Those who haven’t had their fill of the uber-trashy Texas comedy Sordid Lives can pull up a bucket o’ chicken and offer thanks to the velvet Elvis. Writer-producer Del Shores (Southern Baptist Sissies, Daddy’s Dyin’ … Who’s Got the Will?) is breathing new life into his sordid saga via chapters published on his web site. Penned in bi-weekly installments, the chapters — which he plans to turn into a novel — flash back to the days before Peggy tripped over her adulterous lover’s wooden legs to become the corpse around which Shores’ romp revolves.

“The way I’ve structured it is that each chapter could be a short story — they could almost stand on their own,” said Shores. “You get more of the connection, say, between Ty and LaVonda…. Ty’s mother, Latrelle, had a little bit of an addiction problem you didn’t know about, which sort of explains her uptightness all the time. You find out why G.W. is driven to have the affair with Peggy, because of something that Noleta (Delta Burke in the film) won’t do in bed…. Peggy was willing to let him take those legs off.”

Shores also assured that fans would learn what becomes of the Tammy Wynette-emulating Brother Boy after his break from a mental institution and over-the-top exodus from Peggy’s funeral.

As for the nature of the man who beat Brother Boy to a pulp years earlier and later helps him escape, Shores said no latent homosexual tendencies are revealed in Wardell. “I think that’s where everybody always goes,” Shores said. “Wardell was a childhood friend who Brother Boy ultimately fell in love with…. I don’t feel like Wardell is gay. I think that he’s probably evolved into being very gay-friendly out of guilt and realizing that what he did to this man was horrible and horrific. It’s sort of like what happened in Soldier’s Girl, the Calpernia Adams story, where there was peer pressure. It was a huge regret, because that beating was the incident that justified Peggy putting him into a mental institution.”

Another point in the story Shores said people usually read wrong is the character of Bitsy Mae Harling (played in the film by Olivia Newton-John). “I don’t think Bitsy Mae is a lesbian,” Shores said. “I think that sexuality is very complicated — especially in Bitsy’s life…. There’s a chapter on Bitsy Mae where she’s coming out of a really nasty relationship that got her put in jail. So when she hooks up with Peggy, it’s just one of those things where they’re both at a place in their life…. You know, she’s bi.

“Olivia has been my friend and her sister Rona (who plays Brother Boy’s lusty therapist) is my very close friend,” Shores continued. “Olivia saw the play in ’96 and ’97…. She called me up on my birthday and asked me what I was up to and I said I was trying to raise money for Sordid Lives. She said, in jest (Shores adopted a Southern drawl), ‘Oh, you should just let me put on a Southern accent and do one of those roles.’ I thought, I bet she could do this. You know, I was going after Wynonna Judd or Bonnie Raitt, — someone who seemed more lesbian.”

Though the film amassed a cult following shortly after its theatrical release, reaching a more mainstream audience from the DVD shelves, Shores said he’s still overwhelmed by the initial response to the film in the gay enclaves of Fort Lauderdale, Provincetown and Palm Springs. “Palm Springs was the monster that created the cultness,” Shores recalled. “We went down there and we had no idea what to expect. When we walked into the Camelot Theatre, we were like rock stars. Leslie Jordan, who played Brother Boy, was like Madonna. He and Beth Grant (cigarette cessation Sissy) can’t go to Palm Springs without being mobbed.”

Among his credits, Shores has also written for TV (“Touched by an Angel,” “Dharma and Greg”), including two upcoming episodes of “Queer As Folk” (episodes four and nine of season three, the first of which aired on Showtime, Nov. 2).

Shores said working with the creative team at Queer As Folk came easily to him. “The characters are so rich and they’re always evolving. The last season we certainly left a lot of stuff [unfinished]. We had a lot of loose ends to start with and rebuild.”

A portion of the proceeds from online subscriptions to the Sordid saga will be donated to The Trevor Project, a Los Angeles-based organization dedicated to preventing suicide among gay teens.

Shores’ most recent Southern Baptist-inspired stage offering, The Trials and Tribulations of a Trailer Trash Housewife (also starring Beth Grant), has been nominated for a 2003 Los Angeles Ovation Award. The play — which deals explicitly with the subject of domestic violence — is set to open off-Broadway in March.

For a link to Del Shores’ web site and the Sordid Lives chapters, visit the online version of this story at www.gaylesbiantimes.com.