Friday, May 27, 2005 | 9:04 a.m.
She may talk the twangy talk, and walk the polyester-pants-clad walk, yet a conversation reveals there's much more to Etta May than the Southern sass she spews onstage.
"You've gotta listen when something's wanting to change your life. You've gotta recognize when to turn, you know what I mean?" May, who is portrayed by comedian Brenda Ferrari (she prefers using her stage name), said during a recent call from her home in Lexington, Ky.
"When you're going down a road and you realize, 'Well, maybe at the next stop sign I need to turn around because ... I think I'm lost.' Most important thing about finding how to get someplace is knowing when you're lost and having the sense to stop and ask somebody for directions."
May, who headlines the "Southern Fried Chicks" tour that stops today through Sunday at Suncoast, found herself in a similar predicament five years ago.
The mother of four had spent 17 years in Los Angeles pounding the pavement in search of sitcom stardom. Along the way, May enjoyed a role on the short-lived '90s series "Davis Rules" starring Jonathan Winters and Randy Quaid; and parts on the sitcoms "Hangin' with Mr. Cooper" and "My Two Dads," as well as in the flick "A League of Their Own."
Still, "I was beating my head against a wall and ... really on the merry-go-round reaching for the brass ring," she says.
Her perspective changed following a 2000 trip to Kentucky, where she went to entertain a fan named Sharon who was dying from cancer.
Sharon's friends initially contacted May in hopes that the comedian would send an autograph to their ailing pal. Instead, May paid the Somerset, Ky., woman a visit and provided the laughs at a surprise party held in Sharon's honor.
"I had this wonderful experience with 30 strangers, but it was really what life was about," May explains.
On her way back to the airport, she stopped at the first real estate office she encountered and told the agent, " 'You need to find me a house.' That was in late March."
In June of 2000, May moved her brood from L.A. to their new home in Lexington, and she hasn't looked back.
"I'd been reaching for that brass ring, and then I realized when I saw Sharon that I already had it in my hand. I was doing exactly what I wanted to do; I had people in my life that loved me. Quality of life is the most important thing."
May continued her support of Sharon, even seeing her through chemotherapy treatments, until the woman succumbed to the disease in November 2000.
"It seems like people who have died have changed my life drastically," May says.
Case in point: It was in 1987, while she and her husband were visiting and caring for her cancer-stricken cousin in Los Angeles, that May made her first foray into comedy.
With her head shaved bald in support of her relative and donning a colorful bandanna (a look that has become her trademark), May, who had never performed stand-up comedy, climbed onstage during open-mike night at L.A.'s The Comedy Store. She impressed legendary club owner Mitzi Shore, who made May a regular paid performer at the club beginning that evening.
Four weeks later May found herself at The Comedy Store's outlet inside the former Dunes hotel-casino. "I was in Vegas working with greats like Ollie Joe Prater and Gary Mule Deer and Charlie Hill."
Career-wise, she says, "I had to catch up with myself."
A biography posted on www.ettamay.com claims the Bald Knob, Ark., native was raised the youngest (and only girl) of 10 children. She married an "aspiring truck driver" named Delbert. Besides tending to the couple's kids, May boasts having previously worked as a bingo caller, and also spent more than a decade driving a school bus full of little hellions.
Comedy, she jokes, "is the first job I ever found that I could actually drink and do my job at the same time. You know, if I was a legal secretary, they kind of frown on you having a Playmate cooler under your desk."
May has recorded a trio of CDs and a pair of DVDs, including her latest, "I'm Not White Trash ... I'm Financially Challenged." She's appeared on several stand-up television series including "Comic Strip Live" and VH1's "Standup Spotlight". She's also guested on "The Arsenio Hall Show" and "The Oprah Winfrey Show," among others.
"I almost think the key to Etta May is, you've always gotten caught behind me in the checkout line at Wal-Mart," she says. "I'm the one person that you wanna go, 'What the hell were you thinking when you got dressed this morning? What is on your mind? What do people like you think?' "
Still, some audience members are less-than-receptive to the frumpy house frau -- at first.
"I can feel it when I walk onstage. People will cross their arms and look at me like, 'Oh, great, this woman's not gonna be able to tell me anything I can possibly relate to. Then I start talking about the base things, and that's what comedy is -- just talking about everyday stuff. Then they start reliving: 'Oh, hell, I do that, too. ' "
"You know what's the difference between L.A. people and Southern people? When we pull up to the stop sign and somebody in a Mercedes pulls up next to us, the person in L.A. looks over and goes, 'Damn, I wish I was driving that car,' " May jokes, "whereas a Southern person (asks), 'How in the hell do they haul mulch in that thing?' "
Nevertheless, she's at a loss to fully explain why Southern comedians are enjoying a surge in popularity: "I don't know, but I'm glad I got a twang in my kick."
She's also glad to have crossed paths with the other Southern Fried Chicks, comedians Leanne Morgan and Karen Mills. The women were introduced by a talent agent and went to work last year organizing their tour, which May says will continue playing indefinitely at casinos, performing arts theaters and other venues throughout the country.
"We're the 'Blue Collar Tour' with PMS. We're 'The Vagina Monologues' that you can bring your grandma to," she explains. "We're all three such different personalities. We all three represent the South."
The "deep South" is, of course, May's forte. "Most people, when they think about the South, they think about people like me because we're the only ones that see the tornadoes and the UFOs, so we're the only ones that get interviewed ... I'm the 'Deliverance,' and banjos and the trailer trash."
Mills, on the other hand, represents the "metropolitan, urban" Southern set -- "the very hip, the very cool, the smart, educated people," May explains -- while Warthen is "the soccer mom who marries well and keeps the Vietnamese in the strip malls doing their manicures in business. Leanne is hard to describe. She's like Scarlett O'Hara and Doris Day on acid, all wrapped up in one."
May, who declines to reveal her age, says she and her family have adjusted fine to their Kentucky-fried lifestyle. The move, she concedes, may actually have lent some credence to her comedy: "You sit at a Waffle House (restaurant) for a couple of hours, you're gonna add a new 15 minutes to your show."
She's also bought a big ol' motorcycle -- something she'd "never own" if she still resided in Los Angeles -- and hits the open road often.
"I just went riding for two hours and maybe passed three trucks on ribbons of black concrete that anybody would die for," May says. "I lived today."
Out for laughs
Catch David Spade headlining The Mirage's Danny Gans Theatre at 9 p.m. tonight, and 10:30 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Tickets are $70.
Peaches Rodriguez, who was a world-class break dancer during the 1980s, makes her Las Vegas comedy debut Monday through June 3 at Riviera Comedy Club.
Carol Siskind -- profiled March 25 in Laugh Lines -- and Rich Purpura perform at 8 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday at Addison's Lounge inside Rampart Casino.
George Carlin headlines the Stardust Theatre beginning at 8 p.m. Thursday through June 15. Tickets are $54.50 plus tax.
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