Smitty's Bio
This is part of Smitty's life - given in her own words.
Born: December 19, 1967 in Poughkeepsie, New York State. I grew up in Pleasant
Valley, New York about ten miles outside Poughkeepsie, rural area. Lived in the
excessively small town of Pleasant Valley until I was 18. I like to say that the
Valley was two stop lights, a feed store, a Ford dealership and three
graveyards. There wasn't much to do, so we got imaginative. I read voraciously.
I started loving heroes and adventure early, before third grade.
I went away to college in Buffalo, New York at the age of 18.
Buffalo: I did my undergrad at the University at Buffalo. I started out in
illustration and ended up in English and Theater. I was a playwright. My first
play was done on campus in my junior year. It was about a 17-year-old dark
haired borderline personality gas station attendant, named Shannon, who
tormented and fascinated a writer in college named Margaret. It was called Very
Shortly, and I don't think any copies of it still exist, thank the Lord.
But it was a very interesting experience. There are a few beloved Buffalo
friends who were with me then and are still reading what I write. Bless your
stamina.
I ended college in 1992, after taking a year and a half off to work in a
pizzeria and suffer. Broken heart and all that early 20's drama.
Drag: Early 1993 I was moping around. I'd been broken up with by the woman I'd
been seeing. It was January. I was broke, living in a rat hole apartment off
Allen Street. A friend hauled me off to a meeting of some women who wanted to
put on a drag show as a fund raiser. This friend, oddly enough, was the model
for the 17-year-old dark haired borderline personality character that had
started my writing career in Buffalo. She was, and I think still is, proud of
that.
She figured that I knew everything about theater( a bald faced lie) and I could
help out with this show.
Leslie Feinberg, author, historian and transgender activist was once a Buffalo
resident, now living in New York City. S/he had come to town in 1992 to
participate in a drag show in the back of a bar on Niagara Street. The drag show
was called Passing Fancy and was the work of Terrence Fregoe, a brilliant butch
and local drag king. Leslie did a slide show historical presentation on passing
women throughout history, runway models appeared between. It was the first show
of it's kind, the line to get in was staggering.
The time came to do a fundraiser to rent a bus so people could go to the 1993
Gay and Lesbian March on Washington. Robbie Butler came up with the idea of
doing a drag show inspired by Passing Fancy. She contacted her old friend
Margaret Smith, who happened to have an extensive background in local theater.
Margaret w as a director and a founding member of the Ujima Theater Company.
That afternoon I met Margaret Smith and everything changed. I know, dramatic,
but there are people you meet who change the course of your life, you can divide
your narrative into the time before you knew them and after. My wife is one.
Margaret is another.
Margaret was trained in traditional theater. She was also an old school femme
with a deep love for women, particularly butch women. She knew her history well.
It informed her vision.
The show was going to be held in the back room of the same bar where Passing
Fancy had been held.
It was called Dykes Do Drag. Margaret Smith directed. I was one of the MC's. It
opened with a fragrment of a play I'd been working on, something called Wet
Lips. We did runway numbers of both femme drag and drag king, different time
periods, a dance number, skits. I wore a tuxedo for the first time in my life.
I did a number with the friend who had inspired that gas station attendant
character. She stripped for me while I stood there as a prop. Then she jumped
into my arms. I staggered as I carried her off stage, it was rather funny.
The whole night was half amatuer talent show, half protean theater. Raw, and
clumsy, and very very energetic, and like nothing else ever done. We had to do
it again.
I was a producer the next year, and a performer.
We took it out of the back room of the bar the next year and rented a four
hundred seat house in the Theater District of downtown Buffalo.
We had over one hundred women performing, doing tech, crew, all aspects. It took
six months to rehearse. Margaret Smith directed. Again, it was an amalgam of
numbers, dance, fashion, skits. All unpaid, mostly amatur, the money donated to
charity. The goal was to give a chance to perform to women who might never have
appeared on stage, to provide cheap thrills and good entertainment. It was also
about giving the community something genuine, something they had helped form, a
reflection of their desire. The show let us tell our own truth.
We sold out two days in a row. Two shows a night.
We did Dykes Do Drag for four years, it became a mammoth production. In the
third year, Margaret and a few of the other producers, Cyd Cox and Robbie
Butler, traveled to New York City and took Dianne Torr's Drag King For A Day
workshop.
Then they came back and included what they had learned. Margaret Smith directed
a number that was to be the first full on passing drag we had attempted. This
number was going to be something Dykes Do Drag hadn't tried before- a theater
piece, almost a one act play, with all male charaters played by drag kings.
Until now the drag had been fashion, or comedy, not based in both a love of
masculinity and knowledge of traditional theater.
The drag kings for that number were Cyd Cox, playing Sid, Robbie Butler, playing
Mark, Bernadette Hoppe playing Doc, and Susan Smith playing Steve.
We wrote the number as an ensemble- meaning we bloody well rehearsed and made it
up as we went along. It ended up being a story of four men who had all gone to
high school together. Something tragic happened on graduation night, and we
hadn't spoken to one another in 20 years. We were all getting together for our
20th high school reunion. We got stoned, reminised, and hashed out the tragic
thing that happened and how our lives were all changed.
It was a serious piece about male friendships and male silence. We worked on our
characters with the goal of having the audience forget that it was four women,
and get them immersed in the story. We rehearsed five days a week for five
months. I've never had a better time in theater, I was on a constant high. It
wasn't just the number, I was learning about myself left and right. I was
starting on the exploration of gender that would shape my adult life, I was
seeing myself as a masculine woman through the eyes of a woman who truly loved
butch women. I felt brave, strong, creative, generous, handsome- every single
thing I had never thought I might be. Margaret taught us to walk, sit, stand,
choose a voice, but first to know our characters. We had to understand their
lives as men, and we had to know how they had been as boys, when they were all
friends. Which brings me to the next woman to change my life- Leslie.
Dr. Leslie J. Rockenbach: It was 1993. We were doing the drag king rehearsals
five nights a week, I was doing other numbers as well as producing. I was
working 24/7 on that show, and part time in a pizzeria to stay alive. I was
ungodly happy. But, I was dating a woman who thought it was ridiculous. She
didn't like gender, she didn't like butch/femme, she didn't like drag. To be
fair, she didn't have any knowledge of the history, she had philosophical
differences with it. And she didn't think I was butch. I assume because I am
sweet, and not very agressive, very gregarious and social, and gentle hearted.
If you know my characters I'm more Sam than Taryn. I want to grow up and be like
Joe, but I'm the awkward woman in the second hand sports coat, falling madly in
love with everything she sees.
We agreed not to discuss it, because she didn't respect it and I couldn't bear
hearing a word against it. It was too new and too vital to me.
So I didn't discuss what I spent most of my time, and all of my love, doing.
Part of the rehearsal process was homework. Margaret told us to do some male
bonding over who we had been as boys. She told us to go watch the film Stand By
Me. For those that don't know, it's about the intense friendships boys form in
their early teen years, and what that means later in life to the men they
become.
I went over to the apartment of my fellow drag king and friend Cyd Cox. I'd
known Cyd since I was 18 years old and first came to Buffalo. She was a fixture
of the community and I'd had a mad crush on her, but it was a coming of age
ritual for every dyke in Buffalo to have a crush on Cyd at least once. We'd been
friends for years, but we only got close when we started doing drag together. I
went to watch the movie and rehearse. Cyd's roomate was a young woman who had
moved to Buffalo from Los Angeles and was working on her Master's degree in the
American Studies department. She was 23, gorgeous as a leopard with this long
blond hair down her back, perfect California girl skin and green green eyes.
Heart stopping. She wandered through the room in a wrap around hippie skirt and
a white t shirt, and I thought- Women's Studies. A beautiful, barefoot political
activist academic. I also thought, straight and very very young, and dismissed
her.
Cyd invited her in to watch the movie with us. I was annoyed, we had work to do,
and rehearsal was more important than anything. But the roomate came in and sat
down. Her name was Leslie.
We started watching the movie. I was enraptured, Cyd seemed a little bored. At
the end of the film the narrator says "I never again had friends like I did when
I was twelve. Jesus, does anybody?"
I cried. I looked at Cyd, expecting her to be transported as well, and saw
nothing. I looked at Leslie, who was crying. She was crying over how boys bond,
over how the attachments kids form at that age are more intense than they might
ever be again. I had had friends like that. I saw that Leslie had, as well. I
looked right at her and said, "You get it, don't you."
She said yes.
We never rehearsed. Cyd left the room eventually, all Leslie and I did was talk
to each other. We rambled on fast and furious about the friends we had at that
age, how that bonding felt, about comic books and martial arts, about love and
honor, about kung fu films. You know how you hear about soul mates? I met mine,
and I knew it right then. I even told her, in not so many words. When I'd left,
she told Cyd she'd met her butch and she was going to have me.
Yes, she was gay.
I thought she was kidding at first. She was too young, I knew she couldn't be
serious, and she was way too gorgeous for me. This girl could have anyone she
wanted at the snap of her fingers, heart stopping make you lie down and howl
like a dying dog gorgeous. She was also brilliant, driven, and shared all my
interests. And she loved it that I was a masculine woman.
One afternoon while we were still friends we were sitting on the floor of her
room talking. She said, "Don't take this the wrong way, but you'll always be my
man."
I'd never had anything more right said to me.
I was horrendously insecure. It kept us apart. I was an asshole.
I was also seeing someone. So we were friends for the first six months.
Of course I was in love with her from the first afternoon. I should never have
waited, she was right that we belonged together. I haven't won an arguement with
her since.
That was seven years ago. We were married on August 10, 1996. Big wedding.
Cyd and her husband stood up for us, as well as Margaret Smith.
We moved to Las Vegas in 1999, after Leslie finished her doctorate.
We are moving to LA this month. I'm madly in love with a woman who knows me. I
never expected that would happen. If I die tomorrow, I've been luckier than I
deserve- I've gotten to do my art, had friends as close as family, and been
loved by the best woman in the world. I want to be a papa, I want to be a
novelist, but if this is all I get, I was more blessed than the gods usually
allow mortals to be.
Smitty