Satori Shakoor’s journey to finding her brilliance starts and ends on a plane to Hawaii. As she sits in the window seat before takeoff, Shakoor has a complete meltdown and has to get off the plane. It’s not because she’s claustrophobic or scared of flying. She’s having a flashback to the 1990s, when her life fell apart.
If you’re from Detroit, you’re likely at least somewhat familiar with Shakoor and her Secret Society of Twisted Storytellers.
Shakoor hosts the popular event where Detroiters get onstage to share stories of grief, hardship, and triumph that remind us that the human experience is as beautiful as it is difficult.
You don’t often see Shakoor’s own story of how she once abandoned her life in Detroit and fled to Hawaii to escape debilitating postpartum depression, a cheating husband, and crushing self-hate.
In her one-woman show, Confessions of a Menopausal Femme Fatale, Shakoor relives her most vulnerable moments as she navigates sex, death, and the mother wound during menopause. It had a weekend run at Detroit Public Theatre over the weekend, where it was filmed to be released later to a global audience.
Even if you know Shakoor’s story, the intimate details she reveals in the show take the audience on a rollercoaster of emotions via standup comedy and song. One minute you’re laughing at Shakoor’s escapades looking for sex on Craigslist, and the next you’re watching in horror as she nearly attempts to kill her newborn baby.
Mostly, the performance feels like a Megan Thee Stallion feminist anthem in monologue form. She tackles the oppressive weight that women carry as we go through life performing for the male gaze.
In one scene, a man she’s been seeing calls her flabbergasted that she hasn’t had sex with him yet. He makes the preposterous assumption that it must be because she’s a man crossdressing as a woman, because it’s unheard of that a woman simply doesn’t want to fuck him.
She looks at her naked body in the bathtub, detailing to the audience how the soap suds roll off her nipples, down her pubic hair, and into the bathwater as she wonders at the misogyny of equating womanhood to a willingness to have sex.
She eventually does hook up with the guy, harnessing her womb power to nearly snap his penis off as she gives him an orgasm that rockets his consciousness into space. But Shakoor is still here down on Earth, unsatisfied and bored as she wonders if there’s such a thing as pleasurable sex, or perhaps a point beyond where two souls ascend into the universe to become one. Too bad, that’s not reality.
All women have been there, where men define us as a pornographic shell of a human being. The audience laughs as Shakoor describes the sex in great detail, as if her vagina is a weapon, defeating the phallic enemy and leaving it shriveled and pathetic. It’s a humorous but scathing commentary on the politics of sex and women’s bodies.
We would say Shakoor is in rare form for this performance, but she has always been a comedic powerhouse who commands your attention with her gentle charm. What sets Confessions of a Menopausal Femme Fatale over the edge is how she weaves effortlessly between emotions without skipping a beat.
Despite the title, the “change of life” Shakoor experiences in the play isn’t menopause — continued references to hot flashes and mood swings be damned. It’s the point along the crushing journey to self-discovery when you realize that it’s OK to be your wonderfully weird self that’s blossomed through despair — even if it’s “too much” for some people.
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