My job creates a strange duality in my life. While I’m out in the sparkly dress and disco ball headgear, I become a different personality. This personality is attractive to douchebags and man whores. Everyday, while working, I receive marriage proposals. These heartfelt, sincere declarations of love and devotion emit from dudes in pants down to their knees (the kind to which, my grandma has told me, she’d like to give “a good yank.”), tattoos of other girls’ names, and sometimes several golden teeth. I usually have to respectfully decline the invitation to spend the rest of my life in what would assuredly be a satisfying, committed relationship. It’s just that I want to figure my own life out first. I need to spend some time on Project Camber before diving into Project Camber and Ghetto Times Square Husband Share a Life for All Perpetuity.
At the end of my shift, I go back into the dressing room, put on my “normal” mostly non-reflective clothes, and a hat to cover the extreme hat hair, and I’m back out on the streets; this time as a common citizen, just with perhaps too much makeup. Nobody knows that moments earlier, I was drag queening it out all over the place, taking photos ad nauseum with tourists, and complimenting every hot pink item of clothing or sequin bedazzled bit of attire I saw. This same phenomenon plagued me in Hong Kong. I would do a show, in which I portrayed Pippi the Penguin, lost in a world of endangered species, literally tap dancing through environmental issues–then I would take the MTR home and think, “No one on this train knows that only a few short moments ago, I was in a giant penguin costume, thrilling Chinese children with my overacting.” No one knew. But I knew.
TONY. And this time, I’m not talking about the middle-aged Australian actor that Chinese tourists think I am.
The Tony Awards drew a crowd of spectators to Times Square for an outdoor viewing on a giant LED screen. I, fortunately, worked that day. These were my people. I was the star of these people who decided it was a good idea to leave the comfort of home to watch the Tony’s with hundreds of other people sitting around and probably farting nearby in Times Square. I basked in the glory of being the most fabulous person present until….my nemesis arrived. My nemesis, whom I shall call Reginald–age 78, arrived on the scene with his usual shopping cart full of tinsel, colorful cotton fabrics, and some trash. He wore at least 12 tutus of various colors so as to create a rainbow effect. He dyed his long beard a multitude of shades of green, pink, and blue, and apparently used those same dyes on his formerly white poodle. But the piece de la resisitance was his exotic bird. This bird HAS to be illegal. It’s a massive flying beast, and definitely not a parrot. I know this because it did not repeat ANYTHING I said, and my nemesis is not a pirate. Reginald–age 78 then asked me for a flyer (he thinks we’re friends–and he doesn’t speak, so he asks for things with body language and facial expressions). I begrudgingly gave him one and he placed it in the bird’s beak, as if to say that the illegal not-a-parrot bird was helping me with my job. Then, horror of horrors, my shift ended and I left the scene without getting into a fight or even a dance fight with snapping with Reginald–age 78.
Now….a video of me in a hat. Hat is due to the heavy rain which made me look like a drowned rat today, and actually not at all related to the drag queen head dress. For once:
Camberica 