from roanoke.com - November 1, 2003
No, it's not the gr y-hair set lining up for another rousing production of "Hello, Dolly." The crowds pouring into MMT's Waldron Stage on Friday evenings are there to check out No Shame Theatre, Roanoke's new late-night variety show where anyone - from the high school prom queen to your Great Aunt Tilda - can sign up to do pretty much anything he or she wants on stage for five minutes.
Office workers who consider themselves modern-day Walt Whitmans have flocked to No Shame to read their poetry. A 23-year-old graduate student dressed up as poultry to sing a ditty called the "Worn-Out Chicken Blues." A trio of MMT actors pelted the audience with peppermints after performing "Rhapsody in Peppermint," a rockin' show tune about a girl with mint-flavored breath.
No Shame audiences tend to be as diverse as the performers. Stage manager Richie Cannaday summed up the crowd at the premiere No Shame performance on Oct. 17 as "everything from punk, Goth kids to old-man folk singers."
Joker, an 18-year-old who goes by the one name and spends a lot of his time hanging out in front of Mill Mountain Coffee on Campbell Avenue, braved the Waldron Stage because he and his buddy Nelson Oliver wanted an audience for their unique brand of magic - which Joker described as a far cry from typical pull-a-bunny-out-of-a-hat routines.
"It's more like throwing a bunny in a wood chipper ," he said.
The fact that it got a guy like Joker into a theater is the great thing about No Shame, director Todd Ristau will tell you.
"We all have something we'd like to share with the world, whether we have gray hair or purple hair," he explained. "No Shame is probably the one place in the world where there is this kind of a level playing field, and people can come together as a community of creative people without worrying about whatever group they belong to during the day."
Ristau believes Roanokers are starving for this kind of artistic venue. So far, at least, he appears to be right.
On opening night, 113 folks shelled out $5 apiece to get into No Shame. A dozen more had to be turned away after the last ticket was sold.
A little after 11 p.m., Ristau stepped onstage in a rhinestone-studded maroon jacket. "Are you feeling No Shame?" he demanded with the fervor of an evangelist at a revival. "Let me hear it!"
Without hesitation, the crowd obediently chanted:
No Shame!
No Shame!
No Shame!
A few minutes later, the audience quieted down and 22-year-old Alexander Cox, the first of the night's 11 acts, read a poem in a soft voice.
Only a glimpse of levitating fishing net,
And broken pine boxes, the buried pelts of foxes
Through a waving emerald glaze ... and then we're off.
Next, a songwriter who announced he would soon turn 79 took the stage to sing about living at the beach. "And I paid same as you did, so you have to listen," he said.
A woman played a song on the hammer dulcimer. An eight-year-old boy joined his parents in a skit about the history of rock 'n' roll.
In a piece titled "Dance of the Leprechaun King" the bassist for the Star City Wildcats, the night's house band, played the bagpipes while the band's drummer brought out a green marionette. It didn't matter that the King had a limited number of dance moves; the audience went wild.
Joker and Oliver also won hearty cheers for their act, which involved not a wood chipper but a deck of cards and a condom.
"Do you do bar mitzvahs?" a guy in the crowd shouted at them.
The night's biggest crowd-pleaser had to be Sean Nitchmann, a regular at Charlottesville's No Shame. (Since Ristau and some of his buddies held the first No Shame performance in Iowa City in 1986, the concept has spread to 12 cities including Roanoke.)
For his piece, titled "My Lawn," Nitchmann assumed the persona of Dave the Angry Suburban Poet.
Get the hell off my lawn!
You kids.
You Damn kids.
Haven't you seen me, rake in hand
Gathering the remains of autumn's span?
Neat piles of leaves ready to remove,
Until they were scattered by the likes of you.
Even the modest Nitchmann had to admit he wowed the crowd. "A number of people came up and said that my piece was good," he said.
The Sad Cobras, a band consisting of keyboardist Jonathan Woods and guitarist Paige Hodges, heaved their instruments onstage only to find there was nowhere to plug them in. As a stagehand rushed to help, Woods tried to create a diversion by moving the lips on his Dolly Parton T-shirt while speaking in a female voice.
It didn't work. The audience grew restless. Ristau, who gave up smoking, nervously fondled an unlit cigarette.
The Cobras ended up with about 60 seconds of their five-minute slot to sing a song about how spiders have no abdomens.
"I think I'm sober now," a woman moaned as the musicians took their seats.
The audience just didn't get what the Cobras were trying to say, Cannaday contended after the show. "It was definitely a comment on the state of the world. It explored both conservative and liberal points of view."
Or maybe not.
"Basically we showed up last-minute with no plan," Woods, 19, said.
As far as Nitchmann is concerned, that's OK.
"I thought it was good it wasn't real polished," he said. "That's part of how it works. There are failures ... You can experiment."
The Cobras weren't traumatized by the experience. They signed up to play again the following Friday - at another sold-out show.
The audience seemed thrilled to have them back. "Sad Cobras rule!" someone shouted.
This time the pair had rehearsed a song. The audience eagerly joined on the chorus.
Ohhhh. Ohhhh. Ohh.
Ohhhh. Ohhhh. Ohh.
Sure, there might have been some guy in the audience who didn't find the moment to be pure magic. Maybe he nudged his date and whispered, "I can do better than that."
To that dude, the No Shamers have one thing to say:
"Come next week and prove it."
Mill Mountain hosts No Shame Theatre on the Waldron Stage at 11 each Friday night. For information, www.noshame.org or 224-1255.