For Mother's Day, Steve got me tickets to see Urinetown the Musical on Broadway, a gift that I have been asking for for years.

When I went to acting school in Chicago, one of the great local theater experiences was the Neo-Futarists' show, Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind. TMLMTBGB is an attempt to perform 30 "plays" in 60 minutes. Each play is written by a cast member. Often, that cast member was sort of the star of the play, but not always. The play could be something like a tableau that illustrates a memory, it could be a quick story, they often made political statements. One play was called "truth" - the audience got to pick a cast member and the cast member had to answer yes or no questions presented by the audience truthfully. The 30 plays were numbered and strung up on a clothesline. The audience called out the number of the play that they wanted to see next when each play ended. There was a darkroom clock set for 60 minutes and if the company got through all 30 plays, they ordered pizza. A die would be rolled to determine how many new plays would be written for the next week's show.

After I was back in New York for a couple of years, the Neo Futarists sent a group of actors to start TMLMTBGB in NYC. I was so thrilled and I went to see them every chance I got. It was like food for the soul. The actors included Ayun Haliday, Greg Kotis and Spencer Kayden. There were three other players whose names I can't remember - two men and a woman. Ayun liked to show the audience the bagel on her belly during scene changes. Greg's plays were often political, though he and one of the other male players had a lot of plays with potty humor. You know, like farts. Ha ha. Spencer was our favorite. She was strange and subtle and very very funny without ever being a ham.

At some point they stopped performing in NY. Ayun and Greg got married and had a baby, the first thoroughbred Neo-Futarist. Ayun wrote a puppet play about her daughter's birth called Neo Natal Sweet Potato, performed by Ayun and Spencer. I saw it with Steve very early in our relationship and it made a huge impression on me in terms of the experience of childbirth and hospitals and storytelling. It is one of my favorite plays ever. I tried to homebirth Aidan, but he ended up being born in the same hospital as Ayun's daughter and I found myself thinking of them there.

I connected with the HipMama community because of Ayun, who now writes a zine called the East Village Inky and wrote a book called The Big Rumpus, both about her kids and parenting.

So then Greg wrote Urinetown and over the last few years I saw it go from the NY Fringe Festival to Off-Broadway to Broadway. I didn't even realize that Spencer was in it for some time. Frankly, I'm not sure that I would want some one to shell out the Broadway bucks if she wasn't in it. So we finally saw it last night and it was great. I still like Neo-Natal Sweet Potato better, and I would have much rather seen it in a more raw (and cheaper!) setting - but how cool is it to see this group of actors make it? And there were so many NYC TMLMTBGB elements in it: Greg's potty humor taken to the extreme, the Broadway parodies, the political commentary.