English, baby!

Baby Mama

Date: Jul 23 2008

Intro

1. Learn Vocabulary - Learn some new vocabulary before you start the lesson.

2. Read and Prepare - Read the introduction and prepare to hear the audio.

For every person who gets pregnant and doesn’t want to be, there’s someone out there who wants to have a child and can’t. Sometimes these people decide to help one another, and often times they find that they are from different walks of life.

Baby Mama is a comedy about a businesswoman who enlists a high school dropout to have a child for her. The best part? They live together for almost nine months until the baby is due.

Dialog

1. Listen and Read - Listen to the audio and read the dialog at the same time.

2. Study - Read the dialog again to see how the vocab words are used.

Marni

Mason

Marni: So, just went and saw Baby Mama.

Mason: Yeah?

Marni: Baby Mama!! I wanted you to go. You didn’t want to go. You should have.

Mason: And I’ll tell you why, because I love Amy Poehler and Tina Fey. On a normal day that would be enough to drag me to the theater. But I got the impression that it was gonna be more goofy than snarky and intelligent like 30 Rock so I decided to stay home.

Marni: Because you just want to keep them on the pedestal that they are.

Mason: Correct.

Marni: OK, so I can understand that. It was a little schlockier than 30 Rock, but still worth seeing.

Mason: Yeah?

Marni: Well, yeah! It’s Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, who have great chemistry and work so well off each other, and I think it was interesting because it’s actually a pretty sensitive issue for a lot of women, being in your late 30s and wanting to have a baby and not being physically able to. And then she’s able to put this comic spin on it by having Amy Poehler play this white trash surrogate mother.

Mason: And she, like, puts her up, right? The girl lives with her.

Marni: Exactly. And she’s nursing and…

Mason: You’d think she could find some white trash girl who’d already gotten knocked up and kind of swoop the baby up after the fact.

Marni: But then you wouldn’t have the hilarious antics that ensue.

Quizzes

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Lesson MP3

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Discussion

Even though he likes the work that the stars did in other movies and on Saturday Night Live, Mason didn’t want to see Baby Mama because he thought it looked dumb. Marni says it isn’t dumb, though. It’s about an interesting issue: women in their late 30s who want to be mothers but aren’t able to be.

Has anyone you know used a surrogate mother or been one? What do you think it would be like to live with someone from a different economic background?