NTTW

What is Nipples To The Wind? It is the uproariously funny new play, making it's premier in New Haven, Connecticut to a sell out crowed and standing ovations! Through a series of monologues we meet various women, from a narcissistic suicide hotline operator to an overzealous Little League Mom who lands herself in jail to three sisters at confession, each telling their own version of the same event. You will meet fourteen of the most memorable characters, all portrayed by actors Janye Anderson and Paula Coco. Nipples To The Wind is directed by Reno Venturi.

Connecticut resident, Paula Coco, wrote the play. If the name sounds familiar, you may know her from her career as a stand-up comic in New York or as the founder and artistic director of The WHIT, a Connecticut Improv Troupe.

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Shuffle This Odd Deck For Laughs
April 3, 2006
By PAT SEREMET, Courant Staff Writer

Paula Coco of West Hartford is a real card.

And she most certainly is decked out.

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Now, with head back and chin up, she's throwing nipples to the wind.

She has done stand-up comedy at The Improv, Caroline's and The Comic Strip in New York City. She was founder and, for five years, artistic director of the West Hartford Improv Troupe known as The WHIT.

Coco writes funny plays - including a two-woman show called "Nipples to the Wind," in which she and her aunt will perform 14 characters. It plays April 22 and 29 at the Lincoln Theatre in New Haven, and Coco expects the show may travel, based on the number of inquiries coming in from all over the country.

Her aunt Janye (pronounced Jay-nee) Anderson lives in their hometown, Dallas, and has long been her co-conspirator in comedic crime. She is also her Salvation Army soul mate in making gross fashion blunders, initially for their own amusement. Now they're happy to report for a larger audience. Coco is 52, her aunt ("my mother's baby sister") just six years older.

The two now have their own greeting-card business called "Jessie Mae and Pearl" after the characters they portray. The slogan on the back of the cards says: "For those who refuse to live in a black and white world." Jessie Mae and Pearl wear wild colors against a black-and-white background on all the cards.

In their weirdly wacky world, zebra goes with leopard, wild colored wigs should always be topped by a Mexican sombrero or a hat so huge Camilla herself would reject it. There's no accessory too big or overstated, and a pocketbook should preferably come with feathers - the bolder the better.

The characters of Pearl and Jessie Mae, who now live on in these cards, were born one Christmas in Connecticut in 1997, when Coco (Pearl) and Anderson (Jessie Mae) decided to go "deep, deep, deep" into Coco's closet and haul out some wild outfits. Anderson's daughter took pictures, and five years later, Coco put them into a book and sent it to Anderson in Dallas.

"Her friends would scream and holler," Coco says, "and people started asking, `Do you think Jessie Mae and Pearl could come to our party?"'

"The next year, Janye's watching `Oprah,' and she calls to tell me she just had an epiphany," Coco says. A woman was showing a line of cards with dogs all dressed up. She said Jessie Mae and Pearl need to be on cards."

Anderson is a computer- graphics artist; Coco still has the stand-up comic in her, raging to come out. With their dual, explosively exhibitionist personalities, they just let it rip. They decided to take charge of the business themselves so they could have control.

Besides, Coco says: "A lot of card companies are run by men, a lot of corporate types who second-guess what you do."

"This is going to be politically incorrect," Coco says. "I'm a woman; I have a sense of humor. I get it. They get it. I look at cards now, and they all rehash stuff. I think, "Yeah, Elayne Boosler said that in the '70s."

While the Dallas dames were cooking up their card business, Anderson was running her design firm, and Coco was working on playwriting. She submitted a one-act play called "I'm a Believer" to the Short & NEAT One-Act Play Festival in New Haven, and hers was among the 16 plays selected to be performed from a pool of 400 to 500. (NEAT stands for the New England Academy of Theatre, and NEAT's artistic managing director, Reno Venturi, is directing Coco's current play.)

"Mine was the only one that got a standing ovation," she says. "It was one of the top moments in my life."

A month later, the Long Wharf Theatre Guild also chose her play to perform.

"I knew I was on the right track," Coco says.

And she was working on a series of monologues for this new show, whose name, "Nipples to the Wind," comes from an old Southern expression meaning "head up, chin out, no matter how tough things get." The characters are based on her own life, or people she's observed.

Titles of some of the monologues are: "Little League Moms Gone Wild," "It Must Have Been the Martinis Talking" and "Deep in the Heart of Tiaraland."

"My message is to have fun," she says. "The play is dedicated to those who love and appreciate women, warts and all."

To order tickets for the show, or for additional information, visit www.nipplestothewind.com, or call 1-800-369-0065. Jessie Mae and Pearl cards are sold at the Greeting Shoppe, West Hartford; Design Forum, Farmington; The Dressing Table, Hamden; The Wave, New Haven; and Picket Fences, Fairfield.

Website: www.jessiemaeandpearl.com.