The new Bennington Girl

Kathleen Norris returns, sort of.

The term 'Bennington girl' connoted someone who was flamboyantly (if not oppressively) artsy, bohemian, and also notoriously easy with sexual favors." So said memoirist Kathleen Norris in her fish-out-of-water coming of age tale, The Virgin of Bennington.

The Bennington College that Norris reflected on from the late 1960s was not much different from the Bennington that Washington, D.C.-based playwright Sidra Rausch recalls from her own youth nearly a decade earlier.

Rausch's How I Became a Bennington Girl is featured this weekend in the current New Plays (Un) Plugged, the third annual Washington Women in Theatre Festival. Rausch, like her Bennington compatriot, Norris, too, felt like an outsider at the exclusive Vermont women's college, where students were expected to develop intellectually, artistically and socially into formidable young women.

Honestly, 'The Virgin of Bennington' is one of the few BC-related books I haven't read. Shame on me.