I Was a Female Impersonator

Sorry, no photos. I don't even know if any were taken. Halloween was coming up, and, after the release of "Victor/Victoria" I had the idea of dressing as a female impersonator. I was living with Fred-the-make-up-artist at the time and he asked me what I wanted to do. If I was going to be seen with him, it had better be good. I told him. His expression was blank for a few seconds and then the idea grew on him. He liked it. He liked it a lot.
My job was to find a dress. I was hoping to find something cheap and slutty on E. 86th Street where, Fred claimed, prostitutes hung out. They were utterly invisible to me. What I really needed was a Salvation Army store, but I didn't know of anything like that in the upper east 80s. Apparently, "cheap" was not an E. 86th Street description. I found instead a grey silk dress that had long sleeves (the better to hide arm hair), a scarf, and a sash that one could throw together in interesting ways, if one isn't me. I have no ability there, but I figgered Fred did.
Fred acquired a red wig that would do Danny LaRue proud. He explained what he would be doing to make me look more like a guy trying to look like a woman. "I'll cover your eyebrows and draw in new ones above them," he told me - which explains the perpetually surprised look of some FIs.
For my part, I took my bra and stuffed it, clumsily. I wanted it to look stuffed, so I balled some tissues and put them on top of my breasts and maybe a few to the side.
Fred was initially excited about his own costume idea, which reminded me of those spinning paint things you do at carnivals, but he really got into doing me up: gold over the brows, exaggerated lips, etc. It wasn't his first FI job, but this was a new twist.
Our first stop was a party on the Upper West with some of Fred's friends. One of them was a young guy who had a part-time job as a clown, so he had a ready-made costume for all occasions. I don't recall his name (sorry! waited too long to write my memoirs, didn't I?), so I'll just call him Bubo the Clown. On the Upper West, I was crossing my legs ankle to knee, in keeping with someone less-familiar with transvestitism. Bubo started lecturing me on the proper way for ladies to cross their legs. I listened studiously, agog. Really? How fascinating. Fred eventually stepped in to set him ... straight. "Marf," he explained, "as in Martha. This is my roommate." Bubo actually gasped. "Oh, nooooooo!" he wailed. He was horrified that he'd made some sort of gaff, but I was quite chuffed to have actually fooled someone.
It was then decided we should test the costume on a tougher audience. We were going to go to the Christopher Street Parade, the Gay Halloween Mecca. I already was regretting my heels, spiky and pointy-toed.
At the parade, I had Fred and Bubo as heralds, proclaiming the arrival of this Beautiful Woman. I got whistles and leers. It put me in mind of Pres's experience on Christopher Street when he was walking with me. He'd become frustrated because he wasn't being "cruised." Then he remembered that I was with him. Duh! He had expected that he would still be looked at, eye-contact would be made, but a woman at his side disconnected him from a familiar world. Now I had the reverse on them. The laugh was on them, the men who mistook me for another man ... dressed as a woman. At one point, someone grabbed my ass and then shrieked, "Omigawd! It's a real woman!" The three of us burst out laughing. I waved airily at my admirers. I didn't have many in my drab, everyday existence. It was fun to steal some attention from gay men, to be cruised, whistled at, fondled, and to horrify. After all, it was Halloween.
Halloween is Everyday in Second Life. Anyone can be disguised. People can be fooled. This is something that I avoid doing, probably because it is outside of Halloween or April Fool's Day when license is granted. I don't consider the multitude of avatars I keep "on hangers" in my inventory to be fooling anyone. They still carry the label "Lludmila." I may act slightly differently with each of them on (wearing a male av I resist some of my squealing noises: Ewwww! OoooOOoooo!), but it's still me back there behind the mask behaving in what I hope is a reasonably normal fashion. It's much easier to pad the bra ... or even squish it down with the sliders. I can be fatter, thinner, prettier, younger, older than I am in RL. It might be my lack of imagination, but I can't bring myself to stray too far from my real self.
A strikingly beautiful older woman was in the library today and because we were short-handed, I was at the front desk doing her library card. She had written her birthdate down and I realised ... she was five years younger than I was. Aw, sh111111t! I was thinking 60s! SH1111111T!!!! She's not even 50!!!! How old must I look? Whatever age it is, it's nowhere as good as she looks!I used to have an imagination. What the hell happened to it? Right now I just seem to imagine myself too old. arrrrgh!

More Cross-Pollination

Cartoons I did in the 1980s of Fritz and his then wife. Calling him a Nazi is a little unfair - but doesn't really stop me. Always go for the joke.

What a horror to discover that one of your dad's favorite relatives is an unrepentant Nazi, replete with German accent. That he was a decorated (Danish Modern, perhaps) Navy veteran of the Pacific Theater seems incongruous, but true. This is Cousin Fritz. He was to my dad all that was manly and admirable: he got into knife fights, he traveled the world, and probably killed some people. It seems to be one of my dad's greatest regrets that he didn't stick with the Army so he'd been able to fight in WWII.
When I met cousin Fritz, he was a fat, disgusting old man with unpopular (with me) views on Jews and Blacks. They were in collusion, of course. And that was what was wrong with this country. "Don't worry," my mother told me later, "we'll be dead soon and our ideas with us." But she was wrong. The ideas are still floating about, literally, in my wateraerobics class, Omblastit! It was cousin Fritz who provided us with the (what appeared to me to be sanitized) Ruhe family tree. Dad used to say that there were some possible Jews in there, especially with names like Ruhe and Seele, beautiful names that mean "peace" and "soul" in German. You wouldn't hear anything like that from cousin Fritz! There was quite a bit of family tree trimming in Germany, to make your background more palatable, and to save your sorry white ass.
Before WWI, our family received letters from the Fatherland begging that no one join the army and end up fighting their own family. I don't know of anyone the right age in that family to do so. Dad says it was awkward at school having a German name and accent. He also mentions getting in a fight with another boy, but doesn't link it to this.
Fritz fighting was another thing. Fritz had a touchy sense of pride. He was the farm manager for a nearby farm, after working on my grandparents' farm in upstate New York. He was a chaparone (or what my dad calls a "chaparoon") for the two daughters at a dance. When one young swain told the girls to get rid of the "guard dog," the girls made the mistake of telling Fritz about it, as though it were a great joke. "Dog, eh?" he said, and pulled a knife on the guy and suggested they take it outside.
At the same time that Fritz came to America and stayed with my dad's family, another cousin from a different branch came. Dad had nothing good to say about this dandy who arrived with a suit of formal clothes and seemed unfamiliar with farmwork. I think Adolph later had an illustrious career in the laundry/dry cleaning business.
My money is on Adolph, actually. I wish Dad had more stories about him and fewer about Fritz. In the end, Fritz lived in a house packed with newspapers he didn't throw out. His wife had left him (they had not been married long and she told my mother to never marry someone without first checking the state of their bathroom) and he ended his years without indoor plumbing or hygiene of any kind. I think my dad admires that.

The cartoon above comes from a collection I put together while working at the law firm. I can't publish much of it because it's a.) 99% in-jokes 2.) contains material relevant to on-going litigation and lastly, it would be a total bitch to scan and cut and paste, something I did with family pictures, but am not doing for this. I do go back over the cartoons and think some are funny and some show just how painful my life was at the time. sigh.