Hey! I've booked myself on my own show...

I'm doing PVC for the first time on Sept. 26th. And, I'm nervous! This will also be my official birthday party (my birthday is actually the week before, but will be celebrated on the 26th), so it should be a really fun night.

Here's the rest of the lineup:

Cheryl B. Presents
PVC: The Poetry Vs. Comedy Variety Show

PVC is not a typical poetry slam nor a regular stand-up comedy show. PVC is a battle of wits and rhymes where the stanzas and the stand-up collide.

September 26th, 8 PM
Bowery Poetry Club
308 Bowery, NYC
$7, 1 drink minimum
www.myspace.com/pvcshow

EMCEE: Carolyn Castiglia (Caroline's)

COMEDIANS
Emily Epstein (New York Underground Comedy Festival)
Rob O'Reilly (Last Comic Standing)
Mama Spell (The PIT)

POETS
Cheryl B. (PVC: The Poetry Vs. Comedy Variety Show)
Da Bjorkman (The New Theatre of the Absurd)
Jane Cassady (Beyond Baroque)

BIOS:

COMEDIANS

Comedian and writer Emily Epstein has been trapped in a self-cleaning toilet, has stitches from a treadmill accident, and likes guys that list one of their hobbies as eating out. She has performed at clubs all over New York City, as well as the Northeast, and even a boat in the middle of the Yangtze River in China. Emily has been on Good Morning America and written for such publications as Two Drink Minimum and the Hartford Courant.

With appearances on the Tonight Show and Last Comic Standing, 22 year-old Rob O'Reilly is quickly gaining a reputation as one of NYC's most buzz-worthy young comics. It all began in Ohio, where Rob made is stand-up debut when only 16 years-old at a high school talent show. By 18, Rob won Cleveland's largest comedy competition and later earned an academic scholarship to Boston University, where he became a well-known alternative comic and a finalist in the Boston Comedy Festival. Rob has opened for Dane Cook in front of thousands of students and now headlines colleges across the country. Represented by BCA, he had a stand-out performance at NACA Central in 2006 and is doing NACA Northeast in 2007.

Although her training and background geared her for a life of sitting alone in a studio inhaling paint fumes, Sharon Mama Spell longed for a life before an audience. She moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania from Hattiesburg, Mississippi after earning a BFA from the University of Southern Mississippi in Painting and Drawing. Her visual art has been described as possessing a "fine and distanced beauty that suggests abstract expressionism." She was teaching at the Andy Warhol Museum and Carnegie Museum of Art when she dove headfirst in the cabaret performances, putting her fine and distanced beauty onstage, spouting abstract expressionist humor that everyone can relate to. Mama Spell has performed her comedy (and tragedy) across America for nearly ten years, and just this past summer she moved to New York to begin classes at UCB. Her show is more rock-n-roll than stand-up comedy, the kids dig it and you can dance as you laugh along to it (think Steve Martin + Pee Wee Herman + [Liz Taylor / Belle Barthe] = Mama Spell).

POETS

Cheryl B.’s work appears in dozens of print and online publications including BLOOM, Small Spiral Notebook and The Guardian. She is also the creator and producer of PVC: The Poetry vs. Comedy Variety Show, a monthly event at the Bowery Poetry Club featuring comedians and performance poets. Cheryl has given readings and performances of her work throughout the U.S. and Great Britain.
In 2003, Cheryl received an artists fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts and a residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Cheryl lives in Brooklyn.

Da Bjorkman, a bizarre, controversial, surrealist, absurdist comic who has to be seen to be believed. He is the epitome of the New Theatre of the Absurd. Da Bjorkman will take you to the edge of your seat and beyond. With a combination of comedy, performance art, theatre and the bizarre. Da Bjorkman's Show is an unnerving tale of monumental descent into the hellish world of reality, told with the naiveté of one who accepts the incomprehensible as it is. People who barely know him have said he is a very lovely little soul – but with a mouth like the devil -that eternal watchman of hideous body shakes and smiling banana bones. He will have you reveling in the fantastic and burrowing into the armpit of the person sitting beside you, reliving mother memories rinsed in vertigo. Da Bjorkman travels with a suitcase full of Dada and a pocket full of surrealism.

Jane Cassady runs a weekly reading series in Syracuse, NY. She has appeared in The November 3rd Club, The Comstock Review, and Valley of the Contemporary Poets. She has featured at such venues as V.C.P. and Beyond Baroque in Los Angeles, SLAMicide in Baltimore, and Got Poetry in Providence, RI. She has a degree in Art History from Syracuse University, and also paints things.

JUDGES
Michele Carlo as Carmen Mofongo
Shawn Hollenbach
Allen Warnock