Cat & Nat tour an evening of ‘A mom loot bag of fun’
Catherine Belknap and Natalie Telfer — better-known as Cat & Nat — became friends in high school, reconnected after they both became moms, started a social-media empire and are now taking their show on the road on their fourth tour together.
They will be stopping at the Davidson Theatre at the Riffe Center Theatre Complex on Sept. 30 with a show Belknap — speaking by phone from a dress shop in Toronto, where the two were preparing for their tour — describes as “a mom loot bag of fun. It’s conversation, it’s dancing, it’s laughter, there’s a DJ, there might be special local guests. It’s just taking a moment in a group of supportive women to feel connected again.”
The two best friends, both in their late 30s, started out connecting other moms on a much smaller scale about eight years ago. Both had young kids at home — Telfer and her husband have four children and Belknap and her husband have three — and they were getting antsy.
“We were stay-at-home moms, and we would get together with a whole bunch of moms and kids. We created a music class just so we could all be together. It turned out that all these moms really wanted to have a conversation, and we couldn’t finish a sentence when our babies were around. There was always somebody who needed a diaper changed or who needed to eat. So then we started an event club in Toronto for moms, where we would host dinner parties, and moms could have actual conversations.”
They moved on to connect with moms they didn’t know in real life.
“At the time that we started, social media was just budding, and influencers weren’t really a thing. There were a lot of bloggers, and people writing journals. And Cat and I thought we had a lot to say, but we’re not writers. We have short attention spans. So we started making videos. And that’s where the ‘mom truth’ videos were born. The two of us sitting in a car, just having conversations about what had happened in the past night and the past day with our husbands and our children,” Telfer said.
“They are kind of like a diary of our lives,” Belknap said. “They’re moments in time. They resonate with a lot of people, because when you turn a hard situation into humor, it makes you feel less alone.”
They posted the “mom truth” videos to Youtube, where they have had hundreds of thousands of views. The threeto four-minute segments — casual, uncensored and occasionally profane — have titles such as “What They Don’t Tell You About Being a Mother,” “Reasons Mommy Drinks in Quarantini,” “Marriage in the Age of COVID” and “Leave Meghan Markle Alone.”
They have since branched out to posting on Instagram and Tiktok, producing a podcast, livestreaming their conversations and interviews with other moms and writing a book, 2019’s “Cat & Nat’s Mom Truths.”
The humor on their social media coexists with supportive messages and parenting advice.
The two are not just close to each other — they see each other every day — but to the other moms they know.
“It really does take a village. We’re leaving on this tour, and we have our mum friends on board. I have another mother carpooling my daughter for soccer. I think women just want to help each other, and it’s never really spoken about at the level it should be,” Belknap said.
They urge women to make the show a night away from family responsibilities.
“Everybody is welcome. Just not children,” Telfer said.
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