April was a crazy month. I think I’m still trying to recover from it. (Note last blog post was from April 13th.)
We went camping for spring break, Chandler had to decide which college to go to (so glad that’s over with), Marley had daily after-school lacrosse practices and two to three games a week, Chandler had every other-day after school runs and one to two track meets a week, I went to the Stagecoach Music Festival. I took seven days off work and left early at least four or five times. (I assured my bosses several times, that yes, I did still work there!) It took the skill and ingenuity of a $100K/year executive assistant to pull of the coordination needed to get everyone where they needed to be when they needed to be there. (Yet, I did it for free.)
What’s that you ask? It’s a show that has been showcasing people sharing their stories about motherhood onstage since 2008. And last month I got to share mine on a stage in a Downtown Los Angeles theater. I felt honored that over two dozen people came to see me. The other people in the show were amazing. I can’t believe I was chosen to stand among them and share my story.
Hanging backstage before my big stage debut.
And even though it will possibly mortify my children (like I’ve never done that before here), you can watch it below if you like. But only if you promise to focus on how great my hair looked and my awesome comedic timing rather than how the harsh stage lighting makes me look 1,000 years old and the dress I’m wearing makes me appear a little fat. (I swear when I looked in the mirror I looked awesome.)
My typical Sunday goes a little something like this:
My alarm goes off at 5:00 (yes even on Sunday), but I probably stayed up late on Saturday night – you know, until 10:00 or 10:30 and most likely had a good bit of wine, so I decide to be nice to myself and sleep in until 6:00. I get up, have some coffee, attempt to write my Monday blog post, hit a mental block and end up cruising Facebook or Pinterest instead. At 7:15 I realize I still have to walk the dog and get ready to run at 8:00 and curse myself for wasting so much time and not getting up at 5:00 (though if I had I probably would have just wasted even more time on Facebook and Pinterest.)
At 8:00 I meet my run club and suffer through 25-50 minutes of torture train for my 10K. Then my running friends and I go have coffee. After coffee it’s home to laundry, house cleaning, pulling my wardrobe for the week, grocery shopping (I usually hit at least two stores), and meal prep for the week (when you work 9-6 you’ve got to have a meal plan and at least a few things pre-made) . Sunday is always my busiest and most hectic day. I always aspire to take a nap. It never happens.
Sunday Funday
But yesterday was different. Instead of wardrobe and meal planning and laundry and shopping I ditched suburbia and headed out to Hollywood for a field trip with some of my friends from my writers’ group to see our friend Kim Tracy Prince perform in a show called Expressing Motherhood at the Lillian Theater. Sure, we have no vegetables in the house, we’ll be dining on grilled cheese all week, and I’ll be running around like a chicken with my head cut off in the mornings, having no idea what I’m going to wear. I’m pretty sure we’ll survive. Besides, I deserve a day out with my girlfriends, dammit!
Expressing Motherhood is a show where 12 women get up and perform monologues they have written about motherhood. Some of them (like Kim’s) are hysterically funny, some are incredibly poignant, and a few of them are just gut wrenching. All of them are fabulous. I do wish Kim had advised me to bring Kleenex and wear waterproof mascara (that would have been helpful)! I cannot tell you how much I enjoyed this show.
Suburban moms going rogue
The good news for you is there are 4 more Expressing Motherhood shows next weekend. (2/14 at 7:00, 2/15 at 7:00, and 2/16 at 2:00 & 7:00) If you live in the Los Angeles area, I strongly suggest you ditch your usual weekend routine and head out to the show. I don’t want to spoil anything for you, but listening to a 64-year-old woman talking about the rebirth of her vagina is truly one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen. And listening to another woman talk about her son’s cleft palate – one of the most heartbreaking.
Tickets are $25 online (buy them here) and $30 at the door. They sell wine and AWESOME lard-free chicken tamales that you can actually bring with you into the theater instead scarfing down quickly in the lobby like at most theaters.
Be good to yourself – go see this show!
I highly encourage you to grab some girlfriends, get out of your suburban rut, and go see the show. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll drink some wine, maybe eat a tamale. You might not have any vegetables in the house or your work wardrobe planned, but you’ll have a great time. And you deserve that don’t you? (The answer is yes, you do!)
P.S. This is NOT a sponsored post. I paid to see this show and would do it again. It really is so fantastic!
Charlene Ross 