Mom’s the Word: Talkin’ Turkey

Arts Club Granville Island Stage to January 1, 2023
Tickets from $39 at www.artsclub.com or 604-687-1644

Posted November 11, 2022

Death and taxes – and, oh yes, Christmas; three things you can count on happening. In this, the Mom’s  the Word Collective’s fifth installment of their 1993 hit, the writers/performers look at the holiday season in all its joy and jubilation, frustration and frenzy. The moms – Jill Daum, Alison Kelly, Robin Nichol, Barbara Pollard and  Deborah Williams – are no longer new moms as they were in the early 1990s and no longer dealing with rebellious teenagers as they were in the early 2000s. One is widowed, at least one has moved into a condo from the family home, some are empty nesters but one thing they have in common: Christmas is on the doorstep whether they like it or not. Another thing they have in common? A well-honed sense of humour and humanity that pours off Pam Johnson’s gingerbread advent calendar set right into your lap.

It’s a formula that has been working for them since the beginning: highly personal stories – one  after another  – interspersed with song and dance and punched up with pithy, pull-the-rug-out, cut-the-crap wisecracks from, generally, Williams and sometimes no-nonsense Nichol. Just when the nostalgia gets sweeter than plum pudding, the bubble bursts. When Kelly, for example, almost breaks our heart with the story of her first baby, born three  months premature and weighing only two pounds, Williams cracks, “He’s 34. You gotta find a better story.”

Along with a disastrous tale of a raw turkey, cutting down – well, bashing down – a Christmas tree with a rock because the saw got lost in the snow, a dog-sledding Christmas gift for the whole family that led to everyone being covered in dog shit, there are truly touching stories the most poignant of which is Daum’s struggle accepting her daughter’s new boyfriend – “what’s his name?” – at the Christmas table. It’s less about Max’s presence and more about the absence of her husband John Mann who died in 2019.

As always, some of the stories work better than others. In the tradition of Stuart McLean, exaggeration is heartily employed and you know – because we all do it – a funny story seems funnier when it’s blown out of all proportion. But not always.

Lip syncing to their own voices is just plain weird and the forced humour of the Florence Elf Show (oh, I just got the pun) is a bit hit or miss but the North Pole Dancers are outrageously funny. Like the holiday season itself, Talkin’ Turkey has its highs and lows.

But as the moms have grown older, along with the rest of us, they seem willing to be more openly honest. The past wasn’t always all that rosy; sometimes it wasn’t rosy at all. Williams, for example, hasn’t celebrated Christmas for three decades. She celebrates, in a big way, all other holidays including Welsh Bread Day; who knew there was one? And she suffered a stroke and life got a little smaller for a while. Pollard hints at a miserable childhood and some unhappy Christmases. Nichol misses the wonderful Christmases with her grandparents on the family farm but the farm is gone.

But life goes on. Christmas keeps coming. And the moms are still together, still creating together, still having fun together, still giving the gift of laughter to the rest of us. Each of them has two families: their own and The Moms. And, for those of us who have been following them over the decades, they have us, too: a huge, extended family sharing a laugh or two just as the most delightfully dreaded or dreadfully delightful holiday season is upon us. I’d say , “God bless them, every one” but chances are Williams would snort, in her most scathing tone of voice, “Get a grip!”