Point and Shoot : Budget Is Low--So Is the Humor--on Cable Show ‘Two Moms and a Camera’

One of the nice things about channel surfing is you don’t get sand in your shorts. Clicking away on your remote, however, you do run the risk of coming across “Two Moms and a Camera.” That’s a TV show, though except for it appearing on your television set, you’d never know it.

On most television programs you don’t see women schmoozing their way onto whale-watching boats, getting seasick, chasing police cars, pigging out at all-you-can-eat buffets, making bread at the beach or crawling through doughnut shop takeout windows at midnight. And wherever they appear with their hand-held home video camera, the pair engage total strangers in conversation, if not dance.

Usually those trying to so engage the public have the validating advantage of being affiliated with a recognizable media giant, with a crew and lots of gear on hand for credibility. For all the people the Two Moms approach know, they might as well be pushy bag ladies with a broken camera found in the trash. What host of a real TV show starts helping herself to snacks from kids’ lunch bags while interviewing them on the beach?

“Our first line of defense is we cannot be insulted. We have no fear,” says Mom 2X. She’s the off-screen but much-heard camerawoman of the show. She prefers to maintain the anonymity of her never-seen character, though she does own up that her first name is Chrissy.

The on-screen talent is Mom X, Mary Jo Phillips. Each is the mother of three children, and of their ages they’ll only admit to being “not dead yet. We’re fading beauty queens, and we’ve been fading for a long time,” Chrissy said.

We talked with the two at the Balboa Pavilion, not far from their Peninsula homes and the sites of many of their 26 shows. Their X and 2X designations are intended as comments on their relative clothing sizes, though neither looks to have spent as much time at buffet troughs as is claimed. Phillips is quite the beach mom, a perpetually dieting divorcee real estate agent with wind-mussed blond hair and braces, who roller-blades on the boardwalk twice a day.

Chrissy has no use for diets--”Save your money for a coffin; I guarantee you’ll lose weight there,” she says--and her idea of exercise is watching Nick at Nite until the wee hours. She lives her life “entirely at random” and has been married for 25 years to a manager of a senior center.

There is an almost idiotic fearlessness to their half-hour show. They’ll butt into any conversation, cut in on dancers at a posh ball and put themselves in embarrassing situations, such as trying to sneak onto a whale watching cruise as school kids’ chaperons.

On another jaunt, to Catalina, Phillips became so ill that their resulting travelogue featured such sights as the medications aisle of an Avalon Vons market and the two getting their “sea legs” by throwing back Long Island ice teas in a bar.

In one show, Phillips got trash collectors to chuck her into a garbage truck. They make fat jokes at their own expense yet courted caloric disaster by spending four hours--from midnight to 4 a.m.--taping in a doughnut shop.

The result was as informative a documentary as one could ask for on doughnut-making techniques and coastal late-night life, and even featured a special-effects breakthrough: Sniff-O-Rama. As the dough was being kneaded for cinnamon rolls, Chrissy instructed viewers, “Go down to the kitchen right now and smell a jar of cinnamon.”

Far from being an ego romp, the shows often cast the creators in an unflattering light. They get phone calls from viewers complaining about how messy Phillips’ hair is. Their shows often feature what Chrissy calls “the parting shot,” namely Phillips’ rump as she’s climbing over one thing or another. The recent vision of her climbing through the doughnut shop window occasioned the show’s first obscene phone call.

They list a phone number and address on a hand-lettered sign on each show, prompting scores of calls each week, though their audience isn’t much on writing: “In six months of having a P.O. box, the only mail we got was the renewal notice,” Chrissy said.

“Two Moms and a Camera” airs in Newport Beach on Comcast Cablevision, Channel 3, Tuesdays at 8 p.m., Thursdays and Fridays at 4:30 p.m. and Saturdays at 1:30 p.m. In Costa Mesa, they are on Copley Colony Channel 61 on Tuesdays at 11 a.m. In Irvine, the show runs on Cox Channel 3 Thursdays at 11 p.m. They hope to be on cable systems in Orange and South County cities.

They are slowly gaining cult status. The pair say the people at one cable network office fight over their tapes when they’re turned in to see who gets to watch them first. They are often recognized on the street in their hometown.

Once, after doing yardwork entailing lots of parting shots, Phillips learned that waiters at a restaurant across the way had been pointing her out to customers as the star of “Two Moms.”

After doing the show for a year, she doesn’t waste time worrying what others might think of her.

“For the show to work, we’ve found out I have to get crazier and crazier. When I hold back, it doesn’t work. So I have to just climb on and make a total ass of myself for the show to work. And that’s how life works. You have to jump out and grab it. I can’t believe how happy I wake up in the mornings,” Phillips said.

That she and Chrissy let it all hang out is the core of their popularity, she thinks. “People tell us we’re like eavesdropping on two friends having a good time.”

The two are indeed the best of friends, though neither had intended to be. Fifteen years ago they were neighbors on the Peninsula. At the time, Phillips was millionairess Barbara Hutton’s private nurse, tending to her waning days at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel.

“And I became friends with Mary Jo,” Chrissy said, “only because when I saw her one day in the neighborhood she told me that she was entitled to one free room-service meal a night. And she’s always dieting and never ate them. So I told her, ‘Bring me the meal!’

“So when she’d get home at 11, I’d have this gourmet meal every night from the Beverly Wilshire. How can you hate someone like that? And she had to unwind from work, so we’d talk.”

Phillips wound up moving from the area with her family, spending most of her years away in Chevy Chase, Md. Following her divorce two years ago, she moved back to Newport with her children.

She called Chrissy, who thought, “There’s already 700 million people in town. I don’t need anybody else. So I bought her a quiche, dropped it off and thought that would keep her quiet. But then she starts calling to thank me for the quiche! So we meet and I didn’t know what to say. I liked her, but I hadn’t seen her in 15 years. So the first thing out of my mouth was, ‘Hey, do you want to go on television?’ and the first thing out of her mouth was, ‘Sure. When?’ ”

They started that day, with an old video camera Chrissy had found while cleaning house.

The resulting debut “Two Moms and a Camera” started off on the right foot, with the pair taking a 10-pound bag of popcorn and dressing it up as a series of potential boyfriends for Phillips. They mailed the finished tape to their local cable company on a Tuesday and were called Friday to say they were going on the air.

Since then they’ve created a new show every two weeks, starting off with an idea, taping without a script and doing a rough edit on home VCRs in a bathroom.

Their only expense comes when they do a final edit at a professional studio. Chrissy said, “We buy an hour of time at $44. So that’s 10 school lunches we have to tell our kids they don’t need.”

On the show they include their children only occasionally and incidentally, avoiding the doting mom bit, which they clearly are despite their attempts to disguise it, such as Chrissy’s claim, “As soon as my children can tie their shoes, they go to boarding school. But it does take them until the seventh grade to learn.”

Their kids have mixed responses to the show. One of Phillips’ kid’s sole comment on their efforts is, “It’s a start.” Chrissy claims her three children are impressed with it, though. “They have to be. If they want to have dinner, they have to watch 30 minutes of the show. And then if they want it cooked , that’s another 30 minutes.”

She’s a big fan of Carl Reiner and the old “Dick Van Dyke Show,” but when it comes to doing “Two Moms,” Chrissy said, “I think the only real influence on the show is that we wake up and we’re breathing.”

“I laugh all day long with her,” Phillips said. “I just love to be with her. She sees life with such a beautiful strangeness. We get an energy level going, and later when we’re editing, we go, ‘How did we think of that?’ ”

They’re not surprised that they’re able to pull total strangers into their vortex. “The thing is that people all feel like they have something to contribute. We’ll carry on a conversation with anyone,” Chrissy said.

Is there a philosophy behind what the two do?

Chrissy said, “Our philosophy is go out and do what you want to do. If it makes no sense to anybody, do it. Because if you’re going to go to bed tonight worrying about what you didn’t do today, you get up the next day two days behind with worry and guilt. Just go do it.”

“That was Chrissy’s gift to me,” Phillips said. “When we first started this I was so self-conscious, so corporately structured. She’d say, ‘Let’s call so and so,’ and I’d worry if it was proper, that Washington, D.C., corporate mentality. And Chrissy would just pick up the telephone and tell them anything to get what we wanted. Usually we get it.

“We have a little theme song we’re putting together: ‘We’re Two Moms and a Camera, that’s who we are, give us a chance and we’ll go far. We’ll search out the little guy and make him a star. We’re Two Moms and a Camera. That’s who we are.’ ”