of Detroit Michigan and Windsor Ontario
The First Group to call themselves "Raging Grannies" sprouted in the winter of 1986-87 in Victoria, British Columbia. Several peace activists who had been doing street theater began dressing up in outrageous hats and singing satricial songs to protest against nuclear submarines, uranium mining, nuclear power, militarism, racism, clear-cut logging, and corporate greed. They were sometimes arrested but never taken to court.
Since then the Raging Grannies of Seattle have performed at numerous rallies, meetings, schools, festivals, churches, community events, and demonstrations where we sing for women's rights, jobs for all, a clean environment, better education and an end to military spending. In our continuing efforts to raise awareness of issues, we would like to sing ourselves out of business. Each Raging Grannie has found empowerment through this shared experience.
Raging Grannies groups quickly sprang up clear across Canada, all the way to Halifax, Nova Scotia. Each group changes the words of familiar tunes to suit their particluar circumstances.
Jim Beatty, Vancouver Sun, Friday, October 11, 2002
VICTORIA -- A small group of 70- and 80-year-old women shouted down provincial politicians Thursday, temporarily halting proceedings in the legislature while security officials scrambled to usher them out of the chamber.
Moments after question period, the women began screaming "affordable health care for everyone," catching politicians and security officials off guard.
Because the women, who were scattered through the public gallery, were elderly and one used crutches, it took several minutes for security officials to escort them to the door. As they slowly walked out, one was in tears while the rest chanted "affordable health care for everyone."
The five women, who were arrested by legislature security, said they are members of the Raging Grannies. At least one other woman participated in the demonstration but was not apprehended.
"They're not listening to the people so we have to make a fuss," Alison Acker, 74, said outside the legislature. "I don't like having to do this, but if necessary I will."
Acker said no one in government will listen to their concerns regarding the poor, the sick and the disabled. "This is a cruel and heartless government," she said. "We can't get in touch with our MLAs. Nobody will speak to us."
Specifically, the women object to hospital closures, increases in drug costs for seniors and an inadequate education system.
"Don't get caught up on this little thing, keep your eye on the big picture. Hospitals are being closed," Fran Thoburn, 70, told reporters. "Children are not getting decent educations because teachers are overloaded."
While political protests are commonplace on the lawns of the legislature, it is rare for them to move inside and delay proceedings of the house.
Normally, the Raging Grannies distinguish themselves with colourful, tacky hats. But because they wanted to be discreet before their outburst, they left the hats at home Thursday.
The five women were banned from the legislature and will be informed later if they will be charged with disturbing the peace.
The demonstration ended an unusual week in the legislature � the first since last spring -- where much attention was focused on how little the politicians worked.
On Thursday, politicians sat in the house for only 93 minutes. Adding the three days before it, they sat for only 11 hours this week, out of a total of 27 hours of available debating time.
Liberal House leader Gary Collins said the fall session has a much lighter agenda than the normal spring agenda.
In 1998, we took a trip to the Great Bear Forest to search for old-growth trees and were outraged by the denuded forest and huge logging trucks and helicopters. After enjoying a picnic we drove to a Home Depot store on the outskirts of Vancouver. Once inside we leafleted, sang, and made a general nuisance until we were asked by the store manager to leave. We declined, until later when a member of the Royal Mounted Police ordered us to leave. Standing in the parking lot in front of the store we continued singing "Clear-cut the Forest" and distributing more leaflets. It was a little scary, but not as bad as watching the police advance with their armored truck at the WTO.
Who or what inspired you to take on this work?
We were inspired by the Canadian Raging Grannies and modeled ourselves after them.
What keeps you awake at night?
At our age, it's the bladder that keeps us awake at night.
What do you know now that you didn't know when you started?
We've learned how to conduct meetings where we don't all talk at the same time. Most of us have actually learned how to sing. There are few opportunities in our society for older people to connect with the younger generation. Because we appear before people of all ages, we have become mentors to many young people. We have been told we also give new hope to older women who have given up and feel they can't do anything.
What gives you hope?
Mainly the young people we hear from like 21 year old Amanda Romero who recently wrote, "There are so many times when young people like myself feel alone in our quests for a better planet. There are even more times when it seems like the older generations don't even want to listen to what we have to say. I can say now that young people are not alone and that we do have allies across generations and that together, we can make a world of difference."
to the tune My Favorite Things
Clear-cut the forest and
Kill all the fishes
Denude the hillsides
Against all our wishes
Who cares if all of our trees disappear?
We can grow more in about 80 years!
Who needs green trees?
Who needs clear streams?
Who needs oxygen?
They're fooling around with
The health of our Earth
It may not heal again.
Tuesday, July 25, 2000
By M.L. LYKE SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER
The old dames dress dime-store tacky. Artificial flowers are wired to hats, floozy feather boas and plastic Hawaiian leis thrown around necks, slips hang below thrift-store skirts, and political buttons are pinned everywhere:
� "We shall overcome."
� "Protest the WTO."
� "Diverse women for diversity."
Their shameless shtick's hardly four-star, either. Harmony's hit-and-miss, the accompaniment's kazoo, and the mature soprano voice warbling in and out of choruses is not Whitney Houston's. Not even close.
"We're a gaggle of grannies/ Urging you off your fannies," sing the Raging Grannies, a rococo, loco, left-leaning chorus of 18 activist women, aged 49-80, who are musical regulars at Seattle political rallies.
They sang at last week's protest against the arrival of the Trident submarine. They sang at the Million Mom March. They sang at WTO, to the cheers of youth one-third their age who described them as "awesome." "I think they're wonderful. It's so encouraging to see older women exercising their voice," says Seattle Central Community College student Deanna Chapman, at a Grannie "sweatshop fashion show" at the school. The sweatshop stint's not for the politically fainthearted.
"We have a song for you about greed," says musical director Rosy Betz-Zall, 49, introducing a gig in which the Grannies preach the evils of factory worker exploitation and paint horrific pictures of children laboring for 23 cents an hour behind barbed-wire fences in Third World countries.
"There's no business like clothes business," sing the Seattle satirists. One by one, they strut the room in Nike shoes, trendy T-shirts from The Gap and pierced Mickey Mouse ears set off by gray hairs and loose flesh. When one misses her cue, the others laugh it off as "a senior moment."
Soon the roomful of students is giving it up for the Grannies, whose goal is quite simple. They want to save the world. The sooner the better. And they'll twist the lyrics of any song to that end:
"Oh, give me a home
Where the rivers don't foam
And the squirrels and chipmunks can play
Where the lakes all have fish
You can put on your dish
And the skies are not smoggy and gray.
The SCCC students, whose drab black, gray and olive clothes contrast with the screaming, mismatched neons and primaries of the Grannies, eat it up. They laugh. They sing. They pump their fists along with the didactic dames up front. They hear messages of peace ("We're gonna rage and roar/ And stop all war"), exploitation ("If no one knows it/ Let's expose it"), and are bombarded with no-no "isms": racism, ageism, sexism, classism -- "and any kind of slap in the face-ism," throws in petite, 78-year-old Grannie Shirley Morrison, whose outr� chapeau is stacked almost a foot high with artificial daisies, roses and dahlias, a white dove and buttons that read "First things first: A roof over every bed," and "Your silence will not protect you."
Lifetimes of activism
Silence is anything but golden to these hard-core, seasoned activists. This is confirmed in an afternoon meet with a half-dozen Grannies, all in street dress, sipping tea and coffee and Odwalla power drinks, at the Still Life in Fremont Coffeehouse. The conversation begins somberly enough.
The women, whose ages span three decades, talk earnestly about the mentally ill forced out on the streets, the oppression of women and children, the destruction of the environment, arms proliferation, genetic food manipulation, corporate greed
("They've sent our jobs out of the country/ They've sent our jobs over the sea ... ").
The Grannies compare notes on lifetimes of activism. Some remember visiting Japanese prisoners in interment camps during World War II. Some remember blacks moving off sidewalks to let whites pass.
They talk about their participation in the farmworkers' boycott, the civil rights marches, the Vietnam War sit-ins, the women's lib movement, their arrests at protests over Contra funding.
They discuss the history of the Raging Grannies, begun in 1986-87 in Victoria, B.C., by peace activists heavily involved in street theater. The B.C. activists began writing satirical songs such as "Take Me Out to the Clearcut" to the tune of "Take Me Out to the Ballgame," and the ultimate grrrl group was born.
There are now about 60 chapters across Canada and at least five in the United States. The groups share songs, publish songbooks, hold "unconventions" and maintain a Web page: www.raginggrannies.com
Humor gets attention
The Seattle group made its debut in February of 1996, singing in the rain at a President's Day rally sponsored by the Washington State Labor Council. One new member, Hinda Kipnis, 68, says she saw the Grannies perform before joining and thought, "No way can I be in this group. I'm a perfectionist."
This comment makes the Grannies howl, and the rest of the conversation dances between lively laughter and dead seriousness -- that one-two, step-step jig the Grannies do so well. "We believe passionately in issues," says Ruth Liatos, 69. "But when you use humor, when you make fun of yourself, people's eyes don't glaze over.
"You see them spark up, smile, and they start listening."
Ruth, class clown for the strident choir, grows uncharacteristically quiet, her malleable face momentarily fallen. "It's very rare as you get older to have people listen to you," she adds.
But the people in the restaurant can't help but listen as the Grannies' animated voices rise in the warm afternoon air. The self-described "wise women elders" talk costumes. They talk lyrics. They talk about trashing tired stereotypes of older women. And suddenly they burst into song:
"The old gray mares
We ain't what we used to be
We've given up respectability
Don't give a fig for acceptability
The old gray mares
We ain't what we used to be
We're far too awesome to care."
With that, the Still Life erupts in applause, and, for one more Raging day, everything old is new again.
Raging on
The Raging Grannies are a colorful collection of left-leaning women who lift their voices against such ills as greed, violence and pollution. There are about 60 Raging Grannies chapters in Canada (the first formed in Victoria in the mid-'80s) and at least five in the United States, including the one in Seattle, which debuted in 1996.