My First Lady of Drag: Mabel West

Oh. My. God. I'm my mother.

When I was in Jr. High I made a friend that my Mom wasn't happy about... His name was Jeremy West and he was a "trouble kid". We met in special ed class and were instantly bonded simply because neither of us had ever had a real friend of our own before.

There were many adventures that the two of us shared much to my parents dismay, but there was one that will always be front and center in my mind because I was 11 and it was my first time in drag. 

After the infamous "police escort home" from Jeremy's house, my mom was hesitant to let me continue hanging out with Jeremy. She was torn because while Jeremy had a reputation at the school, told to her by teachers whom she actively disliked, she personally never witnessed him doing anything wrong. And she understood that his single mother was doing the best she could and that softened my mom's opinion of him. 

She also knew that I had no friends other than my brother. Special ed kids had to move with the program every year, and there were different kids in the class each year, so it wasn't easy to keep in touch and make friends. Josh never had any problems making friends. He went to the same school most years while I moved around. So he developed friends from school and he had made friends with a couple kids in our town that he would go hang out with every now and again without me. 

Mom was torn between keeping me away from bad influences and letting me have my first friend. So, she relented and let me keep hanging out with Jeremy. She met his mom and knew where he lived and with those things being established, the day eventually came that we asked our parents for a sleepover. 

It was near the end of summer break before 8th grade. For the first time that I could remember I was going to be starting the school year at the same school from the year prior. And I had at least one friend going into it. That was another factor that convinced my mom to let me go.

The weekend came and Saturday morning I packed up my overnight bag with all the essentials that an 11 year old considers valuable, which somehow included my favorite dress of my mom's and the Prince Valiant wig she had bought me for Halloween the year prior that I had never worn. Every year I would inevitably dress up as Dracula since mom had a really cool cape. 

While the wig and dress were easy to ball up and stuff in my bag, the cape was bigger and mom saw me packing it and said no. She didn't know about the dress or she would have objected to that as well. Now mind you, I was a special kid. I had been playing dress up in mom's clothes in secret a couple of years by this point. One time, she surprised me by coming home early and finding me parading around in her hippy dress (my favorite because it was pretty and had volume and flowed well when I spun around in it.)

Unlike most parents, mine were actual hippies who met in a band. Hippies who operated under the code of live and let live and if it's causing no harm, let it be. So when she walked in on me twirling non-stop in her dress, I gasped and froze. She looked me up and down, sighed and said "that had better get back on the hanger when you're done. If I find it at the bottom of the closet all bunched up, THEN, you will be in trouble." Then she put her stuff down and went and started making dinner. 

Since I had "permission" to wear that dress I didn't think mom would care that I took it with me, but still, I didn't tell her. So away we went to Jeremy's house. We hung out and played with toys and watched tv and at night we played a little bit of ding dong ditch, though we had to be careful who's house we hit because the neighbors knew Jeremy too and they would walk right over and knock back if they suspected us. Honestly, it was just fun to play outside in the dark using nothing but our imagination. Ahh, the good old days. 

The next morning Jeremy's mom went to church and we were home alone and I pulled out the dress and wig to show Jeremy. He laughed and suggested we try to fool people into thinking I'm a real girl. so I put them on and we raided his mom's make up and turned me into Mable West, his cousin. 

I had been really into pirates that summer because mom and I had a tradition of watching movie musicals and that summer I saw both "Pirates of Penzance" and "The Pirate Movie" and oh my god I wanted nothing more than to be as cool and pretty as Kristy McNichols, and have the boy from "The Blue Lagoon" moon over me, he's just so dreamy!!

Thus, Mable West was born. Mable because that was Kristy's name in the movie and West because I was pretending to be Jeremy's cousin. Today I wouldn't say I was a pretty girl, but I was a pre-pubescent boy with a slight lisp, so at the time I thought I was a pretty convincing girl. Though I may have overdone it with the blue eyeshadow. WHAT, I thought that's what women wore!! I was fashionable enough to wear a light pink lip though, so I thought I looked gorgeous and convincing. 

Once we were all dressed up and ready, we went outside and walked around to see if anyone noticed or said anything. We walked around for a little bit and realized that since he lived in the middle of nowhere in a tiny mountain town there wasn't really anyone who was seeing us. So Jeremy came up with a better idea. 

There was a kid that lived just up the street that Jeremy knew that went to our school. I didn't know this kid from Adam, so Jeremy thought that would be a great person to trick. We would convince this kid that I was a girl and was visiting my cousin and our secret goal was to get him to kiss me. So we could laugh at the fact that we made him kiss a boy. Remember I was 11. Ooooooooh kissing boys...ooooooh. 

We walked up to this kids house and Jeremy told me to wait at the gate while he went up to the door and asked if the kid could come out and play. They came out and met me at the gate and Jeremy introduced me as his cousin. I said hi and curtseyed. 

This kid looked at me, then back at Jeremy, then back and forth between us a few times. Then he said the words that destroyed the game.

"Why do you look like that weird kid from the Special Ed classes?"

I feigned ignorance and said "Who?"

"That kid that was trying to buy friends with candy last year. What was his name, Shane, I think?"

"I wouldn't know I don't go to your school" I said desperately. 

He looked back and forth at us for a few more minutes then eventually said "I'm going back inside to watch tv." And he turned and did just that. 

Jeremy and I walked back to his house, me in shock, Jeremy barely holding in giggles. We agreed that when school started that we would pretend that this never happened and hope that that kid didn't tell everyone that I was dressed up in girls clothes. If he did, Jeremy promised that he would die telling everyone that it really was his cousin Mable. And true to his word, no one ever mentioned it and I never got teased for it. 

I didn't do drag publicly again until High School, when in Choir class me and two girl friends got assigned to do a song from the King and I, and I dressed up in a big ball gown and sang "Getting to know you" as a kitschy camp song.

Then not again until after the Navy when I moved to SF and joined the Queer Chorus of SF and my friend Andrew (Coby) convinced me to do "You're timeless to me" from Hairspray with him and then later I stunned as the titular "Big Boned Gal" by kd lang at Grace Cathedral of all places. 

You're Timeless to Me

Big Boned Gal

Since then I have dabbled in drag a few more times, though it has almost exclusively been for shows that I was doing. Either with the chorus or with local theatre groups. 

For your amused example, here are a few more:

I did drag in Yoga for a 48Film festival film

I did a play called "Snip" where I played a former marine drill sergeant post op trans woman lawyer

Then after I moved to LA I was in a production of Wayne Self's "Upstairs" musical where I played Marcy Goodman local drag legend of New Orleans

And of course, last Halloween I dressed as my all time favorite Disney villain, the incomparable Ursula!

After all this time and all these experiences in drag I can say it is something that is truly a joyous, ridiculous expression, and that yes, I've come up with a much better drag name in my adulthood than Mable West. Today, if I dress in drag, my name is: