As many of you are probably aware, I fairly relish when one thing I experience intersects unexpectedly with some other experience. I call this intersection — this collision, if you will — Two Things At Once and I had not witnessed, or rather taken part in, an occurrence of TTAO in a long time. Like the man said, sometimes you have to make your own luck, and it was in this spirit of Magellanic exploration that I traveled down to 17th and R a few weeks ago for the Drag Races.
For those of you who don’t know. . . the Drag Races are a DC tradition where the drag queens, cross-dressers, transvestites and other people of undetermined gender or inclination have a foot race down 17th Street. Afterwards, there is a psuedo-parade/meet-and-greet. And yes, I know it happens in other towns, but this is my story, so pretend that we’re in a record store and shut up.
It’s a good time, and cross-dressers being what they are, obviously has great potential for Two Things At Once, so I went, although all of my lame friends bailed. What with one thing and another, I found myself at the Cyberstop Cafe, waiting for the festivities to begin. The place was swamped with drag queens, or “representatives of the trans-gendered community” so I found myself sharing a table with a Korean girl who was traveling the US, and has just arrived in DC the day before.
This all happened the week before the elections, so the Mayor, in a valiant attempt to curry favor with the locals, to prove that he was “down with the queers” or whatever, was out officiating and engaging in photo-ops with the local color. Hizzonor is generally strait-laced and looks uncomfortable in social settings, so I am sure that getting is ass slapped by a funky looking Princess Diana was almost more than his fragile sensibilities could handle.
Trying to explain to the Korean girl, Maria Moon, the gender politics incumbent in the evening was difficult enough, but the addition of the mayor — who looks like he may be a cross-dresser himself — was more than my anemic vocabulary could bear. I was caught unprepared, with adjectives and pronouns insufficient to the task. The evening degenerated into Maria and I walking around 17th street while she asked random people “You man or woman?” while I stammered about trying to explain that she was NOT horrendously tactless, only Fresh Off The Boat.
I mean, I’m sure they have cross-dressers in Korea, but I don’t think she had ever met any of them face to unshaven face. All in all, it was a weird evening, and didn’t make much sense. One of the unexpected benefits of the night was that in addition to being a night of Two Things at Once, it was also a night of You Can’t Call It this One Thing If It Does This Other Thing. I’ll let you suss that one out for yourself.
Speaking of things that make no sense, Maya told me that in Hebrew there is no conjugation of the verb “to be”. Apparently, when you introduce yourself, you say “I Jason” or whatever, and the “am” portion is just sort of assumed. This fact got me thinking that maybe Tarzan wasn’t struggling with English as we had all assumed, but that he had already mastered it and was working on his Hebrew to English transliteration.
Me Tarzan, You Jane indeed.