“Listen to Your Mother” – Performances and Essays about Motherhood

“This year’s show weaves together a lot of different themes into a really fantastic quilt.”

Listen to Your Mother is a nationwide series of performances of essays and stories about motherhood. They are typically performed on Mother’s Day, but this year, the Boulder performance is happening Saturday April 30th.  Stephanie Sprenger and Katie Wise are 2 of the 3 member production team for this year’s Boulder performance of Listen To Your Mother.  They have both participated in previous performances.

Last year Stephanie read a piece called Babies put the Fun in Funeral “that was about taking my breast fed 3 month old baby on plane ride so I could sing at the funeral of my 95 year old great uncle and what could possibly go wrong in that scenario?”

Katie Wise’s essay called “All you need is lovey”, a story about her son’s lovey, ended up in the Listen to Your Mother book. “It was a maternity tank top that says ‘Expecting Baby’ on it and it was his lovey and he was and is still obsessed with it and needs it to sleep – he’s 7 years old now – and it’s the story of one fateful day when both of his – we’d cut it in two so it could be in two places at once – and both pieces of orange shirt went missing on the same day. I was 8 months pregnant and racing around town like a lunatic and stalking homeless people and trying to return my son’s lovey.”

Stephanie and Katie say there is a lot of diversity in this years stories. “they span everything from pregnancy to postpartum anxiety, special needs parenting, empty nest parents who have that full perspective and also a few readers are talking about their relationships with their own mothers which can be quite complex as we all know.  So we really feel that this year’s show weaves together a lot of different themes into a really fantastic quilt.”
audio:

Listen to Your Mother Boulder is happening Saturday April 30th at the Unity Church in Boulder.  Doors open at 6.30pm, performance at 7pm.  A portion of the proceeds go to benefit EFAA, Emergency Family Assistance Association.