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Grand Marshals Drag Showat Tubby's Golden Lantern

On Friday, 9/04, at 9pm, theshow went off right on timeand went just like clock

work. Thanks to the cooperation of Rickthe owner, the stage was decoratedwith new curtains and the crowd was inthe mood to celebrate the beginning ofthe Southern Decadence weekend.Starting off right from the beginning withthe Grand Marshals XXXV, Tittie andPaloma, were first up to begin the fes-tivities. After they each did a number,then it was Larry Bagneris’s turn towelcome everyone and present the GMswith the Proclamation from the City,officially starting off the weekend.

I had the honor of being the MC forthe evening, and the show was fabu-lous. Past Southern Decadence GrandMarshal XXXIV, Electra City started offthe nights entertainment, then cameMiss Starlight 2009 Rikki Redd, (whowas my right hand helping to set up thisrevue), was next, and then came 2009King Cake Queen Tami Tarmac, Mr.America Amon Ra Nathan Brooks, andDeanna, and last was Miss Tubby'sGolden Lantern Miss D.

Through the courtesy of NathanBrooks Entertainment, we had Jaceand Logan of the BrokeStraightBoys,as seen on JustUsBoys, were therehanding out t-shirts and goody bags ofDVDs, ManLube, books, a Wet sex kit,and so you wouldn’t get lonely afterseeing them, a nice sucker...oooh, lickme.

Needless to say , good entertain-ment, and presents all around. Whocould ask for more??? And it was allfree, thanks to Tubby's Golden Lantern

Leather Block Party

Just happened to wander bythe Phoenix and saw the mag-nificent setup they had for the

Leather Block Party. I must say that itwas the best I have ever seen and it wasreally thought out. Lots of vendors, andeveryone seemed to be shopping andhaving a good time. It was just after thedown pour on Friday about 10pm, butthat didn’t stop anyone from being outand having a good time. Kudos toeveryone involved with the initial set upand I’m sure that you will want to do thesame, when Mardi Gras rolls around.

Queens of Comedyby Nathan Brooks

Saturday night of Decadencewas an amazing night withthe best crowd, but they

weren’t ready for what was coming tothem. A night of comedy includingMiss American Dynasty Miss Gia per-forming as a Hip Hopping grandmother,Anita Rich Goodman performing as asexless nymphomaniac, and the hostApheelia Breast being visited by her“monthly gift” on stage, was more then

enough to bring the crowd up to a roarat Tubby's Golden Lantern! Add in TheBoys from BrokeStraightBoys.comand Just Us Boys Magazine, thenChelsea Delorean Divine as MichealJackson and you have what turned outto be a great night of entertainment!

I have never heard such commentsin my years of entertainment! Thevisitors loved the fact that such enter-tainment was available there and evenmore that the ticket price to get in wasFREE! Locals enjoyed seeing drag in anew light and a new perspective. Oneperson said it best when I was leaving,“It is so great to see people that canmake ‘drag’, ‘female illusion’, or what-ever you want to call it, entertainingagain, and not take themselves so se-riously.”

As a promoter, I was very happy tobring such a great and bold show toSouthern Decadence. It was fun and itmade everything just fit together. Thecoming years should be interesting aswe continue to make not only this show,but P3 a historical and hysterical eventwhich visitors and locals alike can bringhome and cherish forever.

P3, Rain, Success

At exactly 12noon, the P3party commenced to a brightand sunny day and even

though the crowd was good and little bylittle when they heard all the music, itstarted to look like God had smiledupon us and it would be a lovely day.Starting out out program was RikkiRedd, and then came Nathan Brooks,followed by Josh Duffy, the new singingsensation who wowed the crowd withhis live numbers. Jasmine was up nextand due to a technical problem we hadto go to the next performer, which wasAnita Rich Goodman, who wowed themwith her fabulous rendition of I WillSurvive with her walker and all. DeannaNinneman, from Drag Survivor came outand did her thing for the crowd, ANDTHEN, true to New Orleans weather,came a torrential downpour, and every-thing came to a halt.

And it rained, and it rained, and itrained for 45 minutes, however, not tobe out done the crowd got into the spiritand several parade watchers decided todo their own show, and danced in therain, in the street. You know how itgoes, give someone an opportunity toshow what they can do and this beingNew Orleans, they entertained thecrowd. They were well rewarded withdry t-shirts from the BrokeStraightBoysfor their efforts.

Finally the rain let up enough thatFelina Colby Shane said that she wouldgo out and bear the few showers and dida number. Miss Gia, GAA CheridonComedy Award Winner did a great com-edy number that was very much acrowd pleaser. Vanessa Michaels cameout and wowed the crowd with herimpression of Cher, and then through

in the spotlight ...from 12

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the magic of the sound system wefinally go to see Jasmine do her num-ber. About this time the Southern Deca-dence Grand Marshals showed up tostart the parade. And as promised,Larry Bagneris made the champagnetoast from the city to them to have agood parade. (Unlike for formal occa-sions, the champagne was not in crys-tal glasses, but were splits of cham-pagne with a straw. Now how decadentcan you get. haha !!!) Officially the 35thparade was under way with the blowingof the Grand Marshals whistles, theywere off.

As the parade passed us by andout of sight, the crowd wanted more,and that’s just what they got when MissGia came out and did a rendition of JoanCrawford in the board room of the PepsiCo. It was an excellent piece, and thecrowd ate it up, and what a way to closethe show down, but with that bitch, JoanCrawford. It was an excellent job byeveryone, considering the rain and all,they were real show people from through-out the whole thing. (I can’t thank all ofyou enough!)

And a special thank you to Rick,Rikki, Nathan, and all the businessesthat supplied everyone with all the “good-ies” that were given out to the crowd.BrokeStraightBoys, Jaeger, and Absolut.

Let’s do it again next year, whaddaya think ???

in the spotlight ...from 16

trodding the boards

by Brian Sands E-mail: bsnola2@hotmail.com

Mr. Marmalade at Le PetitThéâtre du Vieux Carré

I was still in my NYC Katrinaexile when Noah Haidle’s Mr.Marmalade debuted off-Broad-

way in 2005. Despite some good word-of-mouth, it received a drubbing in theNYTimes and I passed on seeing itbefore returning a few weeks later toNOLA for good. Looking back, the usu-ally reliable Charles Isherwood wasabout as accurate about this one asBush’s Brownie was about the levees.

A self-described dark comedy, Mr.Marmalade limns the relationship of aprecocious four year old girl, Lucy, andher inappropriately mature imaginaryfriend, Mr. Marmalade. He exists in aworld of business meetings and lunches,high pressure finance, and trips to CaboSan Lucas but also, when things don’tgo his way, of alcoholic binges, drugsand domestic violence. Add to this Mr.Marmalade’s efficient but overburdenedpersonal assistant Bradley, plus Lucy’sreal life neglectful mother and Lucy’snew, suicidal 5 year old best friendLarry, not to mention Larry’s imaginaryplant friends, and it’s quite a mix.

As Lucy’s attachment to Mr. Mar-malade rises & falls and as her friend-ship with Larry deepens, we see theemotional resiliency of youth serving asa universal metaphor for loneliness andlove and longing. Haidle adeptly blursthe lines between reality, his own imagi-nation, and the imagination of his char-acters, so that, for an instant, you thinkthat a 4 year old might be pregnant.What makes this work is that thoughthe world of Mr. Marmalade is differentfrom the one we live in, it is consistentunto itself, related to but not as brittleand caustic as Christopher Durang’suniverse.

As Mr. Marmalade’s first actended, I couldn’t wait to get back andsee how things turned out. (This hap-pens more rarely than you’d suppose.)And, indeed, Act Two did not disappointwith its brilliantly absurdist spectacle ofan imaginary character being fired fromhis “job” and going to pieces. If the playends more with a whimper than a bang,it’s a gentle, very humanistic whimperfull of hope. Which, in this world of woe,ain’t such a bad thing.

Though Haidle might’ve ramped upthe ages of his child characters a bit(had Lucy been 5 or 6 or 7, it would’vemade her sophisticated imagination amite more believable), and Lucy’smother seems as though she should bea white collar worker rather than thewaitress she turns out to be, neither ofthese are fatal flaws, if you don’t letthem be.

In addition to lightening quick pac-ing, Director Andrew Larimer wiselykept things as “real” as possible, notgiving in to the script’s potentialcampiness; this was certainly one ofhis best directorial efforts I’ve yet seen.

The entire cast gave spot-on perfor-mances.

As Mr. Marmalade, who’s indeedkinda dreamy until he turns out to becompletely dissolute, A.J. Allegra addedanother pitch perfect characterizationto his repertoire. Despite being in his20s, Allegra has the physical demeanormore of a sophomore college studentwhich seems apt as, to a young child,a teenager is old and anyone older than20 is ancient. More importantly, withoutever becoming slick, he found just theright boundaries of suavity andslovenliness within which Lucy’s imagi-nation would be likely to operate.

James Yeargain was smooth asbutter as Bradley, beautifully blossom-ing in the end after Mr. Marmalade hasbeen banished for good. In two roles,Kristin Witterschein, an actress new toNew Orleans, well-calibrated the differ-ence between Lucy’s resentful but lov-

ing mother and the slatternly babysitterwhom she hires for Lucy. RichardAlexander Pomes gave his usual solidperformance as two different guys, nei-ther of whom should be allowed aroundkids.

As Lucy and Larry, Natalie Boydand Sam Dudley gave emotionally ex-quisite performances BUT were morephysically and vocally spassy as thekids than they needed to be, for whichLarimer must share the blame as well.Sure, kids tend to twist and squirm andvocalize differently than adults. But,when more closely observed, they areoften smoother and more centered thanwe think of them as being. Had Boyd,Dudley and Larimer found this properbalance, they’d’ve achieved perfection.

Though costume designer ShaunaLeone’s pink tutu for Lucy has becomea bit of a cliche to indicate early girlychildhood, her giant plant outfits morethan made up for it. Josh Palmer’s setmade for a fine functional home for Lucyand her Mom, but his sky blue back-drop, lit by him to reflect the characters’ever-changing emotional states, wastranscendent.

Some Girl(s) at Actor’sTheatre of New Orleans

When Neil LaBute’s SomeGirl(s) opened off-Broadway three years ago, the

NYTimes’ Ben Brantley deemed it a“slight and sour comedy, ... (a) scantvariation” on LaBute’s other clinicalexaminations of the male species.

Weeeellllll, excuse me! Though per-haps not in the same league as hisbash and Fat Pig, if you can overlook acertain plot device that’s telegraphed amile away, Some Girl(s) certainly is aworthy companion to his The Shape ofThings in which a woman got to be thesnarky one.

With finely etched, natural-sound-ing dialog that creates vivid charactersand a plot that keeps you interested,Some Girl(s) tells the tale of Guy(alright, not the most original name), arecently published author on the vergeof marriage, who decides to go back

and visit four former girlfriends in differ-ent cities to right the wrongs he inflictedon them. If it’s more novella than full-fledged novel, there’s nothing wrongwith that.

Seemingly an inveterate prevarica-tor, with each scene a different aspectof Guy is revealed even if, at the end, heremains a bit of a cipher. With his ariaof self-justification, has this former “emo-tional terrorist” become an emotionalmasochist?

LaBute’s characters are recogniz-able types, though not stereotypes.They fumble for words, “confuse ‘moral’and ‘ethical’”, and the women espe-cially, ingratiate themselves into yoursoul.

Guy’s palaver and mea culpa-ingbecome a teensy repetitious and, es-pecially in the second scene, there’s aninconsistency between a character’susing highfalutin’ words one minute andbeing puzzled by them the next. Short-comings? Yes. Overlook-able? For themost part.

After presenting The Shape ofThings last year and Fat Pig threeyears ago, Actor’s Theatre of New Or-leans seems to have an affinity forLaBute’s work. Certainly this was thecase with Some Girl(s) which startedout good and got better as it went alonguntil it was perfect by the end.

Director René J.F. Piazza not onlyenabled his cast to get to the core of thecharacters but, using the constrictedspace simply but wisely, treated hisplayers like boxers who retreat to theircorners but then come out again fight-ing. And unlike some shows where Iwant to yell at the actors “Move al-ready!”, here when a character sat orstood for an extended period of timethere was no reason for him or her tomove one second before they did.

I’m not sure why Piazza didn’t havehis actresses include certain physicaldescriptions that the text refers to (arash, highlights in one’s hair) but this isa minor quibble. It appears as thoughATNO is spending more money on theirsets, and if Piazza’s hotel room setting,

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A.J. Allegra and Natalie Boyd in Mr. MarmaladePhoto by Linda Marie

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celebrazzi (celebrations-paparazzi) celebrazzi (celebrations-paparazzi)

Southern Decadence Grand Marshals (SDGMs) XXXV Paloma and TittieToulouse, and their entourage, approach the Home of Southern Deca-dence, Tubby’s Golden Lantern at 1239 Royal Street. The duo would lead

what would become the largest parade in the history of Southern Decadence. Stretchingsome 22 blocks, the 35th parade was chockfull of costumed revelers, and specialguest, the Lesbian and Gay Band Association marching band with 200 members. It isestimated that over 40,000 lined the route this year, the largest number to ever view theparade.

MC Gary Glitter of the first 3P(Pre-Parade Party) broughtSDGMs XXXV Paloma and

Tittie Toulouse to the stage out front ofTubby’s Golden Lantern for the officialtoast and welcome by the grand marshalsfor the 38th Official Southern DecadenceCelebration of Gay Life, Music and Cul-ture. Joined by Parade Lt. Toby Lefort, theduo started the parade as tradition dic-tates at Tubby’s Golden Lantern goingdown Royal to St. Louis, to N. Rampart, toToulouse, to Burgundy, to St. Ann, to Bour-bon, ending at Neighborhood Bar of theYear Cafe Lafitte in Exile.

Southern Decadence Susan Lucci’s Rip and Marsha Naquin-Delain wel-comed SDGMs XXXV Tittie Toulouse and Paloma, along with invited guests,to the 16th Official Southern Decadence Bead Toss. Hosted at Ambush and

SouthernDecadence.COM Headquarters, 828 Bourbon Street. Thousands of beads,t-shirts, and buttons were tossed to the huge crowd below. The 2009 SD theme wasHurricane: This Year They BLOW Back! which was the inspiration for the Ambushbalcony created and designed by artist Todd Blauvelt. At the end of the 35th Official

Southern Decadence Parade,the Lesbian and Gay Associa-

tion marching band paused in front ofAmbush and SouthernDecadence.COMHeadquarters to play two sets exclusivelyfor Southern Decadence Grand MarshalsXXXV Tittie Toulouse and Paloma.

The 38th Southern Decadencetheme was Hurricane: ThisYear They BLOW Back! And in

keeping with that theme, Southern Deca-dence Susan Lucci’s Marsha and RipNaquin-Delain (right) appeared as the“Ugly Red Hurricane Twins” in the 35thSouthern Decadence Parade.

Mayor’s Office representativeLarry Bagneris presentedSDGMs Paloma and Tittie

Toulouse with proclamations honoringSouthern Decadence by the City of NewOrleans on Friday of Labor Day Weekend.Bagneris, in his remarks at the OfficialSouthern Decadence Grand MarshalsDrag Show at Tubby’s Golden Lantern,stated that the economic impact of South-ern Decadence, is over 150 million dol-lars to the local economy.

Mayor’s Office representativeLarry Bagneris is joined onstage at the 6th Bourbon

Street Extravaganza on Saturday by PhilipPizzi and Chuck Robinson. Robinson wasrecognized with an official proclamationfor bringing the live free open concert toSouthern Decadence outside ofNapoleon’s Itch on Bourbon at St. AnnStreets. The largest crowd ever for thisevent was estimated at some 25,000 thisyear.

The parade of Good and Evil contestants at the Mystic Krewe of Satyricon’sMidnight in the Garden of Good & Evil was hosted at Venusian Gardensin New Orleans. The event helped raise funds for the krewe’s Mardi Gras

Bal Masque VIII on February 7, 2010 at the Sugar Mill. For more visitMysticKreweOfSatyricon.COM.