Mama Mia!

The month of May is when we celebrate Mother’s Day, so let’s put your knowledge of motherhood to the test with this motherlode of trivia questions about mums, mammas, and matriarchs.

1. Mother-daughter actresses Laurie Metcalf and Zoe Perry played the older and younger versions, respectively, of the same mom in this pair of TV spinoffs.
   a. Roseanne and The Conners
   b. Baywatch and Baywatch Nights
   c. The Big Bang Theory and Young Sheldon
   d. Cheers and Frazier
2. This adoptive mother raised a star NFL offensive tackle who later filed suit against her and her husband.
   a. Leigh Ann Tuohy
   b. Delisa Lynch
   c. Betty Roby
   d. Stephanie Diggs
3. This matriarch of a prominent American political family weathered serial tragedies and lived to the age of 104.
   a. Rose Kennedy
   b. Barbara Bush
   c. Eleanor Roosevelt
   d. Lucy Rockefeller Waletzky
4. Which U.S. president made Mother’s Day an official national holiday?
   a. Theodore Roosevelt
   b. Woodrow Wilson
   c. Franklin D. Roosevelt
   d. Abraham Lincoln
5. In Roman mythology, who is the goddess of motherhood?
   a. Juno
   b. Venus
   c. Minerva
   d. Diana
6. Her name was Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, but to most of the world, she was known as who?
   a. Whistler’s Mother
   b. Mama Cass
   c. Queen Mother Alexandra of Denmark
   d. Mother Teresa
7. This classic novel was based partly on the author’s relationship with her mother.
   a. On the Banks of Plum Creek
   b. Little Women
   c. Pride and Prejudice
   d. Anne of Green Gables
8. In 1977, Jodie Foster and Barbara Harris portrayed a mother and daughter who trade places in a mutual out-of-body experience. A 2003 remake was recast with Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis, who will reprise the roles in an upcoming sequel now in production. What’s the film?
   a. Vice Versa
   b. The Parent Trap
   c. Freaky Friday
   d. Change-Up
9. Which rapper wrote the song “Dear Mama” for his mother?
   a. Kanye West
   b. Tupac Shakur
   c. Eminem
   d. Drake
10. This actress played the mother of a blended family, including three very lovely girls with hair of gold, like their mother.
    a. Florence Henderson
    b. Barbara Billingsley
    c. Judith Light
    d. Julie Bowen

ANSWERS

1. The mother-daughter duo both play Mary Cooper, mother of precocious prodigy and socially awkward Nobel laureate Sheldon Cooper, in The Big Bang Theory and its prequel spinoff, Young Sheldon.
2. Leigh Ann Tuohy and her husband Sean adopted Michael Oher, who went on to become a member of the Super Bowl XLVII champion Baltimore Ravens. In 2023, Oher sued the Tuohys, claiming they misled him into a conservatorship and illegitimately profited from his image and likeness through the book The Blind Side and its screenplay adaptation that scored an Oscar for lead actress Sandra Bullock.
3. The queen mother of the Kennedy political dynasty, Rose Kennedy, outlived four of her nine children, including her sons John and Robert, who were cut down by assassins during the political violence of the 1960s.
4. On Saturday, May 9, 1914, President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed Mother’s Day a national observance to be held each year on the second Sunday of May, making the following day, May 10, the first official Mother’s Day.
5. Wife of Jupiter, Juno is the queen of the gods and goddess of marriage, family, and childbirth. For the Greeks, the role was filled by the goddess Leto, mother of twin deities Apollo and Artemis.
6. Born in Macedonia in 1910, Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu joined the Sisters of Loreto in Ireland and carried out her missionary work in India, where she became known as Mother Teresa. Canonized by the Roman Catholic Church in 2016, she now bears the title Saint Teresa of Calcutta.
7. Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, a portrait of 19th-century social expectations for American women, is largely based on her and her sisters’ relationship with their mother, Abby May Alcott.
8. The plot of the original Freaky Friday unfolded on a Friday the 13th when mother and daughter simultaneously wish they could trade places for just one day. In the remake, the body swap occurs when the quarrelling pair are served magical fortune cookies by the mysterious proprietress of a Chinese restaurant.
9. Although each of these men has waxed poetic about his mother in song, Tupac Shakur released “Dear Mama” on his 1995 album Me Against the World.
10. Florence Henderson played TV mom Carol Brady, whose three tow-headed daughters became half of a six-pack of kids in the sitcom The Brady Bunch.