Upon walking into the Zenith Tea Room, several things greet visitors: an omnium-gatherum of antiques, the smell of warm tofu and, on most days, Sharon Spell. "Hi, I'm Mama," she says warmly, with a handshake. With her slight Mississippi drawl, she pronounces her nickname "maw-muh."

She is immediately endearing. One may wonder, though, how and why this charming Southern gal came to live in Pittsburgh. And why the maternal nickname? These and other questions are answered on Spell's live comedy album, Stories With No Morals, which makes its official debut this Saturday.

After performing comedy around Pittsburgh for about five years, Spell has decided that now is the right time for the CD. "I want to put things down on my permanent record," she says. "I want to send out my comedy to people so that they can touch it, feel it, love it." So this past summer, she gathered 30 friends and fans -- her "children," she likes to call them -- at Plus/Minus Recording Studios and treated them to an evening of her signature cabaret performance, which was recorded for posterity.

Spell spins many a yarn on Stories, always with a healthy dose of irreverence. She begins by explaining her matronly moniker, which was given to her by a vehicle-challenged friend from college. "I was his only friend with a car, and so my car became Mama's Taxi, I became Mama," she explains.

She goes on to tell tales such as how she and her husband met -- "The old fashioned way: on the Internet" -- and how they acquired and named their three cats, Ass, Pants and Grass. To make it a true cabaret, Spell's trusty Casio keyboard helps her to redefine the art of the cover song. Among other tunes, she serenades her audience with a lilting, feminine revision of the Sex Pistols' "Anarchy in the U.K." Throughout the recording, the folks gathered in the studio can be heard gasping for breath between giggles and guffaws.

Despite her talent for it, comedy wasn't Spell's original artistic venture. She earned a BFA in painting and drawing in her native Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Upon moving to Pittsburgh, Spell took a number of art-related jobs but soon gravitated toward her current gig as a waitress at Zenith. During that time she built her local reputation as a painter.

Her first efforts in comedy came a few years later. Comedy offered a chance for a normally soft-spoken person to come out of her shell. "Painting requires you to be in a room alone much of the time," Spell says, "so I found that I didn't know how to speak to people anymore. Comedy was something that I always wanted to do and it at least helped me to get over my shyness. Nothing helps shyness like facing a roomful of drunken hecklers."

Thus the Mama Spell Comedy Cabaret was born. Along the way Spell has found the time to lend her vocal and keyboarding talents to bands the Mofones and Sugar Daddy & the Big Boned Girls.

The stories on the CD may be lacking in morals but that does not mean her audiences won't learn anything at Saturday's release party. For example, lessons in the Mama Dance -- which she demonstrates on the album -- will be given. "I have a lot of experience using jazz hands and pointing. The Mama Dance evolved from that," Spell says.

She sings, she dances; she's a comedienne, a painter and a waitress. One might begin to wonder if there is anything Mama can't do. According to Spell, there is. "I can't cut straight lines with scissors [or do] calculus," she says. "Anything requiring left-brain activity is out of my league. But any right-brain association, I'm all up on it like brown on rice."

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