EDGE Provincetown

An ultra-blonde, petite, shy, soft-spoken girl, Tammy Lang is a visual deception; onstage, this plucky singer delivers a ribald show filled with songs such as “I Shaved My Vagina For This?” (she claims it was inspired by a personal experience with a brian patch) and “God Has Lodged a Tenant in My Uterus” (as she often says, “I have my Heavenly Father inside me, and my biological father inside me as well”). Lyrically, her talents enchant baser senses of humor, while musically her voice soars in apparent devotion to Christianity, her angelic face gazing adoringly towards the heavens as she croons.

It is, of course, a farce; and one that ritualistically sparks the anger of the religious right – early in her career, she was cited by the Journal of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights as singing “a song riddled with slurs against nuns, Jews and brain-injured children.” Lang and her band had been featured on WKCR, a Columbia University radio station, which later apologized and pledged that it “would not happen again.”

Fortunately, Lang is completely unapologetic.

“Tammy Faye is a little different,” she admits. “But she’s full of love… She loves everyone except, like, Jews and Catholics and Muslims and Buddhists. If you’re Christian she loves you.”

It’s a character loosely based on Tammy Faye Baker – but has elements of a variety of Country singers, televangelists, and drug-addicted celebrities.

“She does everything with honeyed sweetness,” Lang reports. “For a while I made her much more of a white supremacist, but that didn’t seem to be funny to anyone – well, except me. So now I stick with incest, drug abuse, alcoholism, and vaginas… and you know, maybe a little rape here and there.”

Get the idea? In her current show, “Born Again Again,” Tammy Faye is back on live radio after her latest incarceration for drug rehabilitation to simultaneously inform the listeners that the apocalypse is imminent… and that her latest CD is coming out.

“She’s been born again again,” Lang offers with a serious expression, “and she’s on the radio to takes some phone calls and talks about her recent marriage to a man named Elbow, who has lost his lower arm. That’s ok, though, she likes the way he wields the stump.”

It’s a character Lang has been developing for years.

“I created her in 1994. I started out by doing characters in downtown New York cabaret bars and I just kind of had fallen in love with country music,” she recalls, then interfects: “I had been a fan of metal, then I put on the Juggs and had an epiphany.”

“I love country music, and I wanted to create a character who’s a country singer - if I couldn’t be a real one I wanted to be a fake one.”

She started with a rendition of “Stand By Your Man,” introducing herself brazenly as her new alter-ego. “After a while I decided that to heighten the intensity of the song I would put in a monologue between the two choruses about being happily gang raped, and it seemed to just go over, because you know, who doesn’t love gang rape.”

Tammy had been born.

“That just seemed to take off,” she continues. “So I started to write my own songs, and do full shows as Tammy, and then I got a guitar player and a band.”

The backup musicians donned the moniker “Angels of Mercy” and within a few years, the group had cut two albums: “On My Knees” and “Used Country Female.” “Born Again Again” is a more theatrical vehicle for Tammy.

“I just created this show in February,” she says. “My manager said he wanted me to do something scripted. I agreed, and I met the director, and we decided to do it like my first record, as a radio show. We had a great collaboration. We did it a few times in NYC to test it, and changed it a bit. We keep doing that, in fact, we changed it from last Thursday. That keeps me on my toes.”

As for her namesake, whose recurrence with cancer has made recent headlines, Lang is completely supportive, in a rare moment of lucid emotion.

“I’m sad,” she says. “I took the name Tammy Faye because she was big in the news back then, you know. I admire her. She’s open and non-judgemental. She embraces a lot of people that her constituents wouldn’t like. She’s strong and I’m rooting for her.”

To lighten the mood, I hold up one of her recent promotional shots: she is sitting spread-eagled on the floor, straddling a vase of flowers.

“Oh, that?” she says with a grin. “I’m holding tulips next to my tulips. Isn’t that nice?”