Cabaret of a life Keeping up with Venus Irving-Prescott BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

Anybody who at one time was known — and advertised in Paris — as "The Bronze Goddess of Love" deserves to be the center of attention onstage for an evening.

So the goddess herself, Venus Irving-Prescott, will be performing in the Camp Cabaret at AS220 on March 5 and 6 (on Saturday at 7 p.m. and on Sunday at 3 p.m.; call [401] 831-9327). The sequined glory that was the 1950s and ’60s will be celebrated in song and story by the erstwhile chanteuse and 15 nostalgic young performers. Even admission is vintage: $5 general and $3 if you’re over 60 and thereby can sing along without the bouncing ball.

Venus will be 80-going-on-30 come April. She has found work as an actor, drama coach, costume designer, director, and writer, among other skills she picked up along her way. Dance instructor, publicist, comedienne, TV commercial "on-camera principal" . . . you get the idea.

The cabaret will center around her life, with songs springing out of colorful descriptions and anecdotes. Of which there are many.

Take the time a stranger briskly stepped onto her Saigon stage, took her by the hand, led her away from the microphone, and protected her with his body on the floor. Seems that the Vietcong were lobbing mortar rounds their way.

She’ll probably tell you about a famous Paris club owner. "Freddie Carroll was very well-respected by men and women," Venus says. "She wore men’s suits and shoes and had a diamond pinkie ring. She put her hand out as soon as men came, and they would have men’s conversations. I was so fascinated with all that stuff."

And not every performer can boast of a command performance before the queen of Siam.

For the cabaret, Venus will have plenty of help.

"A lot of it I wrote — eight or nine pieces, something like that," she says. "Then Keith has some things in there."

That would be Keith Munslow, multi-instrumentalist, storyteller, and music director for the show. Venus glances around for a glimpse of his black leather jacket near the AS220 stage, where the cast is assembling for a rehearsal. Casey Seymour Kim is there speaking to some of them, having stepped forward to direct the cabaret so that Venus could turn her attention to her own numbers.

"I just passed my music around to whoever would fit it," Venus says, "and they all fit like a glove."

Kim is an actor and singer familiar to audiences recently from her boffo performance in the title role in Little Voice at the Gamm Theatre. She’ll probably be camping it up as Miss Pixie Feingold. There’s lots more talent to draw from. For example, Lawrence Nunes, whose recent song-and-poetry CD Hearts Unveiled Venus says she’s been listening to more often than to Ray Charles or Nat King Cole these days. Providence’s own Princess Pearl will do some comedy and maybe sing one of Venus’s songs. Other vocalists will include Denise Moffat and Maria Ventura.

There will also be hip-hop dancing by Project Heat and Alexandra Blackbird, and a traditional story from Mali, told by Mohamed Diakite. And much more.

Plenty of variety, in other words. Which certainly describes the long and action-packed life of Venus Irving-Prescott.

Born in Detroit but raised in Cleveland, as a 20something she made a splash as a cabaret singer, from Minsky’s in Chicago to the Savannah Club in the Big Apple. Career ups and downs included the requisite dark night of the soul in the New York theater district’s Actors’ Chapel, when she was 33. "I just sat there and tried to figure it out," she recalls. "I thought: ‘Well, did I step on any blue suedes on the way?’ Because at one time I had the Midas touch. What happened?" But she picked herself up, gathered her gumption and successfully stepped into the Paris cabaret scene. After that came Switzerland, Southeast Asia, and Australia.

Venus has seven grandchildren "and all kinds of great-grandchildren." She first came to Providence in 1981 to visit her daughter and has been based here ever since. One of her bread and butter mainstays is a business she developed called Show Polish, for which she checks out performers’ acts and suggests improvements.

The memoir she’s writing has a revealing title — Life Doesn’t Owe Me a Thing.

"In our culture we have people making megabucks, and they have platinum bling-bling all over them and they don’t even know whose shoulders they’re standing on, you know?" she laments. "Don’t even have a clue."

Venus shakes her head over encountering a young African-American student who didn’t know "Strange Fruit," the Billie Holiday song about lynching. The title is the name of a free performance Venus will give on March 17 at 7:30 p.m. in the University of Rhode Island Fine Arts Center, on the Kingston campus.

The lady does keep busy.