By Hollie Gibbs
This Fourth of July season, while your buns are toasting and your dogs are getting hot, don’t risk bottle rockets blowing off important appendages; instead let Miss Firecracker do the blowing (and tapping and strumming) for you. The salacious one-woman band has been playing with herself for more than five years now, and if she makes you blush, flush, or chuckle she has done her job.
With influences ranging from Minnie Pearl to Hasil Atkins, Cleveland’s former comedy burlesque troop the Pussyfoot Girls gave birth to Miss Firecracker. (Yes, she and Queen La Tata are one and the same!)
“To add some variety to our shows, I dusted off my guitar and recorded backing tracks for two songs and started singing them while the other girls danced,” she explained. “In 2007, I bought a bass drum, my husband and I wrote a song about pickles, and I left the troupe to focus on my one-woman band.”
Now with little more covering her than a kick drum, guitar, and tambourine duct taped to her shoe (and the occasional kazoo), she sings light-hearted, naughty ditties with that same wink, wink that can instantly work any red-blooded crowd into a frenzy.
Akin to Esmerelda Strange, Miss Firecracker brags, “I love corny puns, double entendre lyrics that are bawdy and risqué, songs and jokes that are suggesting and titillating. It’s more of a challenge to write suggestive, clever lyrics than to be just flat out dirty. When I’m writing a song, if a word or phrase makes me snicker, then it’s probably going to be used.”
Anyone requiring further proof need only listen to her 2009 tongue-in-cheek release Red, White and Boobs.
Like the explosion of the long, thin cylinders themselves, no two Miss Firecracker shows are ever the same. A lover of sing-alongs and audience participation, this sparkler is a natural luminary and improviser.
“I love showmanship and pulling people in on the joke so I use a lot of one-liners and double entendre,” she said. “I sing about jobs you can do without having to wear pants, how fun it is to be nude, how household chores can be sexy. I keep it light and simply try to make people laugh.”
Playing out as Miss Firecracker monthly (she also plays the dark side of bluegrass in a five piece band called Blackgrass Baptism), Carol Schulien enjoys non-traditional venues, like art galleries and festivals, to display her unique set of talents as well as playing hostess (as an emcee who fiddles around — musically — between bands). “That’s probably where my inner carny kicks in,” she smiled.
Where will Miss Firecracker be spending her Independence Day? Why, the infamous Heavy Rebel Weekender in Winston-Salem, NC.
Locally, check her out between Boy in Love and Kill the Hippies sets at Now That’s Class Sat 7/13 at 9 p.m. and at the Spitfire’s One-Man Band Night Showcase Fri 7/26 at 10 p.m.
Hollie Gibbs has a BS in journalism from Kent State University and studied photography at School of the Visual Arts in Manhattan. Her articles and photographs have appeared in numerous local and national publications. She can also be found playing guitar with various bands and building life-size monster props.
11213 Detroit Ave, Cleveland, OH 44102
Cleveland, OH 44102
Cleveland, OH 44107