Motherhood

IN her fifth book, "Above Us Only Sky," Marion Winik again uses her personal life as the substance of her work. Here, Winik tells tales large and small, from a stirring piece about seeing her late husband's features in her sleeping son's face to a lighthearted diatribe against kids' team sports. Throughout the book, Winik presents herself as the anti-soccer mom she is, full of unpopular opinions, droll observations and war stories from a life lived with passion and risk.

Writer, satirist, public radio commentator and performer Sandra Tsing Loh, whose off-Broadway solo shows have included "Bad Sex With Bud Kemp" and "Aliens," premieres her newest solo show. In "Mother on Fire," directed by David Schweizer with Bart DeLorenzo, Loh draws on her adventures in parenting to explore motherhood amid the chaos of an inflated housing market, peanut allergies and the chain-link-fenced world of public schools. Loh is donating her proceeds to public schools.

When Mrs. Scott Holt of Rolling Hills Estates steps up to be inducted into the Southern California Tennis Hall of Fame on Saturday night at the Riviera Country Club, she will be more than 20 years removed from her days of athletic glory. For Tracy Austin, they have been a good 20 years. She is a wife and mom now. She and husband Scott, a successful businessman in commercial real estate, have three boys.

It took the great ape version of the La Leche League to encourage Kalim the orangutan to breast-feed. That was just one fraction of the motherhood training given to the Bornean ape at the Los Angeles Zoo. Snacks were served as positive reinforcement for holding a toy baby right side up. Kalim, raised at the zoo without the benefit of orangutan matriarchs to show her the benefits of cloth diapers over disposable, was considered to have poor mother potential.

At 58, Susan Sarandon seems busier than ever. This season, the Oscar-winning actress ("Dead Man Walking") is starring in "Shall We Dance?" as Richard Gere's loving wife and the mother of two teenagers, who suspects he is having an affair after 19 years of marriage. She also costars as a stunning but ruthless businesswoman who enters into a heated affair with the womanizing "Alfie" (Jude Law). The Charles Shyer-directed remake of the 1966 classic opens Friday.

Laura Dern is missing. It's a Tuesday afternoon and the blond, willowy actress is supposed to be in the sunlit garden at the Chateau Marmont having her picture taken to plug her new film, "We Don't Live Here Anymore." Despite vanishing from Hollywood's radar three years ago, Dern, who plays a disaffected wife in the film, has throughout her career managed to find substantial, memorable roles to tackle, and this one is no exception.

It's a typical movie plot: Smart-mouthed swinging single comes in contact with winsome child and goes suddenly soulful and soft. Only this time, it's the Hollywood press who are mooning amid the baby bottles. With the recent deliveries of a string of A-list stars, celebrity scribes -- historically the gleeful chroniclers of Tinseltown's love triangles, court appearances and rehab relapses -- have ditched the wasp-tongued, dirt-digging persona for one of doting godparent. "Oh, Baby!"

"Imagine it's Mother's Day, and you are being taken out to one of those god-awful brunches where you and hundreds of other mothers will be force-fed runny scrambled eggs and flaccid croissants by way of thanking you for the other 364 days," begins Chapter 1 of "The Mommy Myth," giving readers a heads-up on how the book's authors, Susan J. Douglas and Meredith W. Michaels, professors and mothers both, feel about motherhood in contemporary society.

A divorced woman's sexual affair leads to an unintended pregnancy and alienates her hormone-driven teenage daughter in the TV movie "Sex & the Single Mom" (Lifetime, 9 p.m.), an earnest, cautionary tale mixed with steamy romance-novel spice.

Breathtakingly fluid, gorgeously danced and sexy as hell, Laura Gorenstein Miller's "The Quickening," an ode to childbirth and its aftereffects, is a pure, body-driven work -- choreography of a high order. The 60-minute, intermissionless premiere performed by Helios Dance Theater on Friday night at the Ford Amphitheatre (an earlier incarnation was made on the Milwaukee Ballet Company last year) had the audience swooning.