- OTHER MEDIA
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- review by George Heymont in the Cultural Landscape February 24,
2010
- Last Friday, I dropped into the Exit Theatre where (dressed as his
alter ego Cora Values), Sean Owens was entertaining the troops with Cora's
Recipe For Love. The troops -- barely a dozen altogether -- were mostly
friends of Sean's who had been recruited into the act. Over the course
of the evening, they got to impersonate denizens of the tiny town of Rectal,
Texas who would drop by the local Gas 'n Gulp where Cora reigns supreme.
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- With Friday's show dedicated to "Break-ups and Shake-ups,"
Cora took turns between baking her breaded artichoke hearts in a smoking
toaster oven and looking after her executive chef and ex-husband Zeke Plummett
(Jim Fourniadis) -- one of the best straight men/banjo players and serial
husbands a truck stop hostess could hope for. Accompanied on the piano
by Emmett Corkpike (Don Seaver), Cora took turns between singing a few
ditties, raffling off slices of pie, and tending to the emotional wounds
of what she likes to call her "irregular regulars."
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- What could have been a disastrously underattended event turned into
a wistfully down-home literary salon as Cora demonstrated her skill with
improvising "five and ten stories." These tales essentially make
stunning use of five words donated by the audience (which then get fed
into ten extremely long run-on sentences). The words are incorporated into
the first five sentences in their original order and then used again (in
reverse order) in Cora's second set of sentences.
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- While that may sound fairly simplistic on paper, Cora's skill as a
storyteller, yarn spinner, and cunning linguist gave the evening a special
aura of redneck literacy with three types of sprinkles on top. Residents
of Greater Tuna, Texas were gently given notice by Rectal's "hostess
with the mostess" that they'd been served.
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