Mothers We Salute You

Happy Mother’s Day to all the moms out there today, including my mom, Margaret (above with two of her favorite men: my dad, Ross, right, and the best man at their wedding, Jack Taglietti, left). The three of them are still raising cane(s).
One other mom to single out is Sue Johanson, the grandmotherly sex educator from Toronto who, at 77, is getting out of the TV series biz. As noted before on this blog, her final Talk Sex with Sue Johanson airs tonight on the U.S. cable network Oxygen.
Spoke with her on Thursday and was able to add her to the list of “glorious Canadian women” featured Saturday in a special Mother’s Day article in the Toronto Star. Forty-two women in all kicked in with the funniest, saddest, most embarrassing mistakes of motherhood. I wrangled nine TV moms, including Marilyn Denis, Cathy Jones, Anne-Marie Mediwake, Liza Fromer and Beverly Thomson for the piece. Checkout the Star article here.
Johanson’s story is pretty hilarious, all about catching her daughter necking on the sofa and clobbering the rude dude on the head with a tennis racket. Not the kind of advice you normally get from Johanson on Talk Sex.
“Ah, but when it’s your daughter, it’s very different,” she says. “You can be as liberal as you like with everybody else’s kids, but no daughter of mine is going to be that kind of a girl.”
Johanson has three grown children who she says pay no attention to her advice as Canada’s most famous sex counselor.
Now that she is off the weekly TV grind, Johanson plans to keep busy teaching and writing (including a monthly column for The Star). She also hopes to continue dishing sex advice on the radio, where it all began for her in 1984 on Q107.
She hopes to sneak in at least one more appearance on David Letterman and says there are plans for her to take a bow on Conan O’Brien. Her new late night darling, however, is CBS Late Late Show host Craig Ferguson. “Oh my God is he funny,” says Johanson. “Craig and I get together and it’s just no holds barred because it is a late night show and I get away with murder.”
Happy Mother’s Day, Sue, many more.