Living Dangerously - Issue 31

The decision to go downtown was a no-brainer. "Volcano Love" makes it clear what the uptown girls are missing. The women in that show are doing what heroes do: challenging the rational. "Volcano Love" is the creation of Sarah East Johnson, a fire-eater, juggler, stilt dancer, and trapeze artist who founded the New York City -- based dance company Lava. "I want to expand the models of what women can be, to see what all the possibilities are," she says. Johnson named her company after the fiery heat of Earth's inner forces, thereby celebrating the Earth's struggle to rearrange its known categories. The disruptive force of a volcano also had its appeal. "What gets in your way can take you to someplace new," says Johnson.

Johnson has a role model that I'm sure wasn't mentioned uptown: "There is so much to learn from things that are beautiful and powerful. I drove across the country several years ago. And when I reached the Rocky Mountains, I felt that I wanted to be a Rocky Mountain. There are very few things in the world that you see and say, 'That's what I want to be' -- particularly if you're a woman. How many role models are there that are really inspiring?"

What's interesting here is that Johnson doesn't just want to get to the top. She wants to be a powerhouse. The Fortune women say again and again in their magazine interviews that it wasn't very hard to get to the top. Maybe that's because the game that they're playing is way too easy. Maybe that's why, when you look at a comparable list of the most powerful male CEOs in America, you get builders, shapers, dazzlers: Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Jay Walker. Not people who get along by going along. Not people who get swept up in the current and pulled along by it, as the Fortune "most powerful women in business" have done.

Why isn't there a woman leader to rival Steve Jobs or Bill Gates? Forget the old argument that women haven't invested generations in business. Neither have the new male rich. In the new economy, everybody was born yesterday.

The most "powerful" women are good girls writ large and rational. And so their influence is small.

Why aren't women going out and building the kinds of businesses that build society? After all, women start twice as many businesses as men do. Every 60 seconds in the United States, a woman starts a company. But such companies don't grow very large. Why is it that most businesses that are started by women, or run by women, never reach the stage of becoming big-time players? Why do they never achieve the status of legend?

Legends reach into the realm of the heroic -- testing themselves, daring to look ridiculous. (You think fighting a green monster is elegant?) Heroes, according to the mythologist Joseph Campbell, test themselves, put themselves into unfamiliar territory, risk their identity, and come back from an ordeal or adventure with a gift for the community. Heroes go on a personal journey that makes them whole. Having a special skill or talent isn't enough. The risk, the challenge -- that's what makes a hero's abilities increase.

As I sat in the audience at "Volcano Love," I imagined the uptown scene. I thought about the uptown girls engaging in what they do best: genteel talk between morning fruit and afternoon salad.

The downtowners were willing not just to talk but also to do -- to face the enemy. But the enemy isn't men. Nor is it the intransigent corporation. The enemy is fear. Watching those women soar changed my metabolism, as if I'd just eaten a peach and sugar were flooding my brain. Their display of fearlessness makes you move. You enter their world to a blast of Johnny Cash: It burns, burns, burns a ring of fire. The Lava women have learned to move past their fear.

"Fear is something that comes up all the time in this particular kind of work," says Sarah Johnson. "Sometimes, that fear is about how much something is going to hurt: 'I can't stay in this handstand for another minute,' or 'I can't do one more handstand.' And sometimes it's a fear of a specific act, such as jumping backward through a hoop. You're afraid that you're going to fall on your head and that it's going to hurt. But you tell yourself that you can do it, and then you have to do it -- even though you're afraid."

The rest of us talk about the glass ceiling. Lava women fly right up to it and make it look like a cloud that might disappear if you blew on it. The rest of us groan about jumping through hoops. Lava women plunge through hoops -- backward and in high heels. Lava women put themselves at risk. They face embarrassment at every moment. They are riveting to watch because you worry about them; you expect a spill. The Fortune women keep reassuring the rest of us through interviews how easy their rise was. Would Steve Case ever say that it wasn't difficult to get to the top?