Doll Therapy

Singer-songwriter Cosy Sheridan brings her one-woman show to Mom & Pop’s Coffeehouse in Levittown, Pa.

By: Daniel Shearer
   Barbie has long been a target for ridicule, and for good reason. Besides the old nebulous rants about fostering consumerism or objectifying women, the reality is that Barbie’s construction is, in fact, quite unnatural.
   If Mattel created a version of its classic doll the size of a human woman, proportionally she would be 7 feet tall, with 5-foot legs and a size three shoe.
   Poor Barbie would be incapable of standing, an observation that has not escaped the attention of singer-songwriter Cosy Sheridan. Like her idols Tom Paxton, Randy Newman and Tom Lehrer, she makes some of her best points using satire.
   "I see Barbie as such a cultural touchstone," says Ms. Sheridan, who will visit Mom & Pop’s Coffeehouse Oct. 18, hosted by the United Christian Church in Levittown, Pa. Barbie comes into the picture in a playful song from Ms. Sheridan’s latest album, Anthym, in which she suggests creating a doll with "water retention and fantasies she will not mention."

"One of my songs, called ‘The Losing Game,’ gets played at eating-disorder conferences a lot, and women find me from that," says singer-songwriter Cosy Sheridan.

   "She’s just so tangible," says Ms. Sheridan, during a phone interview from her home in Moab, Utah. "I couldn’t not use her. Barbie is everywhere. I just saw an Oreo Barbie in the grocery store a few months ago, which is Barbie in the dairy section with an Oreo purse. It’s such a mixed message: Here’s an Oreo, which is not gonna make you look like Barbie if you eat a lot of them, now here’s Barbie’s body."
   Criticisms aside, Ms. Sheridan, 37, remembers playing with her own Barbie as a child in Concord, N.H.
   "My brother dragged her around the neighborhood behind his bike," Ms. Sheridan says. "She ended up with two holes where her breasts used to be and two holes where her butt used to be.
   "Most women with daughters who have them agree this is an unattainable body, and it’s frustrating. However, at the same time, they remember they had fun playing with Barbie. I had fun playing with Barbie. She has great clothing. My niece loves Barbie, and I don’t know if she loves her because of Barbie’s little teeny waist and her big breasts, or if she loves her because of the fun clothing she puts on her."
   Ms. Sheridan focuses her considerable wit on songs about encountering 50-foot, half-naked women on billboards, the "urban assault vehicles" populating our highways, and even the humor in a trip to the ladies room while trying not to touch anything.
   "So what do I like?" she asks, laughing. "To be fair, at some level, it’s about looking for things to talk about in a creative context that everybody else isn’t talking about.
   "I did love songs for years, and I kind of thought, well, ‘That’s not necessarily what I want to do on stage these days.’ I’m looking to talk about things that are part of contemporary life for adults 28 and older, so to speak. It’s probably not about love songs all the time."
   Ms. Sheridan enrolled as a voice student at Berklee School of Music in the late ’80s, spending time at several other schools along the way to a degree in transpersonal psychology from Burlington College in Vermont. During the ’90s, she bounced through just about every major folk festival in the United States, bringing home the hotly coveted New Folk Award at the Kerrville Folk Festival in 1992 and also winning the Telluride Troubadour contest the same year. In 1994, she won the Falcon Ridge Songwriter Showcase.
   "I feel like I’ve been a lot of places, certainly," she says. "Except for the Dakotas, I think I’ve played everywhere, but I like that. The demographics of our country vary widely. An audience in California is not an audience in New Jersey. As much as we think we are homogenized by television, we aren’t."
   Following nearly two dozen shows on the East and West coasts in October and November, Ms. Sheridan plans to record her sixth album in December.
   "It’s based on a project I did to graduate college last year," she says, adding that she’ll be performing some of the material at Mom & Pops. "It’s about transformation by going down into the dark, how we are transformed by our negative experiences, and looking at it through Greek mythology and modern media. It’s mostly sort of addressing women’s issues, but it hopefully talks to everybody on some level."
   Ms. Sheridan hopes to perform her one-woman show for women’s groups, conferences and universities.
   "I’m not entirely sure where it will go," she says. "I’m sort of waiting for the audience to find me, and they have, up till now. One of my songs, called ‘The Losing Game,’ gets played at eating-disorder conferences a lot, and women find me from that.
   "The singer-songwriter genre, I think, people often associate sort of with the self-help movement. Oh yeah. I am a living embodiment of therapy, and I admit it freely."
Cosy Sheridan performs at Mom & Pop’s Coffeehouse at the United Christian Church, 8525 New Falls Road, Levittown, Pa., Oct. 18, 8 p.m. $7 donation. For information, call (215) 547-1124. On the Web: www.www.momandpops.org. Cosy Sheridan on the Web: www.cosysheridan.com