It's Friday, November 18, and the University of Washington's Kane Hall is packed with hundreds of students, feminists, and cat lovers all eager to see, question, or simply hug 72-year-old artist Carolee Schneemann: a physical icon of the feminist movement whose performance and video installations preceded and shaped the movement itself.

She's not here yet. She's backstage putting herself in a trance so that she can "fly through time," taking us with her on an exploration of her work, from doodles of staircases and her brother that she made at age 4 ("I'm hoping there's someone in this room ready to write their dissertation on those," she'll later tell the crowd) to the famous pieces she's known for—pulling a rant out of her vagina and rolling around half naked in rancid meat.

I'm here less for the art than I am for the trance. Most people don't know this about me—I try not to brag—but I'm a vegetarian. I'm also a novice medium. Someday, I want to be able to communicate with the world's most famous dead vegetarians (Thomas Edison, Leonardo da Vinci, Hitler, Gandhi if I have time) so I can find out how great their meat-free lives were and write a book that will educate the world. But right now, I'm only able to talk to dead plants.

Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy" blasts over the loudspeakers, and Schneemann appears from the back of the tiered auditorium. She is shoeless and dressed all in black (the preferred color for both artists and mediums). As the music plays, she dances down the stairs waving a stick and what appears to be a cat toy. As she passes me, I whisper, "Hail, Satan!" and throw sage at her butt. I am checking for demons. She doesn't return my greeting. This is a good sign.

(I'm not stupid—Schneemann put herself in an art-lecture trance not a chatting-with-the-dead trance, but demons will take whatever they can get.)

How does one spot a trance, you ask? There are some universal indicators—abnormal pupil size and deep, measured breathing. I often induce a trance by smoking a lot of pot, masturbating awhile, and then closing my eyes and lying in a dark room for a few hours. Some people call this "napping" because they are unenlightened.

Schneemann takes her place at the podium and begins. She is lecturing about her art, which is essentially her own body. In the 1950s, when Schneemann became one of the first female artists to reclaim the nude female form from men who had been guiding the brush strokes for centuries, she did it using her own form—first as a painter and then as a filmmaker and performance artist. In the scope of her work, her body greets you like an old friend. You see it naked, swinging from trees, slapped with meat, painted, harnessed. You see it having sex and waking up in the morning. You watch her hips and neck gain flesh.

Here, onstage, her body seems fragile and restless. She cannot figure out how to clip a microphone to her blouse. She puts on her shoes—gray kitten heels—and then takes them off again. She holds the shoes in her hands. Then her hands become confused about how to use PowerPoint. Giant slides of Schnee­mann's art skip back and forth across the projector screen in dizzying succession. She becomes lost in her own lecture and must ask for help becoming centered again. People shift uncomfortably. I am embarrassed for her. Her art speaks better for itself, and her trance makes my plant-talking trances look pretty rock star.

After 40 minutes, Schneemann abruptly stops talking. She looks tired but gamely takes a few questions from the audience. Someone asks how she handles rejection as an artist. "I'd just say, 'Fuck 'em' and keep going," she replies. recommended