October 3, 2003 GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE 11

bigtips

An evening at my 2-year-old daughter's first drag show

by M.T. 'the Big Tipper' Martone

This past Friday evening I found myself in the basement of a Unitarian church, perched on a plastic folding chair with my two-yearold on my lap, surrounded by earnest people.

Recovery meeting? No. Workshop on making my car run on recycled French-fry oil? Why, no, but that is a good idea.

What we were doing? Attending my daughter's first smalltown drag show. The kid's a pretty big fan of any event that involves a microphone, so when a work friend passed me a small Xeroxed flyer for a fundraiser for the state's

transgender coalition, I figured she could stay up late for once.

After spending a half hour looking for a parking place (and realizing that if I gave up

tain strung on a clothesline across the corner of the room. There was spoken word. There were skipping CDs. There were shoestring costumes. There were people standing patiently, awkwardly, waiting for their music to be cued up, then lip-synching their hearts out. It was great, and painful.

It became clear to me that the small-town

BIG TIPS

my first-born for a spot, that pretty much shot my evening's company), I woke up my date and carried her across the street. As we got close to the door, a friend's 12-year-old son ran up to us and offered to find her some toys in the Sunday school room.

We headed down into the brightly lit basement, thumping quietly with someone's CD of dance music, and gave a nice lady $10, which she tucked into a shoebox. We paid a brief visit to the Sunday school room, then picked a nice chair and got ready to give it up for our performers.

There was an old orange living room cur-

Cool.

transgender activist/ social scene, especially for F-to-Ms, looks an awful lot like the small-town lesbian activist/social scene of 20 years ago. I believe I was at this

very same event (possibly in the very same basement) in 1984, but it was fat lesbians doing the spoken word (then referred to as "poetry"). I was amazed when I met that butch woman who had a job as a professor. They hired her looking like that?

Now I'm thinking the same thing about the freshly-minted guy who's a professor of biology. Though I'm impressed that such a visibly transgendered person got a fair shake in the hiring process, I find myself more surprised at how young he looks.

All in all, it was a perfect evening for the kid. I can't recommend low-budget fundraisers more highly as a child-care activity. Why drop $10 at Gymboree, when you can contribute to a good cause and some drag kings dinner and driving expenses? The folks are low-key and usually kid-friendly.

TITLEWAVE

and in this case, you'd be hard pressed to find a crowd in which more men had actually given birth. Most of all, the Beetle had a good time. And I don't want to hear about it if she suggests lip-synching to Tom Jones in her first school pageant.

While on the note of youth and age:

Dear Big Tipper,

I work with a woman who is bemused by my every experience and thought. If I have a date, she recalls one just like it, and then tells me how the course of any relationship with any person like that will go.

When I recently broke up with my girlfriend, she told me it was a just a "tiny piece of my story," and that everyone has had breakup just like that.

I tend to enjoy her company, and I actually look up to her in a way, because she has had a lot of interesting experiences and frankly, she's the slut I dream of being.

I want to be able to talk to her and have my experience be viewed as unique, and not just "a typical experience that a 21-year-old lesIt's ridiculous tờ* · bian might encounter. generalize, and I think that in her haste to categorize my life, she is closing herself off to who I really am as an individual.

It's all very easy for me to say this to you, but I feel a little shy around her, and I think that if I said anything about this, she'd just put some "feisty kid" spin on it. It's aggravating. I want her company and input, but I want it as a peer. Do you think that's possible?

Another One of Those

Dear Not Her Type,

Do you see what she's like around people her own age? It's completely possible that she does this experience aggregation on everyone and it's not just directed at you. Some people get off on looking world-weary and oh-so-familiar with the way it all goes.

Of course, there are experiences we tend to share. Live in a group house? I'm guessing someone pays her bills late every month, and that the shared honey jar is always sticky on the outside. Shared a dorm room with someone who had a boyfriend? Tell me they didn't have sex at least once, not knowing you were in the room "asleep" (playing dead, once the horror began to unfold).

When people get to know each other by telling stories about their lives, similarities like these make us feel like we share more than just the small slice of time that we're actually in the same place. But it's easy to grow comfortable with the idea of types, and assuming we know what someone is fully like based on what they've chosen to tell, and what we've chosen to hear.

Don't stop asking questions, or even better, just keep listening to what people in your life are saying. They'll lead you to the right questions. Most people would like to be truly seen and known, and when you get good at doing that, you'll have no shortage of good, complex, slutty friends who truly see you.✈

Burning questions? Contact me at the Chronicle, attention Big Tips, P.O. Box 5426, Cleveland 44101: e-mail 10 martonela drizzle.com or fax to 216631-1052.

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Between the question and the answer

Wendy (Jennifer Clifford) gets acting tips from Floating Piñata Head (Meg Chamberlain) in lesbian playwright Julie Jensen's Wait!

Wendy is a UPS driver in a small town who is desperately trying to carve out an identity for herself. She may do so through the auspices of the town's community theater, but she also may find love in the arms of actress O Vixen My Vixen.

Along the way, the strange characters that inhabit her life lead her to and fro as she asks questions like, "What are those moments called? The time between the question and the answer? That wait?"

Wait! is the inaugural production of TitleWave, a troupe bringing new works to the stage of Cleveland Public Theater. The show will be performed until October 11 at the Upstairs Theatre of Cleveland Public Theatre, 6415 Detroit Ave., Cleveland. For more information, call 216-631-2727 or log onto www.cptonline.org.

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