Leigh de Santa Fe






From Brink of Social Disaster

A Hallowed Eve

By Leigh de Santa Fe

Our high holy day, as Cindy Martin called it, has finally passed and with it the expectations and hopes and fears and shopping sprees that attend. I had just about given up the thought of going out, informing my email friends that I was too old, too unlovely and had no friends to party with and how bored I was tired of dragging myself down to the gay bar to warm a solitary barstool for a few hours before heading home, my dark mood enhanced by several vodka tonics. That's the way I've spent the last several Halloweens.

It's not much fun.

I know I'm luckier those who spend the night doling out candy to tiny fiends when they'd rather be dolling up and feeling the freedoms the holiday affords. Like walking into a convenience store en femme and seeing people laugh with you and not at you.

Still, the prospect of spending another Halloween inwardly taking notes on my own alienation while revelers surrounded me like a frieze from a James Ensor painting had lost its appeal even for a practiced alienist like myself. Soon enough that pleasantly dangerous lure of sexual misadventure which stokes the fires of unnamed hopes subsides when you realize you're not at all sure what kind of misadventure you're up for. Twelve months to plot a course and one night to run aground and run aground I always do.

I spend a good part of that year in the vain hope that I'll meet someone in this queen-forsaken town who dresses. Someone who looks like Kirsty Alley with a Lily Tomlin's sense of humor. After sixteen years here I've unearthed one who looks like Charles Durning and another who has a sense of humor like Lillith on Cheers. Call me shallow. Call me a snob. Call me Stella by starlight. I'd rather be alone.

So I bought a bag of Snickers and steeled myself for yet another quiet evening at home with the cat.

Rescued

Thanks to my friend Mary, who has steadfastly encouraged me in my vices for two years now, I was rescued from that fate. She invited me to join three of her friends for an evening in search of cheap halloween thrills. I wasn't terribly enthused at first. After all, they weren't "family" and the idea of doing transgender outreach just didn't appeal. But she was insistent and I was desperate and the cat was indifferent as always so...I said okay.

Late Thursday afternoon Mary came over to my little beachhouse at the end the world to make me up and consumed Snickers while regaling me with stories of her life as a cosmetician with Christina of Hollywood. It was a shortlived career, (nine months) and it was long ago, (twenty years) but I basked in the glow of my Smith Victor spotlight and the knowledge that at last I would be transformed into the bewitching girl that unfailingly emerges in the final pages of every Sandy Thomas fable. "When at last I looked in the mirror I could not believe my eyes! There before me was..." a rather scary middle-aged man in garish face paint. Whaddaya want? This ain't "The Song of Bernadette," darlings.

After Mary had dotted the final eye on my beauty mark I gathered up my "Big Box of Drag" and we headed out, me in flaming make up but wearing my normal costume of jeans and the famous non-vented sports coat from Mervyns. I put a baseball cap on backwards to achieve that "Homeboy from West Hollywood" look so popular here in the Southwest.

We arrived at Maggies with our boxes and bags of costumery. After some brief embarrassed hellos I retreated to the bathroom with the "Big Box" to sort out my costume. After trying on and rejecting a shimmering lurex top that Mary had brought me (too young) I settled once again on the tried and true leopardskin catsuit, borrowed from ex-girlfriend Amy who loaned it to me with the proviso that I not "cum on it." Some people...

I emerged from the bathroom a new woman. Okay, a new old woman and began to distribute wigs to the wigless, a public service I provide during the holidays. Marlon, the other guy, was putting the final touches on his Batman costume. Maggie, elegantly attired as pierrot was in the bedroom sewing up Marlon's wings, Carrie was casting about for a costume and Mary was trying to make a little blond chemo wig of mine work for her. I called the final result, "Doris Day in Mourning for Rock Hudson with Extra Arms." There was, how can I describe it, a good feeling afoot. I had just met these people and yet I felt at ease even in my big haired queenly splendor.

We dressed and redressed and undressed and dressed again. There were strange rituals of the Supplicating Face Powder Application. Carrie fretted that my Tony of Beverly brunette number wasn't "her." I fretted that my five pound "Showgirl" wig would never be as large as I thought it should be. Maggie applied fresh diamonds to her cheeks and polish to my nails. Marlon cautiously tried out his wing span. Slowly it occurred to all of us that we were having that rarest of experiences, an old-fashioned good time. Truly, the dull party we repaired to and the impossibly hip costume ball at the posh uptown restaurant that followed were anti-climactic compared to the antique camradery we achieved back at Maggie's apartment. And we did it all without drugs, friends. Copious amounts of vodka but no drugs. Okay, well, some drugs...but nothing you couldn't buy over the counter in Mexico from a shady pharmacist.

At midnight, as Holly Woodlawn mounted the stage, venerable but talentless as ever, and began to belt out some supper club chanson to a crowd of noisy, disinterested twenty-somethings, we left the bar and headed back to Maggie's place for a late night snack and party post-mortem. As we sat around the dining table eating eggs and wieners I had a Sally Field's moment. If an Acme safe had fallen through the ceiling and crushed my hapless skull and attending wig, it would have been okay with me. I had danced in my catsuit and heels and felt loved.

Life was good.


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