At first, Tracey Erin Smith’s obsession with Jackie Mason seems a little creepy. She’s in her 30s. The stand-up comedian, famous for his appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show in the 1960s and his one-man shows on Broadway, is 73. Smith introduced herself to Mason by sending him a card with a picture of two monkeys, arms around each other, and the text, “We’ve been married so long we’re starting to look alike.” On a visit to Toronto, Mason agreed to meet over coffee and a French cruller, says Smith, falling into Mason’s trademark New York back-of-the-throat grumble, “because they’re so light and fluffy they have half the calories of a regular doughnut.” She told him she was working on a show called I Want to Marry Jackie Mason.

“Is that just the title or is that how you feel?” Mason asked her. “Because if it’s how you feel, it can be arranged.”

Smith’s hero-worship makes more sense when you know that Mason, whose current show is called The Ultimate Jew, was a rabbi for three years before he went into comedy. Smith has considered becoming a rabbi herself and, like Mason, chose the stage over semicha, Broadway aspirations over bar mitzvahs. But that doesn’t mean that either one of them has stepped far away from God.

“The way I see it, he has the biggest congregation in the world, with his one-man shows on Broadway,” gushes Smith.

Smith’s own desire to explore spirituality and to teach permeates the creative adventures that have followed her encounter with Mason. While she works as an instructor and speaker on acting, storytelling and humour — she counts Wal-Mart, Pepsi, Toyota and Holt Renfrew among her clients — the project at the centre of her life for the last five years has been her own one-woman show, now titled The Burning Bush. Its premise can be summed up in two words worthy of a Demi Moore movie poster — Stripping Rabbi! — but Smith’s comic mixture of the sacred and the profane is aimed less at titillation, more at personal growth.

In her workshops, Smith teaches people how to turn their real-life experiences into funny performance pieces. She’s never been a stripper herself, but the idea of a preacher learning to talk in “the language of the listener” intrigued her. In the play, the lead character, Barbara, is kicked out of rabbinical school for being too serious. She meets a stripper who is obsessed with Madonna (the singer, not the saint) and wants to learn about this Kabbalah thing the Material Girl practices. Barbara employs Madonna lyrics to teach the stripper Jewish mysticism and, in turn, learns the tricks of the pole herself. Debuting in Edmonton in 2005, the first incarnation of the show became an instant Fringe festival hit. But Smith had bigger ambitions. Since it was last seen in Toronto, she’s merged the original and its Fringe sequel, Two in the Bush, to create a full, more polished night of theatre with an original soundtrack which includes two klezmerized version of Madonna hits.

With this deluxe version of The Burning Bush, Smith is “serving up the best we’ve got” and is hoping larger forces will step in and help her take the show to the next level. She’s also working on a film treatment. Mason sent a couple of agents to the show’s off-off-Broadway debut in New York earlier this month at the Festival of Jewish Theater & Ideas. Through the creative process, Mason’s role in The Burning Bush has transformed from potential husband to fairy godmother.

“Every time I talk to him on the phone, he asks me, ‘So, are you making a living from this?’” says Smith, gliding easily back into her Mason impression. “And I have to explain to him, no it’s not that way yet.”