Martha Rial


LAUGHING SPELL
Southern transplant's campy cabaret act has Pittsburghers chuckling
by Diana Nelson Jones Post-Gazette Staff Writer
appeared in VOL. 72, NO. 312 6/8/99. Tuesday.

Sharon Spell launched her comedy adventure with a Mr. Microphone and a boom box in a friend's South Side apartment.

Two years later, the 26-year-old former debutante from Mississippi inspires collaborators to believe she has what it takes to break out of the pack of unsung performers in the city. Her piano accompanist, Mike Shanley, says that Spell - now playing to handfuls of followers in vegetarian restaurants - should become "a huge Pittsburgh celebrity."

We find her one Wednesday evening at the Zenith Tea Room on the South Side, where, going by the name Mama, she is host of the cabaret talk show "Mama's PTA Meeting."

She stands on vintage heels, wearing a flowing yellow dress and a kitchen colander on her head. Dimpled, with a heart-shaped face and curly auburn hair, she reads a letter from a UFO advocate while a comically furtive guest star in a pink dress and wig flicks his fingers rapidly in a fake, American Sign Language accent.

The performers and most of their audience have quirked their mouths against breaking up, but one man is laughing so hard and so loud, he sounds like he is trying to stop a purse snatcher on a crowded street.

"Thank you for laughing," Spell tells him after the show, reaching for his hand.

"No problem," he says, chuckling his way out the door.

She watches him leave and says, "I don't even know him or anything."

In Pittsburgh's entertainment scene, Mama's cabaret act plays in the shadows of deep left field, along with limpid happy-hour singers, coffee-shop guitarists, drag acts, parodies of drag acts and limber women who clutch the air and rant to bizarre musical noise.

Recently, cabaret has begun pulling in small followings at several clubs in Shadyside and the South Side. Brian Glover, owner of Sip Cafe, was an early advocate, having seen cabaret acts in small bars in New York City.

"I thought, 'Wow, we could do something like that.' Sharon used to work for me [as a waitress] and she would put on theme nights. She and another employee would dress up and do music all night. People were actually coming back the next week to see what the theme was."

A self-described "independent chick," Spell left her Southern comfort four years ago when she perceived few opportunities in Hattiesburg, Miss., for her art degree. "I wanted to try something different," she says.

How about something completely different?

With guest stars in drag, songs purposefully off-key, wilfuly absurd gestures and silliness on the brink of plunging, Spell's Mama shows fall somewhere between "Monty Python's Flying Circus" and "Pee-wee's Playhouse."

She hangs her controlled but loosely packaged slapstick out like clothes on a line, and you watch in awe, worried it will rain. You never dream you're going to laugh until you're giggling uncontrollably.

When Sip Cafe moved from Shady Avenue to Spahr Street in 1997, Glover asked Spell to do a cabaret show. Spell was already thinking about the idea. She performed for the first time that October and began introducing guests. Some have gone on to have their own shows.

"It may never grow by much," says Glover. "Any time you pioneer something like this, it's a small scene. Word of mouth."

Dean Novotny is one of Spell's collaborators, playing a drag character called Sissy Fit. He is trained as a singer and spent several years in New York City performing in drag theater: "I did 'The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone,' Joan Crawford-y stuff." When he returned to Pittsburgh three years ago, Glover introduced him to Spell. Novotny says Spell is "one of the hardest-working girls in this town."

With the work ethic of a Roman road builder, Spell carts fliers all over town, maintains a Web site (http://www.mamarama.net/) and a huge e-mail list to promote her shows, creates her own costumes and sets, rehearses and, these days, is editing tapes of her shows to be aired sometime in July on Pittsburgh Community Television. (For updates, Spell's email is mamarama@concentric.net)

Recently, she married Scotsman Rich Henderson, whom she met on the Internet. She depends on her friends for emotional support - "They tell me not to apologize" - and uses some of her father's jokes. When she sings, she veers off-key on purpose "because I know what sounds funny."

She made her first little stabs at comedy at The Funny Bone's open stage on amateur nights, "but it wasn't going over. You get five minutes and it takes me that long to get warmed up." The night before her first full-fledged cabaret show, she stayed up all night, planning and rehearsing. The day after the show, she was so drained and anxious, "I cried all day on the couch."

Mike Shanley, a regular collaborator, who also works at the Carnegie Museum, says Spell's professionalism sets her apart: "She is always on time, she's very gregarious, she doesn't have a big ego, plus she's constantly plugging away, constantly promoting herself."

Novotny admires her willingness to take risks and her confidence in taking them: "She'll try all sorts of things. In one show, she made her entrance coming up the street in a rickshaw."

One Saturday night at Sip Cafe, Spell stands demurely at the mike in a polyester 60's dress, pouffy hair and spider eyelashes. Throwing her voice like a kite in the general direction of the tune of "Wild Boys" by Duran Duran, Spell slips to the floor and begins slow-motion break-dancing.

A few moments later, all 10 people in the room appear to be crying.

This is the shy girl who taught Vacation Bible School back home? Spell says yeah, she's acting out as Mama.

The youngest of Joe and Ruth Spell's four children, she jokes that she went quiet around age 8 "to work on my material" and left Hattiesburg High School with a yearbook full of tributes like, "Wish I'd gotten to know you better, you were really funny."

"The first thing I ever did because I thought it would be funny was carry a rifle in the High School Band," she says. "It _was_ funny. We wore purple Lycra body suits with silver sequins that go into a starburst on the torso, and white veils." She kept the get-up and wore it this past New Year's Eve for her First Night performance, "Mama Y3K: Mama at the End of the Next Millennium."

She moved to Pittsburgh four years ago because her best friend from college was living here. Among her new friends, she was the only one with a car. Toting everyone else around she earned the nickname Mama. Suddenly, she had a good comedy name, but thoughts of a change in career had not yet begun to foment: It had been hard enough telling her father she was going to be an artist.

Within a month, Spell had secured several jobs - a gig teaching Saturday art classes at the Carnegie, a waitress job at Sip and coordinating chidren's activities for the Three Rivers Arts Festival.

In late summer of '95, a Sip customer told artist Bob Qualters about Spell. Qualters needed a studio assistant to help make banners for new light poles in Homestead. He remembers this "very funny person" who was a joy to work with, and he encouraged her to exhibit her work.

The Zenith Tea Room agreed to display one of Spell's paintings for sale, and also hired her to wait tables. By the end of '97, she decided not to accept more art jobs. They exacted too much creative intensity for where they seemed to be pointing her - toward a career in arts administration. Waiting tables freed up her creative side to go after what she really wanted. While teaching art, she says, "I was daydreaming about performing comedy."

Now she's in the crosswinds of a career in comedy, and her father, accepting as ever, is sending her jokes.

Shanley, a local rock-band veteran, says when Spell told him she was preparing to do cabaret, "It seemed logical to play piano behind her.
"Her humor is very campy and totally silly. That's what's so cool about it. I like when people watch her and they think she's screwing up. She could just get up and talk and have people ask her questions and it would be funny."

Living "well below the poverty level" last year, Spell has found her on- and off-stage wardrobe at thrift and vintage stores, dresses for $5, beautiful gowns for $3: "These were the type of clothes I had always wanted," she says. In a full-skirted dress, cardigan and hand-held purse, her normal clothes, Spell enters a room with the rounded precision of a '50s housewife. "I'm even starting to look like Mama."

As her confidence and ambition begin to bud, she says she wants Mama to be a full-time persona: "What I really want is to live on Mama's salary," she says, with a wicked stage grin. Then she turns back into Joe and Ruth's quiet daughter.

"And I want more people to laugh at me."

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