Year of the Queen: The Making of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert - The Musical (11 page)

The whole construction, which feels like a diving bell on my head, stays on for about half an hour. Since I’m incapable of conversation they leave me and go off to fool around with their other creatures. I can’t hear much but they seem to be having a good time doing
something
out in the workshop. Eventually they return and begin to release me. They cut at the bandages and painstakingly peel it all off. When the contraption is removed there seems to be nothing to show for my troubles. Just a strange soccer ball-like object that somewhere inside contains my likeness. I guess they’ll pour plaster into it and create an inanimate Jeremy, which will sit on a bench here, adding to their collection of creatures.

I clean myself up and make my way to the giant door to the sane outside world. As I go, I stumble upon the table with the collection of other heads made from the rest of the cast. My skin crawls. Even the members of the cast I know, look like strange cadaver versions of themselves. It’s all getting a little weird. Barely concealing my haste to leave, I thank the DEVO guys politely and slip out into the warming sunshine, where I look forward to not shivering anymore. As I leave this freak show, I want to check that nothing has followed me out and could now be waiting in the bushes to slip unnoticed into the cab, and eat me on the way to the airport.

It’s been quite a day. Consensually, I tried on my first dress and I was cloned. I’ve got lots to tell the kids.

Chapter 8

Drag Show

For around six weeks I’ve been trying to organize an expedition to a drag show. It’s only around the corner, for God’s sake. My dear friend Lily knows some of the girls there and has promised if I go with her that she’ll organize an introduction and for me to scout around backstage, watch the makeup going on and chat with the performers. She calls herself a ‘Queens’ consult’ in preference to ‘fag hag’, which she thinks misogynistic. But it takes six weeks for us to finally get a mutually acceptable date - a date which turns out to be the night before I leave to go to Sydney for rehearsals. I couldn’t forgive myself if I’d turned up on day one having done NO research at all, so I have to go. I’ve only ever seen one drag show before and it was through a cloud of alcohol after a
Buddy
show one night. I wouldn’t say it’s my hot choice for an evening’s entertainment, but in the context of research I’m chomping at the bit to go.

As it’s my last night with the family before I leave for Sydney tomorrow, I prepare a slap-up meal before I go out and we all sit down together with an air of formality and finality. I try to make it sink in, to Hunter at least, that Dad is going to go away to Sydney to work for a long time. To children who have only ever known a stay-at-home-Dad, this concept completely escapes them and they move the conversation back onto
Sponge Bob Square Pants
.

In the middle of dinner the phone rings and I get a breathless Ross Coleman on the line.

“Oh thank God you’re home” he quakes. “There’s been a disaster!”

My stomach sinks. Simon has died in an accident. The producers have gone broke. They’ve cast Garry Sweet in my role.

“I’m cooking a goose for Simon tonight and my oven has broken down”, he says.

No one else I know is capable of a sentence like this. I don’t quite know what to say or where this is leading.

“Can I come and cook it in
your
oven?” he says.

This is of course no problem for me, but poor Annie, who doesn’t eat game, may have issues.

“Hang on,” I say, and cup my hand around the phone. “Ross wants to cook a goose in our oven. Is this okay with you?”

Annie nods, barely comprehending and I jump back on the phone.

“Okay,” I say. “But don’t let it get out that I cooked your goose, Ross. Everyone will think that’s how I got the job in the show.”

Ross, who is at a stress level way beyond responding to jokes, thanks me profusely, and tells me frantically that he and Oleg had already made the chestnut stuffing but something’s gone wrong with the fucking oven. He hangs up saying one of them will arrive with the bird without delay.

As I’m leaving to go to the New Market Hotel for my drag night, Ross and Oleg arrive with a ‘thank you’ bottle of wine and the already stuffed game on an enormous oven tray. They race in the door like they have a patient who needs resuscitation and plant the bird in the perfectly pre-warmed 180 degree oven.

“I can’t thank you enough,” says Ross.

“Just as long as you leave me a taster,” I hint strongly.

Choosing not to pick up the hint, Ross says,

“You look nice. You going out?”

“I’m going to a drag show.” I say.

Ross purses his lips with delight. He’s always speculated on my sexuality and the idea of me spending the night in a gay club positively thrills him.

“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do”, he sings.

Fat chance, I think to myself. Is there
anything
he wouldn’t do?

As I enter the hotel, I hit a solid wall of cigarette smoke. Some of this smoke I’m sure has been wafting around this room since the seventies. A large proportion of it has settled on the walls and fittings, building up a dark sponge. In the dimly lit haze I feel the drunken and avaricious eyes of a cackling hens night searching me, as I collect my happy-hour pot from the bar.

There’s no sign of Lily and I’m forced to sit conspicuously alone within raping distance of the hens. It takes them about thirty seconds to send out a scout, a rotund carrot-haired woman in her mid forties who is obviously ‘the bride’. She wears a costume shop version of a wedding dress and veil with flashing neon lights woven into it. She presses her elbows into the Formica table drunkenly as she sits and flirtatiously insists I tell her how she and her friends know my face. I don’t offer anything more than a friendly shrug but she twigs I’m an actor and demands I tell her everything I’ve ever been in. Without going into specifics, I admit to being an actor and tell her I’m
very
famous.

“Well
we
don’t know who you are!” she snaps and totters back to her friends, who cackle like banshees.

Oh God, please Lily get here soon…

Avoiding any further eye contact with anyone, I survey the room. It’s remarkable only because it’s managed to retain its seventies décor in this inner-city area, where any available venue has been snapped up by needle eyed developers desperate to gentrify all before them, and turn everything into a ‘Murphy’s Irish Pub’.

The room clearly hasn’t had a lick of paint in decades and at one end is a small home-made stage, which shares a backstage entrance with the route to the toilets. A few par cans with coloured gels point unevenly inwards and tables are spread neatly around the room. The tables all have salt and pepper shakers on them which make me quake with trepidation at what kind of food would be offered up here at dinnertime.

The room is yet to fill and besides my sweethearts the hens, there are only a few tables of gay men and would-be girls with their trannie training wheels on.

Lily finally makes a commanding entrance, receiving fond greetings from bar staff and passing Queens. She calls over Amanda Monroe, a glamorous drag who’s approaching her senior years. They embrace and she introduces me as an old friend who’s about to do the
Priscilla
show in Sydney. I get a mixed reaction as she pronounces
Priscilla
misogynistic and tired. I say we intend to freshen the old girl up and the script we’ve finished with has a lot more heart in it than the film.

Amanda prides herself on being a philosopher of drag. She’s very serious about it and once you get her started it comes fast and abundant. She tells me that for her, it’s all about challenging sexual stereotypes, demanding that the viewer look into what they see as normal sexuality, and getting their cage rattled. She relishes the idea of straight men getting a secret hard on as they watch a man perform for them, dressed as a woman. It’s something which confronts their idea of what sexuality is. She quotes someone I’ve never heard of who once said that a society which doesn’t have drag Queens doesn’t fully understand itself. It has a loose grasp on sexuality and its broader role in the community. She tells me early priests used to cross-dress in order to interpret how the Gods wanted their society to behave. I nod mutely, trying to keep up with her earnest monologue. It’s not what I expected. As much as it’s fascinating and informative, my hunt tonight is really about personal accounts. What started you on this brave and unusual journey? What does it
feel
like for you? Which experiences have shaped your life? But I can’t get a word in to probe her. She’s certainly rationalised her choice of lifestyle neatly but she seems to cloak it in philosophy rather than exposing her true feelings. She’s clearly heading from mere drag Queen into being a full transsexual (I can’t know if she’s had the chop yet, but my carefully timed glances down to her breasts tell me they have been surgically enhanced) but I’m not getting the slightest clue as to
why
this lifestyle choice is so vital to
her
. I’ve heard other transsexuals say they’re a man trapped in a woman’s body and the world doesn’t feel right for them until they are living transgender. Maybe Amanda doesn’t want me getting that close to her secrets.

She stops mid sentence like she’s had a revelation. She asks if we do
I Will Survive
in the show. I say we do. Suddenly she’s flushed. She leaps up exclaiming theatrically that
she
does
I Will Survive
too, promising to show me how it’s
really
done, and she charges backstage to dig out the outfit and the music. It’s at this point I get an inkling that she’s secretly, even if it’s ever so slightly, impressed by my presence tonight.

Lily takes me backstage to meet Jess, who is responsible for the main show tonight. It’s a version of
The Sound Of Music
, and Jess has written, directed and sewn all the costumes for it. He’s a squat, ordinary looking man who is just beginning to apply base make-up as I arrive. I introduce myself and ask if I could quiz him about all things drag. Although he’s busy preparing to go on stage, I get the feeling talking about themselves and their art is a topic drag Queens have little trouble with. He generously chats away as he applies a myriad of different colours to his face and fixing eyelashes the size of boogie boards.

More forthcoming in a personal way than Amanda, he tells me that he’s been doing drag since he was three. As a child he was into wearing his mother’s shoes and clothes and his mother and grandmother indulged it for years. And then, suddenly at around eight, he just stopped doing it. It wasn’t until he was at school doing plays that it resurfaced. At an all-boy school, he was handy in the school play, always playing the girls roles. And so it continued into life. When he saw a drag show at the Imperial Hotel in Sydney, that was it, he was hooked. I imagine this is a story repeated time and time again.

As opposed to Amanda, for Jess it’s all about releasing an inner persona through the dressing up. He says the clothes free something within him. Watching him backstage, he seems a determined but rather quiet man. Someone you might misjudge as a push over. I await the metamorphosis.

He begins a rave about the origins of drag specifically related to Sydney. He tells me how Les Girls at Kings Cross was the beginning of it all. The girls there mimed to glamorous European recording stars, dressed in ornate outfits with the intention of actually coming off as women. Some even had the chop for greater legitimacy. As drag proliferated outside Les Girls, it evolved into being more of a cabaret performance with comedy becoming involved and the disguising of the man beneath the frock not being as crucial. In some quarters it even became a kind of performance art with the costumes, music and routines becoming quite avant-garde.

I become aware that Jess and Amanda haven’t mentioned the word ‘transvestite’ once. I’m certain that this is a cultural thing. In Australia we have drag Queens. In England you have transvestites and they seem to be very different things. When I was last in London, I visited a mate who was playing a piano bar gig in a club in Soho. The bar was a renovated bomb shelter from the Second World War, so to find it you had to locate a miniature concealed doorway off a quiet lane and navigate your way to the tiniest stone stairwell which lead down, down, down. You finally came to a room with a very low arched brick ceiling, like every classic picture you’ve ever seen of a bomb shelter, but the club was loud, thick with smoke, dimly lit and pulsing. My friend was on a break from playing and he rushed over to me beaming. With delight he told me it was cross-dressing night. I looked around me and sure enough, every patron in the place was a man with a dress on. And they weren’t disguising the fact that they were men either. There were no wigs, they hadn’t shaved after work or even bothered changing out of their work shoes. Some of them even sported beards and moustaches. They’d literally just slipped out of their suits and into a dress and were now all nursing pints of warm beer as they chin-wagged in the din. One man approached me and in a deep baritone voice, thick with a London accent said: “Hello. My name’s Maria.” Bug eyed, I smiled stiffly and turned to my friend and sang (from the classic tune from
West Side Story
): “I’ve just met a man named Maria…”

We got chatting and he assured me he wasn’t gay. No one in the bar was. They just liked dressing up as women and socialising like that. He told me he was married, as were most of the guys in the club and that his wife knew all about his “Wednesday night frolics” and that she gave him her cautious blessing.

I’m sure there are many straight men who cross-dress in Australia too but they’re not drag Queens. Drags tend to be gay and exist safely tucked away in the gay community, the way I’m sure the cross-dressers would find their own safe haunts as well. Drags are more theatrical. They seem to make a performance out of being a drag Queen rather than just simply getting off on wearing woman’s clothes.