The Arts

Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

NO HANGUPS

Fringe performer finds tawdry telemarketing helps hone her improv skills

By: Morley Walker

Posted: 07/20/2010 1:00 AM | Comments: 0 (including replies)

Talking dirty for a living?

Hey, a girl's gotta eat.

Boston-based writer-performer Cameryn Moore, star of the dark, one-woman comedy Phone Whore, was laid off from her day job marketing textbooks in the U.S. recession in the spring of 2009.

Casting about for an income generator to support her various creative endeavours, she applied for a job as a telephone-sex operator.

You know, one of those women you dial 1-900 to tell you what a big strong handsome guy you sound like.

She figured she was a good fit.

People had long told her she had a huskily erotic voice. She knew she was experienced in the ways of both men and women.

"My life experience is pretty eclectic," says Moore, a plus-size 39-year-old Oregon native who is married but calls herself bisexual. "I've been around the block."

She also liked the idea of working from home in her pyjamas. But she was still surprised to discover how satisfying she found the work, which taxes her improv and acting talents.

"I tell improv artists that they would be crying like little girls in half an hour if they had to do improv like I do improv," she says.

"And with the company I work for, no subject is taboo."

The reaction of her friends when she told them about the content of the calls she took made her realize she had some dramatic material.

She wrote the first 10 minutes of Phone Whore -- which would evolve into her first fringe play -- as a submission to a gay theatre festival in Boston. Apparently homosexual fantasies are a staple of the trade.

"These men don't think they're gay," she says. "It's safer for them to tell me these things than their wives and girlfriends."

This past winter she expanded Phone Whore into a 55-minute script, which sees her taking four separate calls, a couple of which are extremely explicit and intense, while padding around her apartment, making toast and telling the audience about her work.

"I take the calls very seriously," says Moore, who started on the Canadian fringe circuit in June in Montreal.

"These men know what they want and they're able to articulate it."

She gives a $2 admission discount to "card-carrying sex workers," and clearly sees herself as in the same business as street walkers.

"I get men off for money," she says, "though I realize I have the privilege of safety."

With a background as a writer, comedian, sex educator and performer, Moore has no plans to give up her current day job. But she admits she is using a pseudonym for this production.

"I wish I was doing something I could tell my parents about," she admits. "But I can't. They're Mormons."

morley.walker@freepress.mb.ca

FRINGE PREVIEW

Phone Whore

Written by and starring Cameryn Moore

To Sunday at Son of Warehouse (Venue 5)

Tickets $10 ($8 for card-carrying sex workers)

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition July 20, 2010 D5

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