'Real Women' cream cheese contest inspires performance art

JENNY DRUMGOOLE is done with cream cheese.

And anyone who attends her show, "Real Woman of Philadelphia," which opened Friday at Moore College of Art, might be finished with it, too.

Drumgoole is a video artist who graduated from Yale's prestigious master of fine arts program. Her latest project was prompted by a "Real Women of Philadelphia" contest sponsored by Philadelphia Cream Cheese and Southern-fried Food Network cooking show host Paula Deen. Participants (ladies only, please) were assigned to create recipes using cream cheese and posting mini-cooking shows online each week.

But Drumgoole's videos aren't anything like the other entries. While the more traditional cooks excitedly proffer cream-cheese-themed recipes, Drumgoole's offerings are surreal and funny pieces of performance art that have little to do with cooking - unless crafting John Rambo's head out of 20 blocks of cream cheese seems like an untapped culinary avenue.

Each video features Drumgoole in her Kensington kitchen, usually with a drink in hand and including occasional cameos from her cat. She speaks in an enthusiastic, wide-eyed way, which isn't too different from many of the other Deen-acolytes posting to the site.

But then Drumgoole's videos go off the rails: Rather than cook, she does anything but, entering into a video game-esque wonderland that leads to her taking a bite out of a stick of butter mashed with cream cheese.

Drumgoole's mom was a Deen fanatic and persuaded her daughter to enter the contest, despite her lack of cooking enthusiasm or expertise. "Real Philadelphia" winners would be given a trip to Savannah, Ga., to meet lard-loving Deen herself, and Drumgoole figured if she won she could get her mom's Deen cookbook autographed.

The contest site was set up like a Facebook profile - a portal where participants could post videos and facts about themselves and "friend" others. Drumgoole thought she was going to be eliminated immediately, but she began to friend people and found out these women were just like her mom.

While Drumgoole admitted that most people on the site probably thought she was crazy, many of the women began to embrace her, especially after someone using the name Paula Deen posted positive comments about one of her videos.