Novelty Shop: Our Answers to Your Most Frequently Asked Questions

Q: “Who writes the funny words to your songs?”

A:  “Oh GOOD!  You think they are funny?  We did that on purpose!  For the most part we are entirely to blame.  Cindy and Lynne take turns working on some independently and collaborate on others.  Susan and Sally are invited to change one word per song when absolutely necessary when they can think of a word to change.  Sometimes we react to their suggestions with a glazed expression and other times we pretend we haven’t heard them.  But sometimes we just go ahead and let them change a word to help them feel included.  It depends on how dumb and very strange it is.  The dumber and stranger it is the more we may consider it.  A few of our songs like “The Drugs I Need (Progenitorivox)”, “Vatican Rag” and “The Man Song” we hear and really like and get the blessing of the composers to have arranged and perform.  Then we hope they never hear us sing them for fear of changing their minds.”

Q: “How do you decide on your new “set”… who you are going to be and what songs you are going to sing?”

A:  “We usually decide on something we want to be, and then choose the songs. 

The songs have to tell a unique story or different side of the character so the sets and the characters remain interesting.  Occasionally we work the other way: we just like a song or song idea and decide who to be to make it work.  Sometimes we even decide to be us.  Susan likes it when we do that because then we don’t need costumes and props.  Well, at least not as many.” 

Q:  “Tell us about the behind-the-scenes Novelty Shop, your quartet “up close

          and personal”.”

A:   “We truly enjoy each other and have a huge amount of fun together.  We laugh a lot.  We eat a lot of popcorn and share a lot of ideas.  We enjoy our quartet outings to shows such as Menopause the Musical and the Nunsense shows.  We enjoy taking our families out for our traditional holiday dinner at a fancy restaurant.  We love traveling on the road together to our out-of-state shows, and all the memories those trips bring.  Sometime ask us about Cindy and Applebees and the fly on the bedspread.  To sum it all up, we truly love each other as individuals and love being in the quartet together.  And thank goodness… who else would have us?”

Q:  “Anything else?”

A:   “Oh, and we rehearse too!  Sometimes we even sing at those rehearsals.”

Q: “We’ve seen your quartet “on-stage” personalities, what are the four of you

          like “off-stage” in the quartet?”

A: Susan is the quartet hostess with the mostest.  We rehearse at her house. She has a condo on the lake and mom Charlotte and sister Ginny live next door.  Susan makes great coffee and popcorn and because her refrigerator is always empty gets milk for our coffee from Ginny.  Ginny also serves as our technical help desk when Susan tries to get her CD player or DVD player to work.  Susan writes most of our emcee work and remembers most of it when she has lines.  She holds the record for forgetting the words in the songs however.  Along with Sally, Sue designs the majority of our visual stuff.  Susan is the one who always has her tape recorder on “pause” when it was supposed to be on.

         Sally is the mom and the boss of the quartet and keeps us on task.  She is also the business contact and the treasurer.  She lowers her eyebrows and squints and wrinkles up her mouth around when we spend too much money on stuff, but is the first one to remind us to make our annual donations to Young Women in Harmony and fellow quartets competing at International.  We know we’ll never win and make it to International, so it’s nice to know that at least some of our money gets spent there.  Sally is still using the tape recorder she got at a garage sale in the 1980’s.  She is also a really good comfort food cook.

         Cindy is the Super Mom in the quartet who juggles a challenging sales job and young family.  She always looks great, drives a company car so she never cares how much gas costs and we hate that.  She brings a lap top to rehearsal and is late a lot. She has broken more tape recorders than anyone else in history.  She is extremely clever and along with Lynne writes our parodies.  Cindy is allergic to Susan’s cat so Susan’s cat likes Cindy the best.  Cindy is cold all the time and the rest of us are hot all the time.  She is the cute, young, skinny and perky one.  She says she hates it when we call her that.  YEAH RIGHT CINDY.

         Lynne is our other parody writer.  She learns her music really fast because she knows some of the words before we do and she tapes everything for her one hour journeys to-and-from rehearsal.  She was the first one to figure out that we laugh more in our rehearsals than we sing.  Lynne is always on Weight Watchers but saves a few points every week for Sue’s “best-in-the-world” popcorn.  Along with Cindy, Lynne likes to spend our money on things to give away to our friends as souveniers.  Lynne is the person in the quartet who designs the Novelty Shop buttons that we give away at our contests.  She designs close to a hundred new ones every year.  Sometimes we think she needs to be on medication but we’re afraid to tell her that.”

Q: “We’ve heard you talk about your “BOBs”.  Who are the BOBs?”

A: “Actually, our BOBs are Pete Burns, Tom Peirce and Jeff Spires.  We have a BOBBETTE also, that is Susan’s sister Ginny Leroy.  BOB stands for “Beast of Burden.”  Our BOBs and BOBBETTs help us schlep all of our stuff to and from performances and contests.  We couldn’t be US without THEM. 

Q: “Who coaches Novelty Shop?”

A: “We’ll tell you as long as you hold them blameless.  Linda Liddicoatt does our vocal coaching and Cindy Hansen Ellis has done a lot of our visual coaching and has given us some really “over the top” stuff.  Once in a while Linda Liddicoatt will also make suggestions for our shtick which she calls our “stick”.  If we do something that’s not funny it was Linda’s idea.”

Q: “What is the strangest performance you have ever done as a quartet?”

A: “Probably the time we sang as nuns in 2007 for a state-wide Purple Hat Convention and when we said “Nun’s only!” in Vatican Rag a real nun yelled out “GENUFLEX! GENUFLEX! GENUFLEX!”  She had been the “nun as  motivational keynote speaker” and we had been the “performers as nuns” and we had looked more like nuns than she looked like a nun.  We ended up exchanging business cards and deciding she was one of the reasons we love nuns so much.”

Q: “Speaking of nuns, that is probably your most popular set.  Are you ladies Catholic?”

A: “Just Cindy who serves as our subject matter expert on all things Catholic.  We would like to be and hope some of it rubs off over time but we’re still waiting.”

Q: “Do the four of you have a favorite set?”

A: “Cindy’s favorite is the bridesmaids.  Sally loves the nuns and her Sister Mary Cataract character.  Susan likes the business women/lawyer set.  Lynne liked the ballerinas the best but decided being in a tutu was not her best look, even with a full size swan to cover part of her up.”

Q: “What can we expect from Novelty Shop” in the future?

A: “We are currently working on a DVD which we hope to be published sometime before 2015.  We have enough ideas for new contest and performance sets to take us into the next decade.  Several hundred new buttons.  We also expect that eventually Cindy will get old and get hot flashes like we do.  Then we will truly have bonded with each other.”