Woman in the Making: Panti's Memoir (14 page)

So, at Gristle, where the audience were seated and not yet drunk, I talked to them. I told comic stories or ranted about whatever was annoying me. I put my four years at art college to some use and, with an easel on stage, I illustrated as I went. I read
Butler’s Lives of the Saints
and regaled the audience with the life stories of the most outrageous and ridiculous saints. I retold Bible stories from a gay perspective and told silly ‘stories’ in a fake language parody of modern Irish. I wandered through the audience asking questions, slagging and cajoling, and at times it feels like I haven’t shut up since.

It was around this time that Shirley, Veda and I formed our ‘girl group’, SugarRush. We did all sorts of gigs, from scary dives with sticky carpets in Derry, where we were expected to perform standing in the corner with no lights and a ceiling so low our wigs kept getting caught, to fancy ladies-who-lunch charity fundraisers, but it was the corporate gigs (especially the Christmas parties) that were our bread and butter. We’d turn up with the show on CD, a group number to start and finish, a couple of solos each in the middle, and after everyone had had their dessert and too much wine, we’d do our best to entertain bleary-eyed Helen from Accounts and Phil from Sales while struggling with crappy sound and awful lighting in a hotel function room.

Those gigs taught me to appreciate one of the intrinsic advantages of performing in drag: it gets people’s attention. One Christmas I was booked for a big corporate party at the Great Southern Hotel in Galway. It was a huge affair with hundreds of people being served dinner on long tables that ran the length of the enormous room, and even more people eating on a balcony. There was other entertainment on the bill – fire-eaters outside, a close-up magician going round the tables and, this being Galway, a puppeteer, who was interacting with the hapless diners – but the heavy lifting was to be done by a young up-and-coming comedian, who would have been well known in comedy circles at the time but not to most of the alcohol-reddened-cheek owners in that room.

By the time he stepped onto the stage, he was facing a sea of askew paper hats, and the noise was deafening: roast-beef dinners were served or cleared, cutlery was clanked, while conversations and good-natured insults were shouted across tables. It was impossible. One half of the massive room were only vaguely aware that there even was a comedian. I watched through my fingers from the back of the upstairs balcony, as the noise level got higher and higher as even the guests who wanted to hear him gave up trying. He could have been the greatest stand-up the world had ever known and not a single person in that room would have known or cared. I felt bad for him – until I remembered I was next.

I was to go on during dessert, tell a few jokes, do the raffle. I knew I could get plenty of laughs out of picking out prizes and teasing winners, but not if nobody realised I was there, so when I walked into the room I was dreading it – but I had an advantage over the comedian. I had drag. I was six foot ten in platform heels and big hair, wearing a short yellow dress with bell sleeves and ice-cream cones printed all over it, and I was painted up like a stolen car. I was hard to miss or ignore (even from the far end of the room) and the hubbub of conversation died away as people started to crane their necks to get a look at the giant candy-coloured cartoon that had just walked in.

Turned out I’d done half the work by the time I’d left the dressing room.

I
N
1987 N
IALL AND
F
RANK
had helped to produce a small, wonderfully ridiculous event in Sides nightclub called the Alternative Miss Ireland. A fundraiser for the Rape Crisis Centre, it had been inspired by an annual party thrown by English artist Andrew Logan, which took the staid, old-fashioned format of Miss World and threw it to a pack of gay wolves. It became a wild, outrageous, eccentric costume competition: people of all genders and none would take to the catwalk in elaborate costumes for daywear, swimwear and eveningwear. After struggling into their costumes under the stairs, seven or eight contestants took to the small stage in Sides to be interviewed by Linda Martin. Then she and Mr Pussy, the judges, crowned Miss Isle, a naked guy covered in paint with a cardboard nuclear missile thrusting from his crotch (this was the era of Cold War politics and impending nuclear holocaust), as the first Alternative
Miss Ireland. Tonie Walsh, who had entered wearing a costume inspired by Rathmines Town Hall with a clock tower balanced on his head, was narrowly edged out.

Nine years later Niall, our then newly acquired friend and collaborator Trish (who’d just arrived in Dublin after a few years’ squatting, photographing and clubbing in London) and I were approached by Dublin AIDS Alliance, a volunteer organisation that worked with people living with HIV/AIDS, and asked if we would produce a new Alternative Miss Ireland to raise funds for them. It sounded like fun to us so we agreed. Had we known then that it would end up consuming a huge amount of our time and energy for the next seventeen years we might have hesitated.

The ‘pageant’ would be open to all (‘men, women, animals’, we declared) and would be a modern, ‘post-gender’, tongue-in-cheek gay take on Irishness. It would be, we told everyone, a cross between Miss World, the Rose of Tralee, the Calor Kosangas Housewife of the Year, and that time in college we bunked off art history class and took mushrooms. There would be three rounds, and each contestant (each ‘Miss’) would perform twice – once in daywear and once in eveningwear. The swimwear round would be an interview. We were determined that there would be as few rules as possible and we would do our best to accommodate any contestant’s ideas, no matter how insane. This event would be all about encouraging creativity and nuttiness and outrageousness, and
rules would only get in the way. As long as it seemed reasonably unlikely that anyone would die, we were OK with it. And even if it seemed likely that someone would die, well, it would all depend on who it was.

We set about finding contestants, trying to explain to people what we were doing:
You can do anything you want. Yes, of course you can be a boy – or a girl, if you prefer. A snake is fine, no problem. No, it doesn’t have to be actual swimwear, the round titles are meaningless, really, just a little joke. Oh, absolutely, nudity is fine! The chainsaw is fine, too – just try not to drop it on anyone, haha!

The AIDS Alliance had been on the go for about ten years and they used their connections and goodwill to rope in some celebrity judges. We also somehow managed to persuade Marc Almond to perform, and Agnes Bernelle, the then seventy-three-year-old German-Irish cabaret legend, agreed to duet with him. And, for good measure, she decided to enter her dog as a contestant! (When I and some of the contestants appeared on
The Late Late Show
, to Gay Byrne’s bemusement, I had Agnes’s shaggy dog with me on a leash.)

The audience didn’t know what to expect and they got the unexpected. I hosted the whole chaotic affair (as I would do for the next seventeen years) and attempted to keep it all together, which was difficult when there were ‘Misses’ struggling to stay standing under the weight of chicken wire and papier-mâché bulls’ heads, and others were struggling to move (or breathe) in tightly wound
plastic. There were lip-syncers and live singers and poetry and dancing and drunken falling and wet paint. There were highbrow references to Celtic mythology that went over the heads of the drunken audience, and there were blokes in bad wigs with balloons for tits. There was the dog wandering calmly through it all, and there was a naked guy on a motorbike. It was chaotic and magnificent and magnificently stupid – and it definitely wasn’t boring.

On stage, the ‘Medusa Crown of Thorns’ was won by Miss Tress, a gold-painted straight girl in a corset with two spray-painted gay boys on leads, but the real drama was up in the balcony where the judges were seated. The show had started an hour late and the judges were kept happy with a constant stream of booze, which they drank as quickly as it arrived. At one boozy point towards the end of the show, one of the judges, a famously grumpy, multiple-Grammy-winning gentleman, drunkenly decided that one of the other judges, either the Oscar-winning actress or the bestselling author, had made some kind of inappropriate, possibly lesbian remark to his girlfriend. Needless to say, the two doughty women, themselves a little worse for wear, took great offence at the scurrilous suggestion and robustly defended themselves. Voices were raised, shoving was instigated, drink was spilled and ‘fucks’ were liberally thrown until the two women decided to storm out in umbrage. Unfortunately storming out also meant storming down the perilously steep, shiny new stairs of this shiny new building.
Stairs so new that they hadn’t yet acquired the grit and grime of age that serves to grip the shoes of sturdy but booze-unsteady middle-aged women. The bestselling author was first to the stairs but she had taken no more than a couple of steps before she spun and fell backwards, and the only reason she isn’t now fondly remembered as ‘Bestselling Author Who Died When She Fell Down the Stairs at a Drag Pageant’ is because our friend Tom, who had been tasked with minding them as they got drunker, was a couple of steps ahead of her and she landed on him, while the no-less drunk Oscar-winning actress tried to grab her and pull her back upright.

It was, we all agreed, the best night ever.

That first event made barely any money – it was well attended but not busy enough to record a profit after the costs were accounted for – and Dublin AIDS Alliance weren’t interested in doing another the next year. It was probably also true that the board of the AIDS Alliance wasn’t entirely sure they should be associating with us because this was around the time that GAG was becoming somewhat infamous and we were attracting lurid tabloid headlines.

We, though, wanted to do another. As far as we were concerned this had the potential to be the perfect event. It was everything we loved. It was stupid and nutty and open and creative and fun and diverse and welcoming and outrageous. It was loud and brash and unashamed and queer. And underneath all that it had heart because it
actually meant something. In its own small way it was an attempt to redefine Irishness, to queerify Irishness. The Alternative Miss Ireland contest said you didn’t have to be a GAA supporter to be Irish. You didn’t have to go to mass on Sundays to be Irish. You didn’t have to listen to Planxty, drink Guinness, watch
The Late Late Show
or remember Italia ’90 with misty eyes to be Irish. You didn’t have to be a nice cailín to be Irish; you could be a fabulous Queen Cailín and be Irish too. You could be any gender or none. You could paint your face and blow glitter out your arse. You could wear a bikini with a paddling pool for a hat and be Irish. Hell, you could be Polish and still be Irish. You could be the queerest queer in all of Queerdom and you could be as Irish as Peig Sayers.

We were determined that it needed to be a charity event, organised and produced on a volunteer basis, so that it kept its heart and audience/participant goodwill. We also knew it had to raise money for an HIV/AIDS organisation because it was so rooted in the gay community, and all of us had lost friends to the epidemic. After some persuasion, an organisation called Cairde, which supported people living with HIV, agreed to get involved, and over the next seventeen years the Alternative Miss Ireland raised hundreds of thousands of euro for a whole list of charities and organisations working with HIV/AIDS.

The next year, 1997, we moved the show to a new, bigger, venue, upped the production values a little, and the place was packed, with hundreds more queuing outside hoping to get in.

Earlier that year I had met a sharp-witted ball of energy called Declan Buckley. Late one night at a drunken house party he emerged from the kitchen in a tea-towel wig and had everyone howling with laughter at his drunken mime versions of Olympic gymnasts doing their floor routines. ‘You,’ I said, ‘should enter the Alternative Miss Ireland.’

He entered as Shirley Temple Bar, a twelve-year-old Community Games gymnast from Dublin, with a smart mouth, pigtails and verruca socks. She tore the house down. She was hilarious and had the audience in the palm of her hand, and by the time she performed her belly-achingly funny gymnastics routine in the final round, there were twelve hundred people chanting her name at the top of their lungs and a star was born.

There was absolutely no doubt that Shirley was the unanimous and enthusiastically acclaimed winner that year but it was also memorable for the contestant who was carried on stage inside a massive ice coffin. The ‘coffin’ was kept in a freezer van in the car park outside the venue till it was needed. Then the queen, Miss Untitled As Yet, climbed inside, the lid was put in place, and four big body-builders carried her, with enormous wet difficulty, through the venue and onto the stage. The ice was extremely heavy, and awkward to carry, and the entombed queen’s passage to the stage was slow and ponderous. By the time she struggled to burst dramatically through the lid, the half-naked queen was blue, wet, shivering and quite possibly hypothermic. She
might not quite have managed to pull off her dramatic entrance but she did send the broken ice lid crashing onto the judges’ table in sharp chunks. Then, as she (wo)manfully struggled through her number, the stage lights didn’t just warm her up, they also accelerated the melting of her coffin, which flooded the judges’ table with glitter-speckled slush.

It was the following year’s judges, though, who were in real danger.

The 1998 Alternative Miss Ireland (AMI) was won by Miss Tampy Lilette, a country-and-western singer with ‘female trouble’. Tampy was the creation of Katherine Lynch, who was then waiting tables in a late-night café with Shirley Temple Bar, but after winning the AMI she went on to become a popular ‘drag queen’ comedienne on the gay scene, and eventually a household name on TV. But it was that year’s runner-up who almost managed to steal the show with a now legendary diva-worthy flash of theatrical petulance.