SAN FRANCISCO — When Mary Gauthier sings how she "stole mama's car on a Sunday and left home for good/ And moved in with my friends in the city in a bad neighborhood," she's not playing make-believe.

The Louisiana native, touring behind her second release Drag Queens in Limousines (In the Black Records, 1999), is only telling it like it is, or was, for her.

She ran away from home at 15 and took up with — as she describes them in the album's title track (RealAudio excerpt ) — "Drag queens in limousines/ Nuns in blue jeans/ Poets and AWOL Marines/ Actors and barflies/ Writers with dark eyes."

Her 16th birthday found her in a detox center, her 18th in a Kansas jail. The story on that one, she said, was that while washing cars in Salina, Kan., for $2 an hour that winter, she got busted stealing change and 8-track tapes from the cars she was guiding through the washers.

She eventually wound up in culinary school in Boston, and after several years in the industry, successfully capitalized on her

Louisiana roots via the Boston restaurant Dixie Kitchen.

But ultimately she decided to focus on another aspect of her Louisiana heritage, her music, and she sold her interest in the restaurant to finance her first album, titled, of all things, Dixie Kitchen.

Served With Style

In a recent performance at the Noe Valley Ministry in San Francisco opening for Richard Shindell, Gauthier, 38, gave the audience a taste of her brazen, take-it-or-leave-it style.

"I'm not sure I'm a folk singer or a country singer," she deadpanned at one point. "But since I have a lot of country in me I gotta have a drinkin' song."

Then she cut into the gritty honky-tonk ballad "I Drink" (

HREF="http://www.sonicnet.com/artists/clip.cgi?track=~ccc-484908/0233579_0104_00_0002.ra">RealAudio excerpt), about being an adult child of an alcoholic father and getting lured by the juice herself.

The chorus — "Fish swim/ Birds fly/ Daddies yell/ Mamas cry/ Old men sit and think/ I drink" — seems humorous, but she makes no bones about the fact that it was a problem once.

When she sings the song in bars, she told the crowd, "people bring me cocktails."

"It's the saddest song I ever wrote, and people are partying to it,"

Gauthier joked.

She's touring as a solo act, just her and her shiny blue, bright-sounding guitar, and is reminiscent in some ways of John Prine in her direct, clear stories about working-class people on the edge, with a little early-Bob Dylan twang and some Neil Young whine.

When she put her harmonica rack on upside-down Saturday, she laughed, "In my earlier days, before I was such a pro, I might have tried to play it that way." Though she drew hearty laughs from the crowd several times with her comic quips, however, there's no escaping the accompanying pathos.

Gauthier (pronounced Go-shay) sports short hair and wore a leather vest and baggy cargo pants. She's melodic, but her style is simple, often relying on hillbilly two-steps with heavy strumming, with some flat-picking occasionally thrown in.

A Life In Songs

In another original song about life's darker side, "Camelot Motel,"

she sings about "Cheaters, liars, outlaws and fallen angels/ Who come looking for the grace from which they fell/ The mornings are like hell/ At Camelot Motel."

She told the crowd that her parents in Thibodaux, La., were

conservative and as a kid she gave them hell. And still does, in fact.

"When I told my mom I'd won the Gay Country Act of the Year award, she said: 'I'd love to tell our friends but can't. You win something a little less out there next time.' "

In an interview after her show, Gauthier said she loved touring

California because she likes the people. "I see myself in people's eyes here, and I feel like I fit in. In other places I don't see that, and it's kind of scary."

Gauthier closed her set by thanking the audience for letting her

"bother" them for a while. "I write songs and force them down the

throats of people here to see somebody else," she said. But now that she's starting to get around, it's a fair bet that next time they'll

be there just to see her.

In the meantime, she's got a busy summer schedule that will deliver her to many of the major folk festivals around the United States.

Mary Gauthier tour dates:

July 21; Piermont, N.Y.; The Turning Point (with Richard Shindell)

July 21–23; Hillsdale, N.Y.; Falcon Ridge Folk Festival

July 26; Cambridge, Mass.; Club Passim (with Ramblin' Jack Elliott)

July 28–30; Hillsdale, N.Y.; Winterhawk Festival

Aug. 2; Sykesville, Md.; Baldwin's Station

Aug. 3; Washington, D.C.; Kennedy Center Millennium Stage

Aug. 5–6; Newport, R.I.; Newport Folk Festival

Aug. 9; Somerville, Mass.; Johnny D's

Aug. 10; New York, N.Y.; Bottom Line

Aug. 15; Carbondale, Colo.; Sopris Park

Aug. 18–20; Lyons, Colo.; Rocky Mountain Folk Festival

Aug. 25–29; Philadelphia, Pa.; Philadelphia Folk Festival

Aug. 31–Sept. 2; Kerrville, Texas; Wine and Food Festival

Sept. 2–3; Santa Fe, N.M.; Thirsty Ear Festival

Sept. 9; Princeton, N.J.; Princeton Arts Council

Sept. 10; Grafton, Mass.; Grafton Crossing

Sept. 15; Phoenixville, Pa.; Plowshares Coffeehouse

Sept. 16; Chestertown, Md.; Andy's

Sept. 20; Acton, Mass.; Acton Jazz Cafe

Oct. 6; Montclair, N.J.; Outpost in the Burbs

Oct. 27; Londonderry, N.H.; Muse at the Gray Goose