If you’ve seen the sign, you know… the vaginas are coming.

It sounds a bit like some quasi-pornographic gross-out horror flick playing to an audience bespectacled in 3-D glasses. One imagines giant flaming letters would come tumbling out from the screen, toward beehived and crew-cut teenagers, saying “When Vaginas Attack!”

In this case, though, the vaginas are relatively nonthreatening (phew!), and rather than attempting to maul the audience, they’ll be poignantly telling their personal tales via student performers, come next Friday’s performance of “The Vagina Monologues,” put on by the Women’s Ensemble Theater Troupe, better known as WETT.

Even before the actual performance, which has been in the works since the first weeks of school Fall Quarter, WETT will ring in Valentine’s Day weekend with a massive “Vagina Carnival,” to be held Friday in Storke Plaza from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. The festivities will involve face painting, balloon animals, cotton candy, candy apples, a performance by Naked Voices and a collection of various other student groups hoping to make themselves better known to the UCSB campus, including Take Back the Night and Men Against Rape.

“We’re just trying to use this Valentine’s Day celebration to call attention to more things than just warm fuzzies,” said current WETT President Stephanie Griesmer. “But you can’t fight negativity with negativity, so we’re trying to put on this huge, positive event to celebrate women and vaginas and have fun.”

For the 40-some-odd female students involved in next week’s performance of the award-winning “The Vagina Monologues,” written by renowned activist and playwright Eve Ensler, the weeks surrounding Valentine’s Day have become some of the most jittery and nerve-wracking days of their college career.

“We’re all freaking out a little bit right now, but we’ve just been slowly trying to do fun events together and build friendships, like we all went to the Riviera porn store together,” Griesmer said.

Beyond admiring candy lube and Jenna Jameson’s newest release, the girls of WETT have been hard at work picking the particular monologues for this year’s production, meeting weekly and making sure their efforts don’t stop short come the closing night of “The Vagina Monologues.” Griesmer and the group’s vice president, Kristin Dias, even had the opportunity to travel to Las Vegas last November to attend an empowerment workshop with about a hundred fellow campus organizers and Ensler herself.

“She’s such a force,” Griesmer said. “Just to be in the room with her is amazing, and she doesn’t even know it. She’s like, ‘Why would I not do this? How could I not?’ It’s just so matter of fact, so much so that she doesn’t even realize she’s this amazing person who started this whole movement. It was just wonderful to take a piece of that back with us – to be inspired.”

Outside of “The Vagina Monologues” performances, Ensler has made it her life’s work to spread the word about “V-day,” a worldwide campaign to stop violence against women in the forms of rape, battery, incest, female genital mutilation and sexual slavery. Over 1,000 different universities and colleges partake in the V-Day College Campaign, from which every penny of proceeds is donated to local organizations whose mission statement it is to stop or prevent violence against women. In its first five years, the V-Day movement raised over $14 million, with $7 million raised in 2002 alone.

WETT, formed in 2000, performs “The Vagina Monologues” annually at UCSB and managed to raise $8,000 last year. Still, spending so much time with such an accepting and open-minded group of women can, at times, create its fair share of confusion when interacting with those outside of WETT.

“In our group, we talk about sexuality; we say ‘vagina’ and ‘cunt,’ and then I’ll be outside of the group talking and just casually mention, ‘Oh, I’m just hanging out with the vaginas tonight,’ and they’re like, ‘What?’, and you’ll try to correct yourself with, ‘Oh, you know. It’s like a pussy party.’ It’s just a word but sometimes you forget,” Griesmer said.

For Griesmer, being a part of WETT and Ensler’s mission has become something deeply embedded within her, especially after performing the “Flood” piece during last year’s “Vagina Monologues.”

“I told that woman’s story and it just changed my life,” Griesmer said. “I don’t know how or why but something in that experience, being onstage and telling that story – it just spoke to me and has become a passion of mine. Even after I graduate, I hope to bring the performance up to my hometown, near Lake Tahoe. I won’t leave it. I can’t.”

Outside of the crowd-pleasing performances and heart-warming philanthropic gestures WETT provides to the community, it seems they’ve become known for something uniquely their own.

“There’s a message board link on the ‘Vagina Monologues’ website, and I’ve gotten so many e-mails from people in L.A. and even New York, because they somehow have heard how we make a new, huge vagina every year for V-day. So I’ll get these e-mails or phone calls saying, ‘Oh, do you have a big vagina you can send us? Like a traveling vagina?’ And I’m like, ‘Well, it sort of seems like a make-your-own-pussy kind of deal, you know?'” Griesmer said.

So, be forewarned that not only do vaginas around UCSB have plenty to blab about, but they also even come in gigantic sizes. As long as there’s no flaming vaginas hurtling towards you, though, you should be safe… for now.

Come visit the WETT Vagina Carnival in Storke Plaza on Friday from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. and pick up tickets for “The Vagina Monologues,” being performed at Campbell Hall next Friday and Saturday at 7 p.m. Visit www.wettucsb.com for more info.