Mon côté Wertheimer (Les mères poules ne font pas des mouettes)

Chloé traces back the thread of the women in her lineage, with a touch of melancholy and plenty of humor.

It is an intimate and cheeky investigation into my maternal line, my crooked branch: my Wertheimer side.

Is anxiety matrilineal, like Jewishness?

Freud said: "It's your mother's fault if you fell to the ground."

And everyone believed him.

But they did the best they could, our foremothers, with the patriarchy and all that.

What was initially an investigation into my great-grandmother becomes, over the course of the show, an encounter with my mother.

I open the cage to madwomen and birds. I watch them fly over a cuckoo's nest.

I laugh at myself, I laugh in dread.

I cry too — you need that sometimes.

So that, as Barbara sang, it arrives:

The joy of living. The joy of living.

(or at least a little serenity, if that's not too much to ask).