What do you get when you take a brutally honest folksinger and songwriter, then team her up with a hard-hitting political satirist?

You get a likely-not-soon-forgotten, for-adults-only fundraising event for the Backdoor Playhouse at 8 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 12.

The show is set to open with a performance by folk singer Addie Brownlee, whose lyrics on her highly anticipated compact disc, titled "Back When We Were Christians," features lyrics that are imbued with both political and personal insights.

Our campus is just one of her stops on a two-month national tour. Also an actress, Brownlee continues to perform to off-Broadway sell-out crowds. She was raised in Kansas and Tennessee before moving to New York City.

“Addie is warm, funny and enthralling on stage,” says Mark Creter, Backdoor Playhouse director. “She’s fearless. She’ll play you a song about social injustice or love gone blisteringly wrong. She’ll open old wounds if you let her, but then she’ll sing you something so soothing you’ll forget the pain.”

The show culminates with an appearance by Lee Papa, a writer, professor and performer commonly known as the Rude Pundit.

His “One Rude-Man Show” is a work-in-progress preview of his coming play, "The Road to Rude," which is based on his three-year-old political blog that receives tens of thousands of readers from all over the world each week.

Margo Jefferson of The New York Times describes Papa as “a tornado of a writer and a child of Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor and Hunter S. Thompson.”

His monologues and autobiographical stories, which are at turns uproarious, vicious, disturbing and obscene, are scathing political attacks on the conservative right wing of United States government that ignore no current political topic — including George W. Bush, the war in Iraq, the response to Hurricane Katrina, fundamentalist Christians and more.

Admission to the show is $5 for students, $10 for everyone else, and all proceeds will benefit the Tech Players and future Backdoor Playhouse presentations.
For more information, call the Backdoor Playhouse box office at 6595.