The Mamas And Pop

"The festival is for women who have the same amount of passion for performing as they do for their children," says Alyson Palmer, the fortysomething New Yorker who plays bass with the pop-rock band Betty and performed at the 2003 festival heavily pregnant with her daughter Ruby. "We want to show everyone that they aren't mutually exclusive."

Palmer is executive producer of Mamapalooza, but the festival owes its life to Joy Rose. It was her epiphany, her nurturing, yes, her baby.

"I wrapped my head around creating a new genre of music called 'mom rock.' I saw it as a cross between a new art form and a self-help movement that would honor women in their role of motherhood," says Rose, who lives in Westchester County, N.Y. "It's about the humor, madness and chaos of a mother's life."

Back in the day (pre-marriage and children), Rose had a rocketing career in a post-punk art band and as a solo '80s dance club performer; she met her husband while making a video for MTV. A succession of kids (four in five years) iced her musical career, but after she was diagnosed with lupus, her dormant urge to rock returned.

"I had my mountaintop experience: What's my meaning in life? How am I going to change my life? I realized that in the process of becoming a mother I had neglected parts of myself that were necessary: art and music," says Rose, 48, who also underwent a kidney transplant. "I got off my deathbed and decided to become committed to music. After my children and being a good mother, of course."

With her band -- Housewives on Prozac, which includes a guitar player with a child, a bassist undergoing in vitro fertilization -- she hit school fundraisers, church basements, really any place with a stage and willing listeners. Unlike Billboard hits about lustful pubescents and overwrought breakups, the band's songs could have been penned by a cranky Mister Rogers: "Fuzzy Slippers," "I Don't Think Like My Mom Anymore" and "Pee Alone," about just wanting to use the toilet without an audience:

My needs are simply simple

Succinctly defined

I just wanna read the paper

I just wanna talk on the phone

I just wanna take a shower

And I only want to pee alone