articulate woman and yet I feel like if I were a competent, articulate man, I think I'd be done. There's a whole lot of resistance from the system and from those that have the power and money, to let women run with something. I think there's constantly the feeling that maybe she doesn't quite know what she's doing.

It's true that I'm doing something that I've never done before. I'm working on an almost three million dollar development project. I'm learning as I go. I'm sure I'm making mistakes but I think that men would be given the opportunity to start from a place where they are accepted as risk takers and potentially successful project managers or directors more than women are.

I've gotten a lot of support from women politicians, actually, Leslie Katz and Carole Migden. These are people that have saved my life, foundation people. But when you're talking about development, you're talking millions, and you're generally talking about men, in all honesty. Who's running the corporations, who's running the foundations, who's giving the money away, who's making the laws? I don't come with something behind me that's clear, in terms of a payoff. First of all, I'm a white woman running an organization in the Mission, so it's not like they're going to think, "Oh, she's going to bring 30,000 Latino votes with her." I'm not necessarily attracting people who have six-digit incomes. You have to truly believe in the mission of what we're doing.

What woman (living or dead) would you most like to have dinner with and why?

Tina Modotti. She is an astounding character. She was an artist and a revolutionary. She struggled her whole life to find out whether art or politics was more important. She actually set aside her camera thinking that it was too petty bourgeois, that there were more important things to do. In fact, she was lovers with Edward Weston and learned her technique from him. Some people would say that she surpassed him in some ways. If you see just the small body of her work, it's astounding.

She worked as a total, dedicated, selfless person, 12-14 hours a day on whatever it was she was involved in. When she was in Mexico, it would have been workers' rights and poverty issues. She became kind of a militant Communist. She fought in the Spanish Civil War. She organized medical relief for the Spanish Civil War.

She was very beautiful and that was her cache or ticket in. And she was also a film star in Los Angeles. She was a theatre star in San Francisco, in North Beach. So she just went on a creative trajectory with her life that was, in most ways, revolutionary and almost saint-like. In fact, she later became trapped by the influence of Stalin. Towards the end of her life, she was too rigid, in a political sense, but very beautiful, very selfless, very committed.

Born poor, an Italian immigrant, who would say at different points in her life, "Fascism destroyed my life." This was a person who would always be giving, whether it was a meal, or in the Spanish Civil War, the stories about her are unbelievable. She died of a heart attack at the age of 45. She had literally driven herself into the ground. She would work with swollen legs. She was a combination of Mother Theresa and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn.

Modotti also tried to do some kind of propagandistic photography towards the end of her career in Mexico where she would merge photos for effect. So the issue for me in her work, is that line between what is pure art and what is politics. Is manipulation a part of that or not, in the pure moment of a flash, of a photograph. When she left San Francisco, she burned all her work and said, "I have to hold it in my heart." She was someone who really believed in the mutability of life.