When she's on stage, Shelley Marshall has seen and heard it all before, sonny. She's a hard-bitten, no-nonsense broad, more than a little man-hungry but with no patience for the sweet nothings of young romance.
She has a nicely jaded line — which I won't ruin by repeating here — for brushing off lovesick boys who want to sing her a song.
Out of character, of course, it's a whole different story. She 'fesses to being easily spooked when men flirt with her after shows and gets positively giddy — a starry-eyed true believer — when she talks about her new-found love of performing and about her Full Bawdy Comedy Show.
"My little baby, my accident," she says adoringly of the all-woman showcase, patting the press kit.
Marshall is new to the stage and, at 43, something of a late arrival unless you count her reign as Miss Dunnville 1982. She got into comedy when a doctor — she alludes to being depressed and hospitalized — told her to find a way to self-express.
I ask her what, apart from marriage and raising two kids, she did before comedy.
"I cried," she says, smiling.
Her Full Bawdy Comedy Show arrives after a test-run in Hamilton, with nine women recruited from the Fringe and the comedy circuit delivering scenes from their own one-woman shows.
"I saw these great comedians not getting stage time," says Marshall, one afternoon over drinks. So she wrangled them under the admittedly small tent of the Staircase Theatre before a surprise sellout led to Hamilton Place.
Full Bawdy includes Precious Chong, doing material from her one-woman show Zdenka Now!, as well as Rachelle Elie (Joe: The Perfect Man) and Sandra Battaglini (Hard Headed Woman).
"I really believe the show has a life of its own," says Marshall. "It's evolved because the crowd has called for it."
Still, it wouldn’t have been an enviable task to sift through the hit-and-miss Fringe for those few gems. Marshall agrees that a lot of solo shows fall into the category of "I didn't need to hear that." (This from someone, bear in mind, whose stand-up act includes mimicking the uck-uck-uck of a too-deep blow job.)
"Those folks are not doing it for the right reasons," she offers. "There has to be something in it that's pure ... it has to connect, like you've been hugged for 40 minutes."