My name is Faye Lane, and I'm a writer and performer living in New York City. But on the inside I'm still Rhonda Faye Gunnels, who grew up in her mama's beauty shop in Texas. Casa Vale Beauty Salon was an old A-Frame house that was converted into a salon, with big mirrors and swivel chairs in the front room and shampoo bowls in the old back bedroom. And on the front porch? A fat little girl in a glittered-up Burger King crown, practicing her beauty queen acceptance speech and dreaming of being a star of the stage!

Teased mercilessly at school for being fat, I spent most of my time daydreaming on the front porch with a MoonPie in my hand, or giving mandatory concerts for the ladies held captive under the dryers. Mama had a long line of hood dryers on one wall, and I would wait until the ladies were assembled, grab a hairbrush to use as a microphone, and the show would begin!

My shows were always made up of stories and songs, mostly true and sometimes outrageous. And that's a pretty fair description of my current project, Faye Lane's Beauty Shop Stories.

This show has been in development for the past three years. I'm scribbling away on a memoir of the same name, and thanks to the thriving New York storytelling and comedy communities, I've been telling individual stories from the book on the stage. And I've told them on a lot of great stages! In New York, stories and songs from this show have been presented at Caroline's on Broadway, Comix, The Pulse Theater, Stage Left, The Time Out New York Lounge, 92nd Street Y Tribeca, Joe's Pub at the Public Theater, and most recently, in an extended run at the prestigious SoHo Playhouse.

In 2007, one of my Beauty Shop Stories won the celebrated Moth StorySlam, hailed by The Wall Street Journal as “New York's hottest, hippest literary ticket.” And since winning the Los Angeles Moth StorySlam in 2008, (I know, exciting, right? I'm the only storyteller to have won it on both coasts!) I've been performing them regularly in Los Angeles as well. I've told stories in LA at King King, Tangier Lounge, Tongue and Groove, Hotel Cafe, BANG, and El Cid.

As a regular cast member of Andy Christie's wonderful The Liar Show, I've told my Beauty Shop Stories at The Improv in Washington DC, The Jewel Box Theater in Seattle, L'Etage in Philadelphia, The Skull Club in New Orleans, the Victoria Event Center in Victoria BC, and The Edinburgh Fringe Festival, where we received a glowing four star review from The Scotsman!

These stories have also been broadcast on NPR, both locally on Cityscapes and nationally on The Moth Radio Hour. And thanks to NPR's broad and generous listening audience, I've had heartfelt emails from people all over the country telling me how much the stories resonate with them.

So what's next? I don't know. But in the words of my fellow Moth storyteller, Malcolm Gladwell, “I have found the thing that captures my imagination, and I have faith that it will take me someplace meaningful.” I hope it takes you someplace meaningful, too. Or at least I hope it makes you laugh your ass off. Somewhere out there in the space-time continuum is a fat little girl in a glittered up Burger King crown who would love that. And she's thrilled beyond belief to get to do this!