The Real OC

Women For is the local Orange County grassroots organization you'd point to if you wanted to mess with people's minds, and who doesn't want to do that? This Irvine-based progressive women's forum hosts monthly public-education meetings in the heart of conservative South County when it isn't sponsoring the Great American Write-In each spring. Sure, the nice ladies at WF: OC look harmless, but they've lately featured films, panels and speakers on global warming (against), voter-rights suppression (against), single-payer health care (for), uniting women in prison with their kids (for) and military recruitment in the schools (against). They pay for all this terrific agit-prop by dressing up once a year, having lunch together, and honoring some of the other riot grrrls and women who live and work in the OC.

This year's Suffrage Day Celebration honorees include Professor Paula Garb of UC Irvine's Center for Citizen Peacebuilding, Susan Kopicki of Democracy for America, Jeanette Merrilees of Save Crystal Cove and two Cal State Fullerton political-science majors who persuaded their campus to go sweatshop-free—which means you'll have to find someplace else to buy a T-shirt sewn by exploited Central American labor. (See, I am messing with you, and it's fun!) CSUF Criminal Justice Professor Jarett Lovell (host of KUCI-FM's Justice, or Just Us?) introduces the young women, Caitlyn Whitney and Charlotte Samuels of the Campus Coalition Against Sweatshops, everybody enjoys some bitchen chow courtesy of UCI's snazzy University Club, and then it's back to kickin' right-wing reactionary ass . . . er, I mean educating our citizenry on a variety of important peace, human-rights, social and economic-justice issues.

Suffrage Day Celebration at University Club, UC Irvine, 801 E. Peltason Dr., Irvine, (949) 262-1001; www.womenforoc.org . Sat., 11 a.m. $40. Reservations requested.