Madame John Dodt's Legacy #31...
by Jon Newlin, NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana
The early summer is proverbially known in journalistic circles as the Silly Season - Congress and the Supreme Court are over with, there are no major elections, and so the papers are normally filled with zany filler-type stories. This hasn't been much of a Silly Season, thanks to the combined horrors of Columbine and Milosevic, though I've found myself sillier than usual thanks to repeated peeping at the Friday afternoon corps(e) de ballet on Rampart Street, repeated heart-breaks along with endless self-recrimination after dozens and dozens of teeny little plastic tankards of brew, repeated espying among the patrons on the bald-headed row of characters I thought had long shuffled off this mortal coil to happier hunting grounds...but thanks to being down, at the moment, with a touch of la grippe or whatever, I've had to restrain myself and take a bit of time off from my costly and elephantine coquetry among the Great Undressed.
Speaking of Rampart St. - street of dreams! - Don Lee Keith told me that Dirty Dottie, washboard-ironing-board-and-sounding-board for several generations of local drag peers and peris - at least back to the time of Father Seelo - had finally gone to that big One-Hour-Martinizing-Shack in the sky, and that said grim occasion was reason enough for him to recirculate his now-classic, if only by dint of repetition, smartly-written piece concocted decades ago when he and Dottie were just embarking on their separate, if not entirely disparate, careers as French Quarter legends; alas, he is recirculating it in that Atlanta-owned Lesbian broadsheet that mistakenly calls itself Impact after a once-local queer rag. What I've always wanted to know more about was Dirty Dottie's stint at the Marlin Lounge on Gravier St., from an epoch predating her reign as dry-cleanuh-and-foul-mouth to More Stars Than There Are In Heaven. But I suppose I never will. If Mr. Batson (who forever reminds me of a brilliant and lustrous remark once made by Senator Hollings to Sam Donaldson on the David Brinkley Sunday morning show ages and ages ago) would just go in for a little bit of BLT History instead of the usual GLBT history with cole slaw on the side, perhaps we'd find out since Bob feels we have to know Everything, and thus to my mind, the world is robbed of much of its mystery and delight. Speaking of Dirty Dottie, I was recently talking to OL Batson about a Lesbian bar near Dirty Dottie's on Dauphine-the windows of Dottie's at the time looking something like a cross between the exhibition of the Crown Jewels in the Tower of London and an explosion in a sequin factory - when her cleaning establishment (cleaning seems so wacky a term with someone with a vocabulary like Dottie's - to make a stevedore blush, m'dear) called Mr. D's Hideaway which had, in back down a dark corridor, a jernt called The Jazz Room, I think, the only headliner in same that I recall was this enormous creature named something like Angel Baby who wore at any one time more falls, wiglets, and cascades - most of them a shade once known as "ice cream blonde" - than Dinah Washington had in her entire wardrobe. I saw Angel Baby perform, after a fashion, once at Regents Row, but that is another story entirely. Mr. D's was about as Spartan and deliciously grimy as little Quarter bars used to be-there were always a couple of bulldaggers with Balboas or D.A.'s fighting over the last pool shot, wearing those motorcycle jackets with a zillion zippers going vertiginously off in every direction, and the bar itself faced the men's room, the door of which was always broken. (Have I told this story before? It's too late to stop me if I have, that's how senescence is.) The bartender, recognizing that I was just a lonely high-school coed out to see 'some of life', was a dear old soul, also with a D.A. and leather jacket named AJ, I think, and when one of the gals at the pool table got tired of squabbling, AJ would say Watch This, and sure enough, she would go in the Men's Room and stand up to pee, or do her best. This happened again and again. The only thing for me to do was repair to the lady's powder room if I had to answer nature's call - usually all circuits are busy at my house when nature calls - and I considered this the apogee, the ne plus ultra, of the weird and wonderful, watching these diesel-dykes (sorry, no other term will do) stand up to pee. Some of them were at least as accomplished at it as I am; others, well, it was as Herbert Hoover remarked of Prohibition, an experiment noble in purpose. So I have told the story as Batson asked me to, though I have not told of seeing Elmo Avet's legendary Christmas cards, complete with their gruff messages and find-the-dachshund puzzles, but that is a story for colder weather, fireside chats, marshmallows and mulled cider and pantyhose hung up to dry by a crackling stack of pine logs.
But back to the boys and like Ethel Merman, I'm always doing something for them; although, the rest of the Cole Porter tune doesn't necessarily hold true, they're not always doing something for me...being out of commission, my dear and valued and trusted friend and confidante, La Daddario (distant relation of La Pasionara), told me that he would admire to do some Mata Hari-like investigation-counterintelligence, I think they call it - of the Sunset Strip at TT's in my enforced (though not 86'd) absence from the place, but I reminded him of what happened to Marlene Dietrich's spying career in Dishonored: she ends up at the end checking her makeup in front of the firing squad. The last thing I'd want for this unremarked - well, now I've remarked upon it, so there - genius of cyber-and-outer-space would be for his last moments to be spent carefully applying Cherries In The Snow in a hail of bullets. He has far more to live for than I have. A particular young gentleman at TT's who has made my life a continuous torch song of late - though I don't think he's put a great deal of effort into this, not that he needs to - reminds me that glamour is a more common, in every sense of the word, commodity than one might imagine; glamour is everywhere, even in North Carolina, whence I got a postcard from Sister Mary Perpetual Canis Nigrum (aka Old Lady Mays) who was there praying at the tomb of Ava Gardner for intercession and recovery in a recent illness. Given his immoderate faith in Ava's holiness and the number of times he's probably seen The Barefoot Contessa, Bhowani Junction, Pandora, The Flying Dutchman and Mogambo, I suspect he'll pull through all right.
It is the silly season, indeed, but just think if the Pontiff at Rome should get the message and canonize some of those old broads. Stanwyck and Anna Magnani would make particularly interesting saints, I think. One can imagine the statues! Magnani in her Serafina slip in front of a sewing machine with a bunch of old Italian crones in black in front of her, fingering their beads and susurrating over and over again that joyful mystery, "Cretini! Tutti a due!" Or Stanwyck, high on a pedestal in an Irish Channel chapel, in an Edith Head dressing gown, big honker all shiny, bangs crimped just so, holding a dainty little .32 and hissing, "It's in partibus infidelium for you, buster!" Pow!
Speaking of glamour and espying people I hadn't seen since the Early Cretaceous, I ran into Donnie Lloyd of all people on Rampart St., and remembered the days decades ago when he was so kind as to regularly loan me a bedroom on Chartres St. so that I could assignate with my First Great Love (sic); Donnie's boyfriend at the time went on to make a few porno loops, and very fine ones they were, I might add, since he was playing in one of them opposite Gary Boyd which must be like making your stage debut opposite the Lunts. Also a couple years after all this when I did some work for the Jazz and Heritage Festival and I went to visit Quint Davis, whom I've known since my first childhood, and Allison Miner to discuss said work, and I looked out their window and - glory be - they had a perfect view of that same bedroom in Donnie Lloyd's house. Well, they noticed that I kept staring out and they said all too nonchalantly, Oh we used to watch you and your boyfriend f**k all the time. Ragazzi, I could have sunk into the floor! But all I could do was smile sheepishly and say, I hope we met with your approval or something equally lame. I bring all of this up, not that it is of the slightest interest to anyone but myself, because my FGL, Gordon, is gone, Donnie's boyfriend Leon is gone, Allison Miner is gone, and you start at some point to feel like the guy in the Book of Job who comes to tell him of all the terrible things that have happened and says, I alone am escaped to tell thee.
Well, not quite alone, after all - but since I have been driven to quote Scripture, it's probably time to get the hell out of this space.
But not before I say two things. We are in the midst of the Silly Season-look at all the tabloid fuss over poor, pretty, little Ricky Martin. It doesn't personally matter to me whether or not he's a queer, I'll never sleep with him, but he is a shade too pretty and an even brighter shade too evasive about his romantic life-at least for this grotesquely demanding age, and then of course there was his membership in Menudo, the singing and dancing Chicken Farm (named for tripe stew indeed - that's inspired in a Goyaesque way, when you think of the havoc played with the entrails of every pedophile in the world when they tuned up). The intense and foolish scrutiny given all this proves that we live in a repressive age-one of the tabloid stories I read on the subject referred to the absolute secrecy about his personal life lest his pubescent-girl fans be dismayed-shattered-heartbroken over the revelation that he might be a maricon or a loca but frankly, the breathless confecters of these stories don't give kids enough credit. Arrant nonsense, really. Children and teenagers are far more sophisticated, usually in beneficial ways though not always, than adults know or want to know. It's a great big world after all, as the old tune has it.
And elevating the Silly Season into a Solemn one, I again salute Old Lady Dodt, the continued inspiration for all this nonsense, and recently found myself in front of a plaque on the Cabildo with Ms. Dodt's name on it. What a thrilling tribute I thought, as mentally organ music swelled and the vox humana crashed, until it dawned on me that before the Spanish government moved into the building, Old Lady Dodt had been running a combination cat-house and snowball stand for the early French settlers. We are indeed everywhere, as that frightful truism has it.
