Toni Childs, a Kaua‘i resident and three-time Grammy-nominated singer/songwriter, has won an Emmy award for writing the music and lyrics to the song “Because You are Beautiful,” which she says is an anthem for ending violence against women and girls.
Toni Childs, a Kaua‘i resident and three-time Grammy-nominated singer/songwriter, has won an Emmy award for writing the music and lyrics to the song “Because You are Beautiful,” which she says is an anthem for ending violence against women and girls.
“Because You are Beautiful” (music and lyrics by Toni Childs, music by David Ricketts and music by Eddy Free) won the award for Outstanding Music and Lyrics; it was used as the closing music and a theme in the Lifetime original program “Until the Violence Stops.” The 56th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards presentation is being televised tonight on the ABC Television Network at 7 p.m. from the Los Angeles Shrine Auditorium, and broadcast locally on KITV–4. V-Day founder and playwright Eve Ensler is interviewed in the hour-long special, which was directed by first-time director Abby Epstein. Also featured are celebrities Jane Fonda, Glenn Close, Isabella Rossellini, Queen Latifah, Rosie Perez, Salma Hayek and Tantoo Cardinal.
All are players in Ensler’s award-winning play.
At times “The Monologues” is humorous, personal, emotional, outrageous — and above all, it spawned a global movement to end violence against women and girls.
In 2002, 800 cities performed “The Vagina Monologues” as fund-raisers for related local programs.
“Until the Violence Stops” is a documentary that follows the uplifting and empowering impact of VDay in five international communities, while exposing the pervasive and cultural forms of violence that women experience all over the world. It includes excerpts from Harlem’s outrageous production of “The Vagina Monologues;” a group of grandmothers relate their experiences as enslaved “comfort women” in the Philippines during World War II; Agnes, a woman’s health educator, walked to villages in Kenya for years to teach about the dangers of female genital mutilation. The V-Day organization built her a safe house for girls fleeing genital mutilation; native women and men working together to stop abuse in Badlands, S.D.
“Until The Violence Stops” premiered at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival and was first broadcast on Lifetime Television on Feb. 17, 2004.
It’s a very interesting grassroots phenomenon that’s happened with this program. She touches on so many different communities internationally, from the secret girls schools in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Iraq and the things that are supported all over the world,” said singersongwriter Toni Childs in a telephone interview from her Kapa‘a home earlier this week.
Last April, Childs and Ensler met at V-Day Kaua‘i when Childs did a performance to benefit the YWCA Sexual Assault Treatment Program. According to Childs, Ensler was traveling back to the States from Australia and didn’t know that she was performing.
“Ensler was already a big fan of Toni’s — the impact of Childs’ music on her life has been profound and a lifeline,” YWCA leaders said earlier.
“She came to the performance and we got to really connect.
Then she asked me to write an anthem to stop violence against women and girls,” Childs said.
“I think the thing that’s phenomenal is it’s a wonderful gift to have her give me a task to do,” she said.
Childs took the task, going through a period of self-reflection, meditation, and praying.
“The insight that I got was if violence was really going to end, women need to end the violence we inflict on ourselves,” Childs said. “We don’t think we’re good enough, pretty enough, skinny enough.” “What I hope for the song is that it inspires women to live knowing their beauty. Because you are beautiful,” Childs said.
“Women have a beauty wound, and it takes so much energy. It’s such a tribulation.
If all that energy wasn’t there, what would you do then? Each woman has their own particular story about that. And yet each woman has that answer to that piece. It’s a very individual, a very personal thing for each woman.” Music writer and Kapa‘a resident Eddy Free echoed the sentiment. He, Childs and David Ricketts, a part-time resident of Montana and Kaua‘i, recorded the song at the North Shore studio of David Tickle.
“Women can overcome the obstacles and violence against themselves on a spiritual and emotional level. Men and women both struggle with that. It’s about finding that unconditional love. We tried to put as much heart energy as we could into it,” Free said in a phone interview from Glendale, Calif.
Ricketts wasn’t reached by phone to comment on his experience.
“We went into it with a blank canvas,” Free said.
“We wandered and explored and traveled with many different themes, around the world with the music, like the documentary, and came up with this anthem,” he said.
Winning an Emmy was a wonderful surprise, Free said.
“That moment between when they announced the last nominee and the winner, it seemed like a very long moment yet a split second at the same time,” he said.
Childs continued: “Really living your beauty out in the world gives you a strength.
The song says: ‘It’s now time to focus on that. Choose what you want, it’s time to focus on what you want.”
