All the Fun of the Fair

With the day job threatening to drain me of the last remaining millilitres of my will to live, I am glad to have had a lively weekend of cabaret activity to act as hedonistic CPR and encourage my heart to carry on beating.

I can’t complain that this weekend was lacking in variety. It all started off on Thursday when I worked at Glitterous at the RVT - a new night hosted by Zak Black and my tranny de jour, Miss Kimberley. There was music, dancing, speciality acts ... and despite a slightly cunty crowd (posh people who drink champagne and then talk through the acts) it all went down pretty well.

Zak and Miss Kimberley put in great musical performances – the latter proving she’s not just a pretty face, she can also bang out a mean Billie Holiday number. There was a fab stilt walker / angle grinder / fire breather who breathed so much fire we had to send her outside or the whole place would have been turned to cinders, and my personal favourite - a fierce drag queen called Flame (who I’ve so far been unable to find online – boo!) who strutted and lip-synched to Whitney Houston and Lonnie Gordon. He reminded me a bit of my San Franciscan idol, Kiddie – the same sturdy male build with strong androgynous features. I gave him lots of extra lights and dry ice to make him look ultra fabby - I hope he comes back again soon.

They had told me there would be TV cameras at the show so had dyed my roots in preparation. This turned out to be a BIG FAT LIE, but I need to look my best for my next two appointments, the first of which was another Wizard of Oz night at the Royal Festival Hall.

This week Dickie Beau was left in charge of running the show and had assembled a cast of friends to appear with him. I loved Ingenue St John - a New York queen who performed to Rihanna’s Good Girl Gone Bad, and A Man Da Pet driving round the auditorium in full drag in a motorised wheelchair throughout the interval was inspired, but some of the rest of it was a little bit shaky. Lisa Lee and Lavinia Co-op weren’t really able to show off their talents as the scarecrow and tin man, and I obviously don’t “get” Nando Messiah who I haven’t liked on any occasion I’ve seen him performing.

Quite rightly Dickie was the highlight of the evening, turning in a couple of amazing performances in his psycho Judy Garland drag. The show climaxed with his superb Blackout - a lip-synch to Judy Garland talking about her life. It starts off chatty and self-deprecating then ends up manic with her ranting about the way the public has treated her as she falls of her chair and spits blood. It’s a mind-blowing performance that had me in tears the first time I saw it, and even had me a bit wobbly on this fourth occasion.

You might think that had been enough excitement but no, the best was yet to happen! On Saturday I went to the Miss Behave Variety Nighty at Roundhouse which, aside from giving you a crick in the neck from watching the aerialists, is a work of sheer ruddy brilliance.

The Roundhouse is the perfect venue for this mixture of old-time cabaret and circus. There was sword swallowing and weird tongue-twisty-ness from Miss Behave, music from Dusty Limits and Frank Sanazi, fire from Lucifire … and those weren’t even the best bits! There was a groovy hula-hooper, a buff young trapeze artist, a superbly pretentious young hoop aerialist by the name of Bret Pfister, and I think my favourite of all was a tiny woman called Marjo Nantel who did aerial stuff using ribbons. I’d never seen this kind of act before and I can’t believe that somebody would be content to hang upside down held only by two lengths of fabric wrapped round their ankles, much less flip themselves back up and then do the splits in mid-air. YIKES! It gives me the heebie geebies just thinking about it.

I urge you to get tickets before the end of the season. As the straight couple I heard on the way to the toilets were moved to comment, “Well, it’s certainly different.”