Lovers’ Theme

I’m a cell phone. That’s what I told myself as I waited for Anna Conda to welcome me to the stage of The Cinch, a Polk Street gay bar in San Francisco. My heart beat against a pink cardboard flip-phone costume made by my close friend Kate. I prepared to turn my face, a mask of thick foundation, painted lips, and arched, drawn-in eyebrows, all framed by a wavy blonde wig, upon the crowd. (Through a hole in the giant flip phone’s screen, I mean. Flip phone prototype: Motorola Razr. This was 2007.) I’m a cell phone. As soon as Anna Conda called my name—my then drag name, Extremity—i’d climb the steps, a giant pink ladyphone in black Payless heels, ready to lip-synch a carefully selected medley of ringtones. “Please give it up for Extremities!” Amidst whooping, laughter, and applause, I heard Kate’s voice call, “It’s Extremity!” The stage lights glared down on me, and I carried myself with as much stylized feminine dignity as a bedazzled and spraypainted suit of cardboard allowed. The music came on—a loud, cheapsounding, ringtone rendition of Britney Spears’s “Baby One More Time,” all synthesized bleeps and squawks meant to emulate the human voice. I opened and closed my mouth along with the tones, calling to mind, I hoped, a ventriloquist’s dummy. “Meep meep meep meep…meep meep meep meep…” The people who attended drag shows in San Francisco generally ate this kind of thing up—part of the reason Kate and I wanted to put together the number. To my knowledge, no one at any of the drag nights had yet performed as a cell phone—surprising, actually—and this novelty provided motivation enough for me to memorize the sequence of ringtone yaps, to roll on pantyhose and affix false lashes to real. Many, many queens went to much, much further lengths for their drag numbers, putting hours into elaborate looks and choreography that graced the stage for three minutes at a time. (I once watched, agog, five people in courtly eighteenth-century European dress—powdered wigs, panniered dresses, deep décolletage—on a tiny stage at The Stud, performing a choreographed number to “Rock Me Amadeus,” from the Mozart biopic Amadeus. “Ooh! Rock me Amadeus!”) Kate and I more often threw things together for conceptual laughs. When the Cinch barflies started