"True story," Judith Rizzio says.

"I come home the day after elections sulking about the dismal results. On my way home in the car I think . . . I gotta get out of this funk some way. Gotta do something.

"I get the mail and there is one letter amongst the junk mail. I open it, and it's my 10-year renewal form from the Oregon Corporation Division to renew the trademark of The Fallen Angel Choir. I know it might sound loony, but I literally take this as a sign. I smile real big and pick up the phone . . ."

Rizzio called old-time Angels Cathryn Cushing and Kate Finn, plus Sharon Knorr, who'd performed with Finn in the show "Hot Flashes." All had other things to do. All said yes.

And the Angels -- Portland's, not Charlie's -- were reborn.

"It feels great," Rizzio says, "to be back on the streets where we belong."

True story. For 21 years, from their first impromptu performance in 1976 at the downtown Meier & Frank until Rizzio retired the name at the end of 1996, the Angels were a Portland satiric tradition, street-theater carolers all decked out in Dickensian duds and singing lyrically altered holiday songs from an old-fashioned lefty perspective, taking on everything from rampant consumerism to political buffoonery to the AIDS epidemic. Toward the end they got so popular -- corporations hired them for private events, and they became a mainstream ticketed event -- that some old allies on the left denounced them for selling out.

Rizzio never bought the criticism. A veteran of political theater, she considered the corporate gigs like parachuting behind enemy lines and having the other side greet you with bouquets of roses. As for entertaining audiences -- well, why not?

Now, she believes, it's time to shake things up. And this time, it's back to the roots: less polished, more raw.

"We're doing this to help people feel. Snap out of it. And make them uncomfortable," she says. "We're not there to make people throw rotten vegetables at us, but we are going to be pointed."

Sometimes, very pointed. "What part of 1,000 bodies on the streets of Fallujah today," she asks, "are the bodies of pregnant women?"

To a sharper or softer degree, The Fallen Angel Choir has always been pointed. After treating shoppers to a verse of "We wish you a merry business and a lucrative year" in that first department-store performance, they were promptly booted from the premises -- and onto the path to local stardom.

The reborn Angels make their first appearance Monday evening at a benefit performance for Naral Pro-Choice Oregon. They'll do an Amnesty International benefit Dec. 10, and the next day they'll be back at one their most frequent old stomping grounds, the Portland Saturday Market.

Times are more cautious than during the Angels' heyday, Rizzio says. When she's called for bookings, some places that used to welcome the Angels have asked, "Are you going to be as political as you were? Are you going to offend anyone?" One group, she says, told her, "You can be satirical, but you can't be political."

As Rizzio sees it, that's a failure of nerve. "The carefulness, I think, is the most insidious thing of all. We can be so careful that our rights to even think our thoughts will be taken away."

Angel sighting: Amnesty International benefit, Portland State University Parkway North Building, Room 101, 8 p.m. Friday, Dec. 10. Public invited.

THANKS AGAIN ANGELS! We can never thank you enough!

Below is how the band describes themselves:

"If you do not know who we are.....The Fallen Angel Choir is a 4 women accapella political satire group that sang during the holidays for 21 years. We are quite irreverent and pride ourselves on being equal opportunity offenders. We take Christmas songs as well as non holiday tunes and create parodies that speak to social issues and point/poke fun at the realities of this time of year as well as the political realities of the times. Be forewarned......this is not your "normal and safe" Christmas choir."