In Front of Your Eyes 2026
A Festival of New Performance Presents
Lauren Mayer’s
I Didn’t Come From Your Rib (You Came From My Vagina)
The Marsh Berkeley Cabaret Theater
August 21 at 7:30 pm & August 23 at 4:00 pm
Written & Performed by Lauren Mayer
Opener: Judith Linzer
Ticket Information
Tickets: $15 – $35 General Seating | $50 & $100 Reserved Seating
60 minutes | No Intermission
(Please do not bring infants to the show)
Online ticket sales close 2 hours before each performance.
Additional tickets may be available for purchase at the door.
Show Description
As a woman in her late 60s who grew up with a feminist mother (who had an abortion before they were legal), Lauren is shocked at how rights she thought were established are now under attack. But Lauren responds to this with humor as well as righteous outrage. This show uses a mix of her own feminist journey, her mother’s history, and tunes like the title song, as wells “If Men Could Get Pregnant” and “I Don’t Wanna Go Back to 1950”.
Artist Biography
Lauren Mayer, Writer and Performer
Lauren has performed various solo shows at venues around the Bay Area, including Marsh Rising/MNM and numerous JCCs and synagogues (“Don’t Mind Me, I’ll Just Sit Here In The Dark” and “Dear Internet Trolls”), and at Hillbarn Theater (“Psycho Super Mom”). She is a 5-time recipient of the SF Cabaret Gold Award, a phi beta kappa graduate of Yale University, and the creator of weekly topical comedy song videos that have earned millions of views and almost as many trolls.
Opener
Judith Linzer
I did 18 short shows with Martha Rynberg at SPW – Solo Performance Workshop between 2016-2023. Martha stopped teaching and Steve Budd recommended Joyful Raven. I took a class with Joyful in January 2025 right after returning from 4 months as an activist in Israel/Palestine, having spent considerable time in the West Bank visiting/supporting Palestinians and witnessing the oppression of Palestinians in the West Bank. For the past few months, I have been part of a group with Joyful at the helm, helping us develop full length shows. I did shows on many topics such as aging, loneliness, doing things that scare me – like being a child custody professional (my career was being a clinical psychologist), working on my health (my experience at the Pritikin clinic), shopping, racism, Christian anti-Semitism. In the past four years I have done several shows about learning about the plight of the Palestinians and realizing that I had been “brainwashed” as a Jew to “not know” about it. People say that I’m funny and that they learn about “the situation” in a balanced and nuanced way when I perform and that it “makes them think and feel”. I have a way of taking “heavy” material and making it funny/palatable. I first started performing at age 63 and now I am 74. I performed this shorter piece at the Berkeley Marsh in December 2025. It was longer than 15 minutes so I would have to cut out several minutes for this show. Joyful is a wonderful teacher/coach and my work with her has improved my performing. I have a video of that December 2025 show.
Piece Description – Do I have to hate you in order to love me, or should I just hate everyone?
I start with my mother “talking” to me (with her Yiddish accent) when I was a child, telling me all about Christian anti-Semitism and I develop “us and them thinking” and then I “flip” it by showing my gradual discovery that “we Jews” are oppressing Palestinians. I “go” from being the “victim” to realizing that I’m also “the perpetrator”. I am incredulous that Jews who’ve been so persecuted can “turn around” and oppress others. I also include my having been isolated and ridiculed as a child and deciding at a young age that when I grew up, I was going to “help people”. Joyful felt it was important for me to show that part of my early life experience so it would make sense to an audience as to why I was so focused on the topic of suffering and my sense of urgency about it. The longer piece (not this one) will delve much more into the Palestinians’ suffering at the hands of “us Jews” (with scenes expressing my encounters with Palestinians and Jews) and my difficulty in discussing this with other Jews. The shorter piece does include that but not as much (but gets the point across).
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