Nathaniel is a lawyer from Boston. (Actually, he’s from Milton, which sounds nice but also boring.) He’s here with his children, Teddy and Sophia. It’s Family Week in Provincetown, meaning there are people of every age in the audience tonight. Nathaniel is clearly dressed for comfort: T-shirt, cargo shorts, sneakers. “Red, horizontal stripes,” Miss Richfield says with a hmmph. “That wouldn’t have been my first choice.”

Poor Nathaniel. He’s been up on stage for a while now. “Do you mind standing?” Miss Richfield asked him 10 minutes ago. He looks at his children pleadingly. They cackle and squirm in their seats, pointing their fingers at him. Sorry, Dad!

What kind of law does Nathaniel practice? Health care, he says. “So, do you represent patients or the major companies that are poisoning us all?” Miss Richfield asks. Nathaniel turns as red as his T-shirt. “Yeah, no comment,” Miss Richfield says, shooing him off the stage.

As she does with her lipstick, Miss Richfield lays the audience participation element of her show on thick. The house lights remain on for most of her show, “Phony Baloney,” at the Pilgrim House. She has a knack for choosing the most unassuming members of the audience and making them stand on stage for 10, 15, 20 minutes. She dresses them in cow costumes, presses them for details about their marriages, and cheers for them when they finally nail their choreography. They blush and, occasionally, light up. This is what Provincetown is about: stepping out of your comfort zone.

Speaking of which, Miss Richfield recently stepped out of hers: She bought a new toaster. Before that, she’d had the same toaster since the ’70s — it was avocado green, so it matched all her other kitchen appliances. In 1983, the handle broke. No problem: Miss Richfield started using the Minneapolis Yellow Pages to weigh the handle down. “It was only a problem when I needed to look up a phone number and toast bread at the same time,” she says.

But recently the whole thing went kaput. She bought a brand-new state-of-the-art 2024 Hamilton Beach toaster — shiny stainless steel, absolutely beautiful. Then, things started to get creepy. The toaster could tell the difference between bread and a bagel. “I don’t know how,” Miss Richfield says. “I didn’t press any buttons. I didn’t show the bagel to the toaster beforehand.” Miss Richfield stood horrified in her kitchen. “I realized the toaster had become self-aware,” she says.

The show uses this anecdote as a springboard for whipsmart commentary on the current state of technology. “Phony baloney” is Miss Richfield-speak for artificial intelligence. She’s wearing an Oscar Meyer bologna package as a dress. A slideshow of AI-generated photos is projected on the wall behind her. As the show goes on, they get increasingly ridiculous, but it’s too late: we’re already here, in the uncanny valley.

The show pairs bygone electronic devices — a flip phone from RadioShack, an original Mac desktop, dial-up internet — with contemporary horrors like what happens when you have a conversation with a friend about going girdle shopping and then, minutes later, you’re getting an advertisement on your phone about a girdle sale at Sears Roebuck. Or, when you then try and call Sears Roebuck about said girdle sale, and you can’t get a real person on the phone, so you find yourself talking about your intimates with a robot.

Miss Richfield is named after her hometown in Minnesota, where, in case you’ve been living under a rock, she won the beauty pageant in 1981. There’s no one in the audience from Minnesota tonight.  “But that’s OK,” Miss Richfield says. “We’ll still do the show. We just won’t try as hard.”

More audience members are dragged up onto the stage. It’s a tour-de-force of schadenfreude, but all done lovingly. Zach is here with his girlfriend — they’ve been dating for less than a year, so he’s basically single. He works for a moving company. “You’ve got big, strong, lesbian hands,” Miss Richfield says admiringly. He didn’t grow up attending any kind of church. “A godless soul,” Miss Richfield says. “That’s even worse than a lawyer.” She’s not done with Nathaniel, who is back in his seat.

There’s Carey, who’s been with her wife for 20 years, and is wearing “summer navy blue, not as nice as Christmas navy blue,” Miss Richfield says. She works in software. So does Mark, who, microphone in hand, says, “I’m going to keep saying boring things if you let me keep talking.” The audience cheers for him. Keep talking, keep talking. Under Miss Richfield’s guiding hand, everyone has a story worth sharing.

There’s “super gay Jason,” the only participant in tonight’s show who volunteered to come up on stage. Hiking up his booty shorts, he teaches Carey and Mark how to snap your fingers like you mean it. They each start off stiff, awkward, but as Jason coaches them, their hips start moving and their lips start pursing.

“Sassy!” squeals Miss Richfield. Their inner divas have come out — we all have one, and we’d all be well advised to let them out more. Here, on stage with Miss Richfield, yours might just come snapping to life.

Do You Mind?

The event: ‘Phony Baloney’ with Miss Richfield
The time: Through Sep. 14 at 9 p.m.
The place: Pilgrim House, 336 Commercial St., Provincetown
The cost: $35 to $55 at pilgrimhouseptown.com