Onstage, Triangle expatriate Alina Simone has been known to break out the occasional Britney Spears cover. From there, one supposes, it's a short step to performing in the guise of Rielle Hunter -- notorious paramour of North Carolina's former senator/presidential candidate, John Edwards.

Improbably, Simone will don a blonde wig to do just that on Thursday at Brookyn's PowerHouse Arena, playing Hunter in "Edwards! The Musical." A satirical treatment of a pretty tragic series of events, "Edwards!" has been tapped as entertainment at the launch party for "The McSweeney's Book of Politics and Musicals." You can check out the script for "Edwards!" here.

I can tell you from firsthand experience that former Chapel Hill denizen Alina Simone is a fantastic writer. It's just that, until recently, the only people who knew that were e-mail pals of hers. But the word is out now, thanks to her excellent new book "You Must Go and Win." Simone will be back in the Triangle to do a reading from it tonight, so see the interview for details on that. She's also scheduled to be on WUNC's "The State of Things" at noon today, so tune in to 91.5-FM.

If you ever find yourself headed for Siberia -- and hey, it could happen -- one of the best sources for travel advice would be Brooklyn-based singer/songwriter Alina Simone, who used to call Chapel Hill home. Simone has spent a lot of time there over the past nine years, carving out an idiosyncratic niche in the field of music, writing and wacky cultural commentary. For particulars on traveling on the other side of the old Iron Curtain, see this interview from Sunday's travel section.

ADDENDUM (8/22/10): New York Times essay on changing her name.

Toward the end of her interview on WUNC's "The State of Things" last week, Triangle expatriate Alina Simone mentioned that she's writing a book about her "strange adventures in Russian indie-rock." Plenty of raw material there, given that Simone has spent the past few years reclaiming her Russian heritage. Curiously, however, she's devoting a chapter in the book to Britney Spears, an object of fascination for Simone ever since she discovered that Spears' 2003 hit "Toxic" was inescapable even in deepest Siberia.

Simone says she's also going to record an EP of Spears covers, including "Toxic," "...Baby One More Time" -- and, of course, "Oops!...I Did It Again," a jailbait anthem that might be the skeeviest song in Spears' catalog. Saturday night at the Carrboro ArtsCenter, Simone closed her show with a jagged guitar version of "Oops!," to general confusion and amusement. Simone transposed the titillation of Spears' original to something like anguished paranoia, and it took most of the first verse for everyone to recognize the song. There were audible snickers the first time Simone got to the money-shot line: I'm not. That. Innocent.

It was a great shock-value moment, even if Richard Thompson beat her to it by a couple of years. How much you want to bet Thompson covers that one, too, when he plays the ArtsCenter in March?

ADDENDUM (1/26/09): Here's what was happening right next door to the ArtsCenter Saturday night.

SECOND ADDENDUM (7/21/09): More strange Britney covers.

As 2008 winds down, Triangle alumnus Alina Simone is turning up on some unusual year-end lists with "Everyone Is Crying Out To Me, Beware," her tribute album to the late Russian punk icon Yanka Dyagileva. Washington politico Howard Wolfson includes "Beware" in his "Best of 2008" recap of the year's best albums, calling it "your standard album of modern Russian folk covers." And Simone comes in at No. 83 on the "Top 100 People of 2008" listing of USA Today's pop-culture blog "Pop Candy."

As for future projects, Simone recently signed a book deal to write a memoir -- "essays loosely themed around my strange adventures in indie rock, especially in Russia," she says. Meanwhile, she'll return to English-language songs on her next album, "Make Your Own Danger," due out sometime next year.

More immediately, Simone will be back in the Triangle on Jan. 24 to play the Carrboro ArtsCenter.

Long ago and far away, I studied Russian in high school. It was so many years ago ago that I can't recall why learning Russian seemed like a good idea, or why my high school even offered it in the first place. Maybe it was because the Cold War was in full effect and nuclear paranoia ran deep, and that the Russian language and Cyrillic alphabet seemed exotic and scarily fascinating. Whatever the reasons, I took two years of it and did okay. By now, however, about all I remember is dosvidanya ("goodbye") and the ability to jabber a bit in what sounds like (but actually isn't) Russian.

Lately I've been wishing I'd retained more of my Russian, thanks to sometime Triangle resident Alina Simone's "Everyone Is Crying Out To Me, Beware" -- an album sung entirely in Russian. "Beware" first crossed my radar after I selected Simone to be in this past January's "Eight Great Local Acts" feature. Five minutes into interviewing her, I knew there was no way I could do justice to Simone's story or "Beware" in the limited space I had to work with for "Great Eight." So I've done a longer feature that gets into the back-story of the Ukrainian-born Simone reconnecting with her roots via the music of the late great Russian punk legend Yanka Dyagileva.

Check that here; and catch what will probably be her last Triangle performance for a good long while Tuesday at Chapel Hill's Local 506.