It is said that American adolescent girls are more fearful of gaining weight than they are of cancer, war or of losing their parents.

In a two-act narrative performance Friday night, the Eating Disorder Center of Denver and the University of Denver’s Women’s Studies Program brought modern renaissance folk singer Cosy Sheridan to the Sturm Auditorium stage to perform her most recent project titled “The Pomegranate Seed.”

This concert and open house was to help the Eating Disorder Center celebrate its second anniversay as well as bring up issues of body image.

The first act was a fictional encounter between Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz and the biblical Eve, who has been banished from the Garden of Eden for not sticking to her diet.

“The fork in my yellow brick road came when I was fourteen,” Sheridan said to the audience as the applause from her first number subsided. “My dad promised he’d buy me a new dress if I lost weight.”

In a shiny garnet and black, kimono-style gown, Sheridan went on to spin a musical tale of one woman’s battle with mass media messages, idealized Barbie dolls, fad diets, peer pressure, family misgivings and cultural icons.

Originally titled “Women’s Spiritual Initiation Journeys to the Underworld and Their Return,” “Pomegranate Seed” began as Sheridan’s thesis project to complete a transpersonal psychology degree from Burlington College in Vermont.

Sheridan explains that her show has evolved to its current state as “one woman’s spiritual journey into the symbolic underworld and her emergence as a vibrant and more compassionate person.”

In act two, the audience is introduced to Persephone, a character who meets and falls in love with a biker named Hades. Hades instigates a doomed cross-country journey that leads Persephone into an underworld of moral darkness and ethical abandonment.

At the end of her struggle Persephone regains her lost innocence and learns how “to turn the food of the dead, the pomegranate, into the seed of her own rebirth.”