Social media superstars, podcasters, and viral video influencers Catherine Belknap and Natalie Telfer, aka Cat and Nat, are best known for telling their #MOMTRUTHS. So trust them when they say that their live show will be “The Night of Your Life.”
“Everybody should go, because the night is designed to be the ultimate night out for any woman, doesn’t even need to be a mom,” Telfer told Revue. “It’s a night filled with everything that is just fun and funny. The two of us, we didn’t have a lot of opportunities, having seven kids, and husbands, to be able to go out. And so we were like, ‘If we were going to go out, what’s everything we would put in that night, if there was just one night only. And so we took all those elements, and we put it all into this.”
Longtime friends Cat and Nat first met in high school as teenagers. They went to the same summer camp, but then lost touch until they became moms and reconnected over Facebook.
Sharing feelings of loneliness, isolation, and disconnection as new moms, they soon started hosting and organizing wine and dinner parties to bring together other moms to share laughs and swap stories in their native Toronto. After the success of those events, they decided to take on the ridiculous standards placed on moms via social media by creating their own vlog series in 2014.
In the years since, they’ve performed over 100 live shows all across North America, racked up millions of views, and expanded their massive network of followers across nearly every digital platform.
But even as they got busier, and their audiences have gotten bigger, Cat and Nat said that they’ve never lost sight on keeping things all about connection and community.
“We’ve had people fly to the shows from all over,” Belknap said. “They come with their friends. So it really is about a night of community fun. We host you so you don’t feel like you don’t not know what to do. There’s cocktails, there’s mocktails, there’s entertainment, and there’s us.”
“It’s about laughter,” Telfer said. “It’s about positivity. It’s about women feeling like no matter who you are, if you’re alone or with your friends that you belong because you’re there with us.”
And there’s lots of mom truths at the live shows, which has become the duo’s distinct brand.
“We talk a lot about our mom truths, including confessions from the audience,” Telfer said. “We love to get the audience to participate. And I think a lot of times people don’t know what they’re going to come for, but they dance, they sing, they laugh, they hug, and they just leave feeling like I’m part of a community that’s good in the world, and we don’t judge each other, and we’re still allowed to have fun.”
Absolutely enjoying every minute that they’re up onstage and out on tour, Cat and Nat are themselves escaping from their lives as moms back at home. Jokingly calling their tour the Reckless Abandonment Tour, they admit they had to learn to accept that things would be OK with their families back at home, and that it was important for them to help other moms get out and laugh.
“In the beginning, when we first had kids, we never left the kids alone, and we thought we were the only ones that could actually do it all,” Telfer said. “And we didn’t even give the husbands the opportunity to try, because we could do it better.
“And we couldn’t,” Belknap interjects. “But we thought we could.”
“So it was when you do that, then you take all of the stress and you put it all on yourself,” Telfer said. “And it’s not that other people weren’t available to help you. You’re just like, ‘I got it, I got it.’ So when we started to do this, and we had the ability to go and travel and do these shows, and leave for the first time, we got to see that husbands, babysitters, our moms, other people were actually able to take care of our kids. And our kids saw that other people can love them and take care of them too. So for us, it was really transformational as moms, to realize that you do need to take time for yourself.”
As their kids have grown, Cat and Nat have candidly shared the ups and downs, the shifting challenges and triumphs of raising now teenage children in the age of social media, with all the pluses and minuses that come with it. Their families are proud of them for creating something that has become a mom movement online over the years.
“When our kids were little, people would ask, what does your mom do? And our kids had been heard saying, like, our moms help other moms,” Telfer said. “Not our moms go out on stage, or do this podcast, or wrote this book. Our moms help other moms. And it was like the most amazing thing because we had never said that to them. But that’s the way they saw it.”
Cat & Nat’s Reckless Abandonment Tour: “The Night of Your Life”
Miller Auditorium, 1341 Theatre Dr., Kalamazoo
Feb. 22, 7:30 p.m. $39-49, $104 VIP
Millerauditorium.com, catandnat.ca
