Cocktails for three

Vance and Lorna's twisted love fest

by Jon Garelick

To get an idea of what the comedy duo of Vance and Lorna are like, start with Bill Murray's old Saturday Night Live lounge crooner, mix in some Steve and Eydie for pitch correction and husband-wife rapport, add a touch of George and Gracie, and then picture Ernie Kovacs getting ready to drive a golf ball that's teed up on Edie Adams's kisser.

If that doesn't work, simply picture Vance and Lorna as Kurt and Courtney doing Ward and June Cleaver.

For the past year or so, Vance and Lorna have been performing their wide-eyed, scatologically minded lounge act everywhere from the Lizard Lounge and the Hong Kong in Harvard Square to P-town. By now, they have a built-in cult that fills the clubs. The show is plenty dirty, but it's not the trash talk that makes it funny -- rather it's that golly-gee innocence in the delivery. Vance is given to exclamations of "Holy Mother of God!" when he isn't talking about his latest escapade cruising the men's room. Lorna's a Middle American mom type, cheerful as all get-out, probably cranked on diet pills, laughing in hysterical, gulping spasms, her Aquanetted blond beehive planted on her head like a helmet. They're an incendiary combination of apple-pie Americana, show-biz earnestness, and unrepressed screaming id that can take over at any moment.

The effect is abetted by lounge-scene accouterments. Vance, the polymorphously perverse roué with a pencilled-on pencil-thin moustache and a missing front tooth, smokes from a cigarette holder and seems to have an endless supply of vintage smoking jackets in mint condition. Lorna favors leopard skin or, on special occasions, a Campbell's Cream of Tomato Soup-colored full-length gown. In true lounge fashion, the two pay homage to Route 1 ("Mass Vegas!"), martinis and scorpion bowls, and all manner of kitsch perceived as fabulousness. They also pay their respects to any number of hardcore drugs, sexual practices not covered by the sodomy laws, and their own "open" marriage. Through the evening the duo cue numerous on-stage costume changes, and Lorna, a full-figured gal, often spends as much as half of the show in what used to be called a "foundation" -- the kind of long-lined corset and garters that have more to do with the underside of Pleasantville than the Victoria's Secret Web site. Through it all, you have no doubt that Vance and Lorna adore and are devoted to each other.

Typically, Vance and Lorna come on stage carrying a complete set of luggage and wearing elaborate overcoats, as though they'd just returned from some fabulous cruise (at one recent show, Vance was wearing a beautiful camel-hair style coat with a huge fur collar), breathless with greetings and laughter, accompanied by tinkling Love Boat cocktail piano from a mute sidekick, Ivan. "Hello, New York!" pipes up Vance. Lorna coos, purrs, and shrieks. Vance growls with an eager leer -- if Lorna is June Cleaver on poppers, Vance's round-faced innocence, his constant sense of wonder, is less Ward than the Beave himself, all grown up and totally fucked. Overcome with lust for his beautiful wife, he asks "Isn't she incredible?!" and then buries his face in her cleavage. The duo give a summary of their recent activities, including, say, a night at the Red Roof Inn in Methuen, before launching into their first number. At a recent Hong Kong show, in honor of the venue, that first number was the "Eastern Medley": David Bowie's "China Girl," the Vapors' "Turning Japanese," Carl Douglas's "Kung Fu Fighting," and, of course, Wang Chung's "Everybody Have Fun Tonight" ("everybody Wang Chung tonight!").

Unlike any number of lounge music acts, Vance and Lorna never leave any doubt that they're playing it for laughs, and they really can sing.

Vance: "Ivan here defected from this little shit-pinko Third World country -- what was it, darling?"

Lorna: "Czechoslovania, honey. He doesn't speak a lick of English, but he does speak the international language-ah de mew-si-cah!"

Ivan, meanwhile, in heavy Robert Goulet black mop and moustache, white suit, shirt unbuttoned to his navel, never cracks so much as a smile. While he leads into some funky chording, Lorna purrs, "Ladies and gentlemen, please sit back, relax, and grab a drink from your waitress while Vance and I pay tribute to the late, great, Mr. Kurtis Cobain."

What follows is a version of "Lithium" as heard through Sinatra's "L.A. Is My Lady" -- early '80s Frank, with a heavy layer of ersatz funk, Vance and Lorna trading one non-sequitur after another from Nirvana's typically depressive beauty. "I'm so happy 'cause today I found my friends," sings Lorna, sounding more truly happy than Kurt ever did, before getting cheerfully rhetorical. "You know what? They're in my head."

"I'm so ugly," answers Vance, "but that's okay, 'cause so is she." One of the most profoundly alienated, isolated anthems of high grunge gets interpreted as an all-accepting love duet. Even before launching into the soul-revue big finish ("I need you and I'm not gonna crack!"), Vance comments, "I love this song BUT WHAT THE FUCK DOES IT MEAN? I'll tell you, those heroin addicts write some pretty screwy lyrics."

"Oh, they certainly do," coos Lorna, "and you know what? We really don't understand that because Vance and I have never dabbled in the big H."

Vance: "Abba-solutely not! . . . Not intravenously anyway . . . Just a little bit at parties."

Lorna: "Everything in moderation!"

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The Vance and Lorna phenomenon has been a long time in gestation. In real life, Lorna is Laura Sweeney and Vance is Bradford Scobie. The two met at the beginning of the decade when they performed with the independent theater troupe House of Borax. Sweeney had been a Boston Conservatory student, Scobie was an Emerson College dropout. Until appearing in Borax's production of Joe Orton's What the Butler Saw, Sweeney had never seen herself doing comedy -- only musical theater and straight drama. "What the Butler Saw was my first experience ever with a comedic show. I learned more in one year with that group than in three years of college -- taking a script, learning your lines, having rehearsals, getting up on stage and falling flat on your face, not having an instructor there to say that's a D-minus or that's an A, having people there who said, `That stunk,' getting good reviews, bad reviews."

In House of Borax, everyone did everything -- costumes, sets, cleaning up. It's also where Sweeney got comfortable appearing in scanty costumes. "In What the Butler Saw, I was in my underwear for the very first time on stage -- I mean, in my underwear, bra and underwear, much less than what I wear now. That scared me, but by the end of the run of the show I was walking around cleaning stuff up after the show in my underwear, waving goodbye to people."

Sweeney and Scobie went on to work together in the comedy-sketch group Chucklebucket, whose home base was the Linwood Grille. That group disbanded about a year and half ago. When local musician/underground impresario Rick Berlin was looking to book comedy for his "Marlene Loses It" nights at the Lizard Lounge, he thought of Chucklebucket, who had performed at one of his "Drags, Dicks and Dykes IV Life" AIDS Walk fundraising shows, and he contacted Sweeney. "I called Bradford," says Sweeney. "We'd always wanted to do a lounge kind of thing. At parties we were always singing things like Fiddler on the Roof and `Viva Las Vegas.' "

The two had also worked in Borax and Chucklebucket with Ryan Cummings, a former Mass College of Art multimedia student with a broad pop-music and performance background, including scoring plays and working with the Speakeasy Cabaret dinner theater. But Cummings's most relevant résumé item for Vance and Lorna was his stint as musical director of the DeMoulas, a kind of has-been family musical act that took off from the Partridge Family and the Carpenters and was named for the notoriously feud-ridden Massachusetts supermarket family. Ivan was born, and not merely as a brilliant deadpan comic foil but as a musical foil who's no fool. It's Cummings who gives "Lithium" its Sinatra flair, or who spices up Vance and Lorna's "Miss Woburn Beauty Pageant" audience-participation segment with lead-ins from Stephen Sondheim's Sunday in the Park with George. "I love working with these guys because I can take an original song and rearrange it into anything," he says. "It's all over the place musically."

The inspiration for the characters of Vance and Lorna is more difficult to pin down. Scobie focused on the idea of a married lounge couple. Sweeney thought about her mother. "Even though she's not like that," she says, "but she's very upstate New York [Rochester], and she speaks that way. Of course, my mother is very wholesome and is no way as crazy as Lorna." Sweeney's other inspiration was an LA lounge duo, Marty and Elaine, who work Hollywood's Dresden Lounge. "He plays upright bass, she plays keyboards, they're very serious, I mean, they are lounge. But they have that rapport. `Oh my lovely wife Elaine.' `Oh Marty, stop!' That's what I think about, but Bradford's never seen them and he does all our writing."

"When I write," says Scobie, "it's obviously from what we've developed as characters over time, and the characters start to write themselves, thanks largely to what Laura has done in that time. And it's a parallel universe to our own relationship. Lorna does most of the talking. The instinct is to give yourself all the jokes, but these characters have evolved into something I can't fight."

Although Scobie writes a few pages of material for each show, a surprising amount -- given the quick give and take -- is improvised. "I used to be scared to death of improv," says Sweeney. But Scobie gradually persuaded her, to the point where she can now do the "Grab Sack" question period from the audience without losing a beat. "The thing is, if I tried to answer those questions as me, I wouldn't be able to, but for some reason, once I put that cone on my head, I can drop into that character. I love her."