Some years back I ran into a woman I had gone to high school with. She was all grown up, of course. She was generally pretty attractive, tall, with a nice figure. She also had a nice singing voice, quite deep (probably contralto) and had sung in the school choir. Also early on, she wanted to be a ballerina and took some ballet lessons, but was eventually told that she was not really "petite" enough to be a ballerina. Tall, well-muscled, built like an amazon.

We dropped into a restaurant, had several cups of coffee (as we used to do after school was out for the day) and spent some time catching each other up.

It seems she was making some pretty good money at an unusual job. She got the idea when she saw a 1982 Julie Andrews movie called "Victor Victoria." The "McGuffin" of the movie was a woman impersonating a female impersonator.

My friend was using her singing and dancing skills in a somewhat unconventional way. She worked up a song and dance act for "The Garden of Allah," a gay night club down on Seattle's First Avenue, where, at that time, all the pawn shops and porn theaters were located.

Her act at The Garden of Allah was as a female impersonator! The manager of the club thought it would be one helluva snort for a female to impersonate a singing and dancing male female impersonator!

Got that? It can get a little confusing.

The fact that she had what might be called a "Junoesque" figure, and a fairly deep voice for a woman, helped the illusion a lot, and the customers in the place assumed that she was a male impersonating a female—and that she / he was damned good at it.

Well, I guess you could say that. He / She had what you could call a certain natural talent!

She was not confused about her sexuality. She eventually married and had a couple of kids. Also, she had gotten into computers early on, and last I heard, she had taken a job as a computer technician at a downtown business firm. Bright woman!

Don Firth