One
500-Seat Confession Booth
NatIt’s the kind of moment that feels like a dream. I’m backstage, in a different country, with my best friend in the world, Cat, about to put on the very first show of a business we’ve created together. It’s all I can think as I hear the crowd just meters away, on the other side of the curtain, give a loud cheer. They roar. The music thrums, the lights sparkle. Time seems to pause, and a supercut of the months leading up to this moment flashes in my mind. Endless phone calls, family strategizing, text threads with Cat, freezing meals, planning playdates, talking to our team, coordinating carpools, business meetings, day planners full of schedule shifts.
And now, here we are. At the Tobin Center in San Antonio, mere moments and steps away from hundreds of fans who have come here for us. For us, and for themselves. To be swept away by a night of glitz and laughs. To make us a part of their real lives—not just their idle scrolling. And I want to make this night the perfect escape for them, an escape from their own endless text threads planning playdates and day planners full of scheduling mathematics worthy of NASA.
Suddenly, it seems almost ridiculous. We have no script. We’re just two moms who make each other laugh. What if it doesn’t translate to the big stage? My body revolts against me. Palms sweating, heart quickening in time with the rising beat of the DJ, breath getting tight, legs unsteady. This feels like more than stage fright. It’s panic, the disastrous possibility of letting these people in the audience down. They arranged babysitters for this. We need to make it worth the babysitter’s fee and the guilt for taking a night off from their kids. Can we do this? I feel dizzy.
I turn to grab Cat’s hand. As I try to mouth HELP, which my tense muscles can barely manage to articulate, she breaks into a huge, face-splitting grin.
“I’M DRUNK!” she says, laughing and glittering.
For most people, this would be the final straw that turns a near breakdown to a full-on panic attack. But it’s me, and it’s Cat. Seeing her laugh gleefully and mischievously, without a care in the world, put me right back into the spirit of this thing. We were here to take away feelings of nerves, guilt, anxiety, and stress. We were here to alleviate all the things that make women, mothers, and parents feel not good enough. We were here to be ourselves—that’s what these people came for! Who knows why, but they want our messy, beautiful, silly, inappropriate, wild—and, apparently, drunk—selves. We’ve never promised to be perfect—or even sober, I guess. We’re just them, with microphones.
The beginning of our intro song starts to play, and my insides swell with anticipation. It’s showtime. And this show did have quite an unexpected twist to it, but not at all in the way we expected.
But before we go any further, let us tell you about how we got to that moment in the first place.
After grueling preparations to make sure our families survived our absence, Cat and I are sitting pretty. More specifically, sitting pretty on a plane, Texas-bound for the first leg of our multi-city tour, and eagerly signaling the flight attendant over for some beverages. We’re reeling from the fact that hundreds of people have paid real, actual money to see us live, but relieved we made our flight at all. Finally, we let out a sigh of relief. All the planning has paid off, and now it’s just time to carry out those plans. On theme with our first stop, we order some tequila cocktails to celebrate.
Unfortunately, we opted for the extravagantly expensive in-flight Wi-Fi—one of those inventions you think is going to make your life so much better, but actually makes it so much worse. You’re supposed to be unavailable for those glorious hours on a plane! Who allowed that to change! A few sips in, we decide we should post some fun pre-show, en-route pictures on our social media to get our fans excited for the tour.
But the internet giveth and the internet taketh away.
Across the aisle, our beloved Sam, tour team leader, is also connecting to Wi-Fi. She gives us a pained look, and at first we think it’s just because she spent the past half hour puking into a paper bag (eight weeks pregnant, unbeknownst to us), but then we realize it’s more than sickness.
“Gals, I just got an email,” she says. “Our whole team of male strippers have come down with the flu.”
This was pre-pandemic, so the flu qualified as a major disaster. We never expected smooth sailing (after all, it’s us), but we’d already lost out on the hottest DJ in Texas—some shirtless cowboy who was booked until next century—and had to replace him with a wedding DJ our sweet assistant booked because he “sounded nice.”
We order another round of drinks—not celebration drinks this time . . . nerve-calming drinks. Please-God-let-us-find-hot-guys-to-dance-for-the-moms drinks.
We open up our laptops and start frantically googling. I type in “last minute hot male strippers” and see Cat type “emergency hot guys for rent.” We’re trying everything we can: “24/7 men dancers,” “strippers available TONIGHT SAN ANTONIO HELP.” Because we need the hot strippers. A cardboard cutout of Channing Tatum just won’t do. (How does one get one of those hologram projectors they use to bring back dead celebrities?) No. We promised hundreds of moms living, breathing, gyrating, and, above all, hot strippers. They juggled their schedules, booked babysitters, meal-prepped, got dressed up, and paid for Ubers for this. We are not going to let them down, no matter how bleak the options for no-notice San Antonio hotties looks.
We land in Texas, and our team has decided we should do a little sightseeing to get a feel for the area before the show tonight. But all we can think about is hot half-naked men and it’s making us miserable. Finally, we get word that someone knows someone who knows someone else who has a hookup for replacement strippers. Beggars can’t be choosers, so we’re like, “Okay, good enough for us!”
We have to get started on our pre-show routine, you see. Like a diva trilling through multiple octaves before hitting the stage, Cat and I need to warm up our instrument. Our art is riffing and joking, so that’s what we need to do. We hit the town, checking out the shops, sampling the local beverages, chatting about things we can bring up during the show. This is our rehearsal for the off-the-cuff style that is our bread and butter. Three-minute YouTube videos in our parked SUVs, three-hour live show in front of an audience, what’s the difference?
We soak up the sights, and soak up some more alcohol, too. I am liking business trips more with each margarita. When we arrive at the venue, women are lined up around the block already. It’s exactly what we dreamed of—these hot mamas laughing, chatting, meeting each other. The energy is contagious, and we rush inside to freshen our makeup and get our show outfits on.
An hour before showtime, we meet the DJ. He is indeed, uh, nice. But he seems like he’d be more at home at a library than on a stage in front of screaming moms who have escaped their homes and families for a precious night out.
“At least our dancers will spice things up a little,” Cat whispers to me. And just then, our scantily clad troupe saunters down the hall toward us for introduction.
“Oh my God,” I whisper-scream in Cat’s ear. “Did we hire high-schoolers by accident?!”
Our Chippendales were looking more like Chip ’n’ Dale. Cat and I look at each other. Okay, okay, not to worry. Men aren’t the main draw of this event anyway! Nope, not about men at all—this is about divine feminine bonding, I think with desperation. And the stage adds ten years, right? They’re meant to be accessories to our jokes and games . . . and how bad can they be, really?
Now we’re back where we started this story: onstage. We’re trying not to die of secondhand embarrassment as the scrawny, dirty-jeaned strippers we’re subjecting this audience to are doing their “routine”: moves that bring us flashbacks of sweaty adolescent school-dance thrusting. Cat can see in my eyes that I’m starting to panic, so she cues the DJ to turn down the music and we transition into the Q&A section of the evening. I worry that we might be losing the crowd; this isn’t the sexy little night out they’d envisioned. Mics are passed into the audience.
A woman who appears to be here alone stands to take the mic. The crowd hushes. She speaks clearly, though she seems shy. She introduces herself and says, “I’m a single mom trying to be both a mother and a father to my kids, and every day I feel like I’m failing them. All around me I see groups of friends and moms who came with their besties, but I don’t have mom friends. I wish I had my own Cat to my Nat to walk with me through life.”
Copyright © 2022 by Catherine Belknap. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
