RANSVESTIA

the boat for the trip to Vancouver via the inland passage. I had planned this particularly as a further test of my ability to make it on a boat because I had the following year in mind already. Anyway, the memorable thing about that trip down the passage was that they had a hat-making contest and everyone had to be put something together and wear it to dinner. I festooned my cardboard frame with bits of gold jewelry for the gold of Alaska, green for the forests, a bit of birch bark that I had brought back and some other stuff. We had to stand in front of the group for the judging and I had composed a little piece where- by I said I was an Alaskan Eskimo princess named "Lily" of the "Dashe" tribe or something like that. Anyway, the audience liked it and so I won first prize over all the other ladies. A victory for me in more ways than one as you will agree.

1969 started out as just another year but I had had a yen to go to Europe and in talking about it I interested one of the local FPs into going along-he as a man and me as a woman of course. The year before when I was in Washington, D.C. I had visited the passport department and worked out an "AKA" which means "also known as" passport. It was hardly what I wanted since it listed both my legal "born" name and Virginia Bruce-the name I adopted as my public, non-FP name. And the picture I had to have for it was sort of non- discript uni-gender. But I had the passport and that was what counted. But as usual whenever I had a trip in prospect I arranged a lot of other things on the way to New York and from New York on the way back. So it was San Francisco, Salt Lake City, Minneapolis, Madison, Chicago (where I did the famous KUP show in WMAQ) and finally on to New York. My friend Dick flew in and we teamed up in the boarding lounge of KLM at JFK. Our first stop was Amsterdam where we were met by the City by City Tour people who were to take care of us in each city we went to.

He took us through customs and on to our hotel. I was a little nervous at what might happen when a man and a woman with pass- ports in two different names wanted a twin bedded room. But nothing happened either in Amsterdam, which I learned later was a pretty open and easy going city, or anywhere else in Europe, either. I don't suppose it would raise many eyebrows today in this country, either, but this was 10 years ago and the Europeans are just more accepting than we are of these kinds of things.

74