By LISA CHURCH
Special to The Tribune

MOAB - Cosy Sheridan remembers clearly the day her struggle with body image began.

"I was 14 years old and my father promised to buy me a new dress if I lost weight," she says. "He didn't realize the effect that would have."

As a teen, Sheridan battled anorexia and bulimia, grappling to reconcile the reality of her physical appearance with images of female perfection propagated in magazines and television advertisements across the globe. Images of Barbie and the constant barrage of ads and magazine covers featuring pencilthin models who purport to represent the ideal woman have created a society of diet-crazed women who sometimes go to extremes in their attempts to achieve the impossible, Sheridan says.

"I could have learned nuclear physics with all the time I spent worrying about diets and image," says the singer-songwriter who now makes her home in Moab. "I've lost a lot of time because somebody. wanted to make a lot of money on a Diet Pepsi campaign."

Twenty-five years later, Sheridan has recast those difficult life lessons into her one-woman show "The Pomegranate Seed," a mythical journey of "survival and transformation" that takes a bold, unflinching look at eating disorders, sexual abuse, and other issues affecting women's lives.

On Saturday, Sheridan performs the "musicalogue" - her word for the mix of songs and monologue that make up the show - as a benefit for the University of Utah's Women's Resource Center.

The performance is timed to highlight Eating Disorders Awareness Month, says Donna Hawxhurst, center staff consultant. The campus center offers a variety of programs, workshops, and discussion groups to aid women struggling with body-image issues. Research shows that one in four women suffers from an extreme eating disorder, but Hawxhurst estimates that as many as 90 percent of women have difficulty with body image.

"It's an issue that really preoccupies women in their lives," she says. "It's at almost epidemic proportions."

"The Pomegranate Seed" opens with a fictional encounter between the biblical Eve and Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz. Eve, who was booted from the Garden of Eden for breaking her diet, warns that when Dorothy meets the Wizard of Oz, "just don't tell him what you ate."

The show takes its title from the myth of Persephone, the beautiful daughter of Demeter and Zeus who is abducted by Hades, god of the underworld, where Hades tricks her into eating a pomegranate seed and makes her his wife. But Sheridan's modem-day Persephone, who hooks up with Hades the bad-boy biker,. ultimately redeem from her descent into the dark side and transforms the Pomegranate - the fruit of the dead in ancient mythology - into the fruit of her own rebirth.

Scattered throughout the perfor mance are factual nuggets meant to shock the audience into greater understanding of the issues.

"I read poll a few years ago where a significant number of women would rather die than gain weight," Sheridan says at one point. "Isn't that a little skewed?"

originally titled "Women's Spiritual initiation Journeys to the Underworld and Their Return," the play began as Sheridan's thesis to complete a transpersonal psychology degree. And while much of the show borrows from actual events in Sheridan's life, the specific characters and situations she creates often bear little resemblance

"I had experiences that become life threatening for some women, but I had them in a survivable formAnd I can talk about it," she says. "I've fictionalized it enough that it's not really my life anymore. I like to think I'm telling the story of many people."

Joan Sangree, a Moab therapist who has twice seen Sheridan's performance, says "Pomegranate Seed" breaks through taboos surrounding sexual abuse, eating disorders and other issues.

"She's willing to speak the unspeakable, to take the risk that somebody's going to be uncomfortable. Yet these things need to be said regardless," Sangree says. "She's right out there with it Her show gives people Permission to talk about these difficult things."

That is one of Sheridan Is goals. The other is to help her audience understand that there is beauty in even the darkest moments in life, and that often, grief gives way to wisdom."

"I'm determined that you can take on dark emotion and find the light in it.

want people to see that," she says- "I'm more than a survivor. I'm healed. The rest is mop-up."

For more Information about eating disorders and body image issues, visit the University of Utah's Women's Resource Center Web site: http://www.sa.utah.edu/women.