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| Must
be something in the water: Camille West goofs off. Photo:
Ellen Descisciolo |
Shocker
Mom
One of the Four Bitchin’ Babes, songwriter Camille
West mines humor, housework and rolls in the hay to create
a new breed of folksinger
By Kathryn Ceceri
What
does a Suburban Mother From Hell do when her last child leaves
the nest?
“I’m
gonna walk around the house in the nude,” declares folksinger-comedian
Camille West, “although it’s probably 20 years too late.”
Then, pausing for a beat, she adds, “I better not give them
the keys.”
It’s been a long time since West got her start making up songs
to help her sons Jason and Justin, now 22 and 18, learn their
ABCs, and giving “the girls” in her Queensbury neighborhood
a few laughs.
“My
friends’ tastes ran on the bawdy side,” she says. “That’s
what stuck, the funny stuff.”
West turned that talent for risqué lyrics into a career that
has taken her from open-mike night at Caffe Lena in the late
1980s to performing with friend Eleanor Stanton as the Suburban
Mothers From Hell—complete with poufy wigs, frilly aprons
and big cleavers—to cross-country tours as one of the Four
Bitchin’ Babes.
She’s written songs for the off-off-Broadway revue Sex:
the Musical, and was included in the book Life’s a
Stitch, an anthology of contemporary women’s humor.
But despite audience enthusiasm for songs like “Viagra in
the Waters,” about an upstate town’s reaction to a drug-truck
spill (“She knew something was up as he stood naked at the
table/Holding two cups of coffee and half a dozen bagels/Oh,
is that cinnamon raisin?”), which topped the charts on
the Dr. Demento radio show in 2000, West still faces stereotypes
about women songwriters—and housewives.
Critics have walked into shows expecting an evening of women’s
issues—“That’s what housewives are like,” she says, trying
to pin down their motivation—and been stopped short by a 40-something
woman singing about sex.
“Sex
is a big topic,” she muses. “Yeah, it is, and why shouldn’t
it be? I’ve gotten more sexual, and I like my songs to project
that. That’s who I am.”
In an interview by phone from her home, where she’s at work
on a musical she hopes to have completed by next year, West
does seem more matronly than she allows. She says she’s never
led “the little June Cleaver existence,” yet spends as much
time bragging about her “brilliant, creative” sons (Justin
is an actor and painter, Jason a grad student at RPI) and
the support she gets from husband Scott Wodicka, a sales manager
for a flooring company, as she works on her latest contribution
to Sex: the Musical, a song called “Orgasm Island.”
“It’s
hard for housewives,” she says. “You need to express yourself
creatively. My niche was always songwriting. It was never
going to be my career or avocation. It was just something
I did for a hobby.”
Given her insistence that she’s always been “a little bit
out there”—in school, West claims, she was one you’d look
at and say, “This person is either going to be successful,
or a vagrant”—the folk-comedy connection was a natural for
the acoustic guitarist.
“There’s
a whole tradition of getting together with your friends that
lends itself [to comedy],” she explains. “That’s how it really
started, doing something for your friends. Sometimes it’s
godawful, sometimes it’s dirty, but it’s your friends.”
And humor has the advantage of immediate feedback from the
audience. She doesn’t tend to do serious songs anymore, West
says. “Sometimes you don’t know if you’re reaching people
or touching people,” she admits.
It helps that she’s never been one to shy away from being
shocking. In the liner notes of her CD Diva’s Day Off,
West responds to “the woman at the Festival of Funny Songwriters
who heard ‘Rapture’ [in which she describes watching all her
good Christian friends rising bodily up to heaven] and told
me that my soul was consigned to hell. Your point?”
“When
you’re doing comedy, you’re going to piss somebody off,” she
comments. “And if you’re not, you’re not doing your job.”
So will that job change now that her mothering duties are
fading into the background? Well, West says she intends to
keep touring with the Four Bitchin’ Babes, which has taken
her and her husband to exotic locales like Hawaii and lent
her a certain degree of fame.
“We
sold out 2,100 seats in Madison [Wisc.],” she recalls. “People
were coming up to us and asking for autographs! Alone, I guess
I’m not special enough.”
West joined the Babes, now featuring Suzzy Roche, Sally Fingerett
and Debi Smith, in 1998, replacing founding member Christine
Lavin. She credits the group with teaching her a lot about
being onstage.
“It’s
changed everything,” she says. “My act has become more theatrical.
It’s more about the performance. I’ve gone from being scared
of performing to absolutely loving it. It’s quite a trip with
these girls.”
Other plans include getting her play, which she won’t talk
about in any detail, off the ground. And, West says, it would
be nice to get some musicians playing behind her, so she wouldn’t
have to accompany herself.
But mostly, with all that extra time to write, she hopes to
turn out more new material. (The producers of Sex: the
Musical have asked her for a song about fetishes.)
“I’m
not that great a housekeeper, so I’ve got to do something,”
West quips. “These songs make me happy. Who am I to complain?”
Camille West will perform at Caffe Lena (47 Phila St., Saratoga
Springs) on Saturday (Aug. 16) at 8 PM. Admission is $15 and
$18. For reservations and information, call 583-0022.
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