MOMbo.org : mother's day 2002

home : programs : mother's day 2002

A MOMbo Mother's Day Celebration
From PRI, Public Radio International
by Nanci Olesen

Way before Hallmark, Mother's Day was a political event. Nanci Olesen, in her inimitable mom style, revisits Julia Ward Howe's 1870 Mother's Day Proclamation, read in multiple voices, young and old.

She talks with Anne Crittenden, the author of The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World is Still the Least Valued (Owl/Henry Holt), and former New York Times reporter, financial writer and foreign correspondent for Fortune and Newsweek and economics commentator for CBS News (and she's a mom). Special guest Amy Borkowsky, who saves her mother's answering machine messages for fourteen years simply must be heard to be believed.

And as always, the real voices of other real moms: journalist Diane Richard on vanquishing the "evil" stepmother, Kris Berggren and Julia Jergensen Edelman, on what makes a perfect Mother's Day, and actor Annie Piper, with a humorous salute to her first year as a mom. Great music, poetry, and interstitial material is interwoven.

The show length is 59 minutes.

Here are descriptions from four of the eleven years of the MOMbo half-hour, "MOMbo, a mom show":

MOTHER'S DAY SHOW RESOURCES:

Julia Ward Howe's "A Mother's Day Proclamation for Peace," is online. (Send this to your newspaper, or take it someplace and read it to a crowd!)

The Mother's Day essay by Nanci Olesen can be found at Tompaine.com and pacificapeacewatch.org.

Louise Erdrich's bookstore, Birchbark Books.

Michele Weldon's book, I Closed My Eyes, on Amazon.com.

Million Mom March, a national grassroots chapter-based organization dedicated to preventing gun death and injury.

AustinMama.com, celebrating a mama's world: the heart soaring, sacred mess of it all!

Linda Breitag's music is available through the Bread for the Journey web site!

Mothers Acting Up is organizing Mother's Day parades in cities across America, as a part mobilizing the gigantic political strength of mothers. You can do it too. Visit their web site and download their "parade recipe". Do it on stilts (and get their "stilts recipe"!) It's as easy as apple pie!

(Visit our RESOURCES page for other resources.)