Also this issue:

Too Legit to Quit
Billy Ciancaglini, budding lawyer and a relative of mobsters, is fighting hard to make good.
-Deborah Bolling

Petitions Filed -- No Fatalities
-Daryl Gale

Independently Wealthy
Philly’s quirkiest newspaper may not make a lot of money, but it is rich in quality.
-Deborah Bolling

Bleu Haze
-Mary F. Patel

The Bell Curve
City Paper's weekly gauge of Philly's Quality of Life

March 13-19, 2003

city beat

Women In Black: No Iraq Attack

Local women plan post-war civil disobedience.

by Daniel Brook

On the night of Mon., March 10, a dozen female peace activists gathered at the tchotchke-filled West Philadelphia home of Judy Wicks, owner of the White Dog Café. After dining informally on Wicks' roasted vegetable lasagna and a desert of baked apples, the group went to work planning a civil disobedience action to protest the war.

The peace activists are part of a local chapter of Women in Black (WIB), a group founded in 1988 in the Middle East by Palestinian and Israeli women opposed to the occupation. In recent years, chapters have sprung up worldwide. During protests, WIB members wear black to symbolize mourning.

The meeting was as quirky as the apartment's interior decoration scheme. The activists entered the living room by walking over a life-size cardboard cutout of President George W. Bush, laid on the floor as a welcome mat. The women then wrote messages to the president on scraps of paper and burned them in Wicks' elegant fireplace. One activist composed a haiku: "He steals from the poor/ And leads our country to war/ We must thwart these plans," and then threw it in the fire.

"It's the Wicca in us," quipped Theresa Camerota as the women huddled by the hearth, though the voodoo-ish plans to write messages on the cardboard commander in chief and then burn him were nixed because a number of activists didn't feel comfortable with the proposed ceremony. "I have a problem with burning somebody in effigy," Lou Ann Merkle, an art teacher, explained, saying cryptically that she believes "in its power." Merkle is using her artistic skills to build cardboard coffins covered with Camerota's photographs of Iraqi children.

The exact date of the planned action has not yet been determined. The activists plan to make their statement two days after U.S. forces attack Iraq by blocking the entrance to a local federal building, risking arrest. At the meeting lavender-colored arrest cards were passed out. Women planning to participate in the civil disobedience filled them out with contact information so others in the group can track their progress through the criminal justice system and contact loved ones if need be.

Many of the WIBers are heading to Washington this weekend for an antiwar march. While the situation looks bleak, Camerota holds out some hope. "We pray that we don't have to do this," she says.