Should it be that way?
No.
But I learned if you don’t have a sense of self-deprecating humor, then you have no coping mechanisms. You take yourself too seriously. You cannot laugh when the going gets tough. And it always gets tough, my dears.
Did I—and my Golden Gays—pave the way for so many today?
You bet your sweet asses we did.
With our bodies, blood and lives, so maybe say thank you on occasion instead of gagging when you see an older person at a bar for your gift of being able to walk around in the worldtoday without being ashamed of who you are and identifying as you please.
Sadly, our society has the attention spans of gnats, so we forget our history, fooling ourselves into thinking the world has become more accepting.
But we must always remember that when we take two steps forward, we take a mighty one back, and we must never be fooled: We must always be ready to fight.
I check my watch.
I have an appointment with destiny.
Where is Patty?
I pick up my cell to call when she saunters in with her Starbucks.
“You’re late!”
Patty stops and touches her belly.
“How did you know?” she cries dramatically. “And, yes, the baby is yours! I know because it’s marked with the sign of the beast.”
I shake my head. This is our routine.
“I’m having a late lunch with Barry to go over this month’s show,” I lie to Patty, my assistant and second mother who—by the way—is not a woman but an eighty-five-year-old man named Hank who warms up the crowd before our show by performing as a drag queen named Patty O’Furniture. “Can you watch the shop until I get back?”
Patty lifts one narrow, overly plucked Pamela Anderson brow to survey me with great skepticism.
“You never trust me even though you hired me,” she says.
“You steal my clothes and stuff dollar bills down your bra when customers pay in cash.” I point. “I have cameras.”
“I thought I was auditioning forRuPaul’s Drag Race.” Patty eyes me closely. “And I thought you had already planned this month’s show.”
Patty’s voice sounds as if she’s just smoked a carton of unfiltered Marlboro cigarettes and chased that with a gallon ofgasoline. If Harvey Fierstein and Brenda Vaccaro had a child, Patty would have been it.
“Last-minute changes,” I say.
“Well, I have to be out of here by six,” Patty says. “I have my own show to get ready for tomorrow, remember?”
Patty has been doing the same exact act for the last six decades: song, joke, insult bachelorette parties, do a shot, repeat.
She used to open as Tina Turner performing “Proud Mary,” but two decades ago her knee snapped, last decade she got two hips and three stents, and Patty had to switch to ballads. She is still pissed off about it.
But she can sing “Fancy” just like Reba. No lip-syncing either. Patty is old-school. She doesn’t make an entrance, sing a couple of lines and immediately exit the stage to stuff dollars down her bra, no. Patty performs an entire number, start to finish.
The dollars come to her.
“Where is this gig?” I ask.
“Vegas-adjacent,” she says with a wink of her butterfly lash.
