About

Society of Mothers
Introduction
Pregnancy
Before Parenthood
Labor and Delivery
The Baby
Changes
Society of Mothers
A Philosophy
Chain of Mothers
Earth
Heaven

In December 1988, Joe Siena was born. Earlier that year, his parents, Watchface members
Iris Rose and James Siena, had performed Sin with the rest of the group at the Museum of
Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles. Two months after Joe’s birth, Julie Lazar, a curator
at the museum who was instrumental in Watchface’s appearance there, called Iris to ask if
she was interested in creating something for a radio series that Julie was executive producing
on public radio. The series, called The Territory of Art, gave artists of all media the opportunity
to explore the possibilities of radio. Whoopi Goldberg, Ruth Maleczech of Mabou Mines,
and Eric Bogosian all served as hosts over its eventual 50 episode run, and participants
included performance artists Marina Abramovic and Ulay, theater director Peter Sellars,
painter Gary Indiana, and actor Ron Vawter of the Wooster Group.

Iris told Julie she would think about it, but that even going to the grocery store felt like a
monumental undertaking since the birth of her child. She wasn’t sure she was up to the
challenge of creating an ambitious work for a national radio program. When Iris later talked
it over with James, however, he encouraged her to accept since it was such an exceptional
opportunity, and he assured her that she was capable of rising to the challenge. Iris called
Julie back and agreed to create a piece for The Territory of Art, but she offered one
condition: “It’s going to have to be about having a baby, because that’s all I can think about
right now.” Julie told her the subject matter was her decision.

As executive producer, Julie claimed the right to select the producers that would turn Iris’
writing and ideas into an actual program for broadcast. She chose experienced radio
producers Stuart Leigh and Joan Grossman for the job. Luckily, this arranged marriage
turned out to be a very congenial one. In the early stages of the process, Iris worked
primarily with Joan since Stuart was completing another project. For their first meeting, Joan
came to Iris’ home, and Iris explained her concept of breaking up and overlaying her own
writing with interviews of other new mothers. Joan suggested that they also think about
finding other kinds of voices in order to create more variety, an important consideration for
an audio project. James, who was also present, suggested that they travel to Ithaca, New
York, to interview two women he’d met during his time at Cornell. For one thing, both were
over eighty years old; for another, one of them had a southern accent and the other a
German accent. Joan and Iris agreed that would certainly add much needed variety.
They also decided to interview a couple of young girls, one of whom was Stuart’s daughter,
Nila.

Iris began, as she did on most projects, by developing an outline and collecting material.
She divided the subjects she wanted to cover into three categories. First were the practical,
physical realities such as pregnancy, labor, delivery, and the changes that occur
immediately after giving birth and upon arriving home. Second were the psychological
changes of mentally preparing for impending parenthood and afterward realizing that you
have become a member of the “Society of Mothers,” as James christened it. Finally, there
were the larger, philosophical concepts: the fear of bringing a child into a dangerous,
unpredictable world and, in contrast, the hope for the future that a new baby represents.

Iris scheduled interviews with the other new mothers, starting with her only good friend with a
small child, dancer Lise Friedman. Iris also enlisted Rima Mardoyan-Smyth, whom she had
met in her Lamaze class, as well as friends of friends, including Joan’s pregnant roommate,
Marcy Krever, and Gina Barnett, the acting teacher of two other Watchface members. Iris
found Vicky Horowitz in an East Village babies’ playgroup they both attended regularly. The
babies didn’t really need the playgroup, but the mothers benefited greatly from getting to
know others in the neighborhood who were also coping with the complexities of raising
infants.

Iris created a list of twenty-one questions that corresponded to the subjects she was
planning to cover. Some sample questions:

Please tell me the story of your labor. What do you remember most?

In what ways are you different from your own mother in your mothering style?
In what ways the same? Has it changed your relationship to her?

What does being a parent mean?

Do you feel optimistic/pessimistic about the future of the planet – the world your child
will be an adult in?
complete questions list

In addition to recording the women’s answers to these specific questions, Iris asked each
one to tell her some of the nicknames she called her baby and the “baby talk” she used.
Iris also asked them to repeat the word “push” exactly as they had heard it in the delivery
room; this would be useful later in the editing. As Iris conducted the interviews, Joan did the
actual recording.

When most of the local mothers had been interviewed, Joan drove Iris, James, and baby Joe
to Ithaca and served as engineer at the recording sessions there. In addition to interviewing
the two elderly women, Libby Leonard and Cecelie Sieverts, they spontaneously decided to
include Cecelie’s daughters, Kati and Laurie, who were also mothers.

Libby lived in a small wooden house on the edge of Cayuga Lake, one of New York’s Finger
Lakes. She was known in Ithaca for her commitment to feeding the ducks that came up into
her yard from the lake. Iris had met Libby on a previous trip to Ithaca and had watched her
feeding the ducks, but she had never been inside Libby’s house, and James had not been
there for many years. Friends in Ithaca warned him that Libby was having a progressively
harder time keeping up with the care of the many dogs that lived with her, but she was too
proud to accept much help.

When Iris, James, Joan, and Joe arrived at the lake house, Libby welcomed everyone in.
The first thing Iris noticed was the intense odor of urine and feces from the dogs. Also, there
didn’t seem to be a clean surface anywhere to set anything down. As a new mother, she
was horrified that she had brought her baby into this environment, but as an artist, she was
determined to get the interview. Since they were unwilling to set him down anywhere, Iris
and James took turns holding Joe while Iris interviewed Libby and Joan made the recording.
Libby was happy to talk and had an energetic delivery that made her a great subject. She
told them how much she had enjoyed being a mother of two daughters, then revealed that
both of them had died. At one point she broke out singing, “Memories! Memories!” When
they at last emerged into the fresh air, Joan and Iris agreed that they had gotten something
very special.

The interview with Cecilie – whom many called Oma, German for Grandma – was very
different. She lived in a comfortable home near the Cornell campus not far from her two
daughters (she also had three sons in other cities). In the interview, however, she revealed
that she had also once lost a child, a baby boy that had only lived a few weeks. Although
she had five adult children, Oma confessed that for decades she continued to think daily of
the one she had lost. She also spoke movingly of leaving her own mother in Nazi Germany
and never seeing her again.

Back in New York, Iris worked on transcribing the tapes by hand into a spiral-bound
notebook transcription notebook page and assembling the script. At this point, Stuart became
more involved with the project. Although Watchface was highly collaborative, Iris was not
used to sharing the responsibility for organizing and structuring the work that she initiated.
She recognized, however, that Stuart and Joan brought a great deal of experience and
expertise to the process, particularly relating to what made effective radio. For instance, the
original script for Labor and Delivery was made up entirely of statements taken from the new
mother interviews. Iris’ intention was to heighten the universality of the experience by having
all of the mothers tell their labor and delivery stories together. Labor and Delivery original script
Stuart convinced her that the piece would be much more powerful but still universal if she
instead told her own labor and delivery story in detail, with brief interjections from the other
mothers.

Iris’ deadline for a complete draft of the script for Society of Mothers was two weeks before
they would go into the studio to record her part. The team used the intervening time to
tighten up the script, with Stuart and Joan offering suggestions, and Iris rewriting. In addition
to the complete change of direction for Labor and Delivery, as noted above, the revisions
included the elimination of one section, To Be a Parent, To Be a Parent script and the
reduction of an intended opening montage, The Initiation, to a single line – Marcy Krever’s
“I’m going to have a baby” – which was moved to follow this introduction:

Hello, my name is Iris Rose.
But I’m not the same Iris Rose that I was a year ago because now I’m someone’s mother.
His name is Joe.
Yes, I’m a member of the club.
The Society of Mothers.

The recording of Iris’ voice took place in a small studio within the Carnegie Hall complex. Iris
struggled to find the perfect balance between being expressive and overselling the material,
but she trusted the producers to guide her. The biggest challenge was re-creating the
sounds of giving birth – a lot of moaning and heavy breathing – into a microphone with
several people watching.

The final bits of recording to be done were the ambient sounds that would be used to create
audio texture. Joan took the tape recorder to Central Park and captured the carousel’s
version of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Dah.” At Iris’ house, she recorded multiple rattles, including a
very musical, bell-like rattle from Japan. A crying baby sound was essential for the piece,
but Joe was a very good-natured baby, and Iris wasn’t sure how they could get him to cry on
cue since she wasn’t willing to hurt him just for a sound effect. Iris put Joe in a bedroom with
a microphone, then she and Joan waited in the living room until he began to express his
discontent. Iris wasn’t able to suppress her maternal instincts long enough to achieve a true
wailing cry, but they got a sufficient amount of fussing.

Just as the producers had helped shape the writing, Iris was a part of the editing process,
listening to the material as it was assembled and offering suggestions. They all contributed
found music for the soundtrack – Iris brought in Smokey Robinson’s “Ooo Baby Baby” and a
ragtime instrumental of “Pretty Baby”; the producers provided “Of Children” by Sweet Honey
in the Rock, which was used as a transition between sections, and the haunting lullaby
“Hush-a-bye” by Bing Crosby and bandleader Fred Waring for the ending and to underscore
the final credits. MOCA correspondence with end credits During some of the final editing sessions,
Iris brought Joe along, and he passed the time by nursing and sleeping.

Stuart and Joan carefully assembled all the disparate pieces, trimming and shaping the final
version to fit the inflexible 28-minute length restriction, but leaving enough room for Libby
and Oma to each tell as much of their powerful stories as possible. A selection of old blues
guitar was used to underscore Libby’s monologue and a mournful Hebrew song for Oma.

Society of Mothers was completed on time and the final version was turned over to the
Museum of Contemporary Art. It was first broadcast as part of The Territory of Art series in late
1989 and rebroadcast in early 1990; air dates varied by local stations. Around the time of the
rebroadcasts, Julie called Iris to tell her that Society of Mothers was receiving an award: it had
been selected by American Women in Radio and Television (AWRT) as the Outstanding
Dramatic Radio Program of that year. The organization was committed to rewarding
“excellence in programming that presents a positive and realistic portrayal of women,” and
they felt that Society of Mothers had achieved that.

In March 1990, Iris was invited to attend the award ceremony in the ballroom of the
Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. A single ticket was provided, so Iris went alone. Before the
ceremony, she talked to a few other radio people, and she was asked if she’d like to have
her picture taken shaking hands with 60 Minutes’ Leslie Stahl. She said yes but she never
received a copy of the photo, since no one asked her name or where it should be sent.

The panel onstage during the luncheon presentation included many celebrities from the
world of broadcast media, not all of them women. Local newsman Chuck Scarborough said
that his presence proved that you didn’t have to be female to be included, you only had to
be blonde. Iris received her award from another blonde, gossip columnist Liz Smith, and
made a brief speech thanking Julie, Stuart, Joan, and MOCA, though none of them were
there to hear it.

Although Iris was thrilled to have won a national award for her only piece for radio, the
physical object that represented her achievement was a disappointment. It consisted of a
rectangle of dark Plexiglas topped with a slightly bent piece of gold toned metal, unadorned
other than bearing the pertinent information, and another naming Society of Mothers, The
Territory of Art, and the museum. Despite her pride, Iris felt it was too unattractive and
impersonal to hang in her home, so she mailed it to MOCA. They sent it back to her with a
note stating that it was their policy for artists to keep the awards they earned. Iris stared at
the ugly award. “I decided to make lemonade out of this lemon,” she remembers. She
glued embossed gold paper trims onto the bent metal plaque and framed the title of the
show with vintage die cuts of mothers and their babies. Finally she covered the top half of
the Plexiglas with paper cutouts of roses. “Once I finished customizing it and making it really
mine, it became one of my most treasured possessions. It has hung in my home ever since.”
customized AWRT Award

David Newgarden of New Jersey’s freeform radio station WFMU found out about Society of
Mothers and asked Iris if he could play it on his program. James was a devoted fan of the
station and, not long before, he and Iris had performed live on the air with Joshua Fried as
the music group Nancy (see Nancy/Marty/Masterpiece Theater for a description of the group).
They also brought along two-year-old Joe. When he was asked to request a song, he chose
“Whiskey in the Jar” by The Pogues, which endeared him to the staff at the station. When
David called Iris with his request, she told him she’d love for him to play her radio piece
inspired by Joe’s birth, but it wasn’t her decision to make since the program belonged to the
Museum of Contemporary Art. Iris contacted Julie on David’s behalf, and she gave WFMU
permission to broadcast Society of Mothers one final time.