Well, that's not exactly true. Lisa Lisa isn't actually a girl -- she's a male-to-female transsexual who emcees a drag show at Bob and Barbara's. And she probably named herself. Besides, most of her friends just call her "Lisa."
But still, a large sign boasts: "Lisa Lisa -- The Girl so Nice they named her TWICE!!!." The sign sits behind the small, wooden stage of the discreet, dusky bar that sits on the corner of 15th and South and, like most everything else at Bob and Barbara's on Thursday nights, the sign captures the gist of Lisa Lisa, without ever revealing her essence.
Lisa Lisa is: A drag queen. A transsexual. A damn good emcee, with her twiggy, curvy figure and her easy rapport with the crowd. She is 5'6", but taller in heels. She is black.
And now, in the bar's muggy dressing room, she is spraying adhesive on her B-cup breasts, wearing a black thong that wraps up in two suspender straps that then drapes over her breasts like flaps of curtain and preparing for tonight's show.
In another corner of the dressing room, which really is more of a curtained off area anyhow, Audwin King, a short drag queen who goes by the stage name of "Joy Marnier" and works in an Atlantic City casino by day, stands in a state of undress. Two crudely cut and dirty-looking pieces of foam pop out of his black bra, and he's pulled his stockings up so tight that they squeeze his stomach, the skin pooling over in a small waterfall of flesh. His face looks like the rainbow -- yellow, pink and orange brushed on a black palette.
Just after 11 p.m., the DJ starts up with Chicago's "All That Jazz," and the crowd begins to chant -- "Li-sa! Li-sa! Li-sa!"
"They're chanting for you?" comes the jibe from the dressing room, at once skeptical and admiring, and Lisa Lisa waits a few beats, then struts out onstage.
Lisa Lisa has been doing this for 10 years, just about as long as the bar has been hosting Thursday nights. She's watched the crowd -- a mix of university kids, of friends and family, of neighborhood folks -- grow and evolve, but always return.
"It's always the same group of people, just more of them," manager Frank Galoardi says.
Three years ago, Bob and Barbara's expanded, knocking down a wall and moving into the empty room. Before, the shows went on behind the bar, atop the bar, even.
"Bartenders were occasionally used as props," Galoardi remembers."The volume of people that were there -- it was just packed, you were just shoulder to shoulder with people."
Lisa Lisa and Galoardi were also both there when the bar ended up in court. Galoardi says that one night, Lisa Lisa was bringing people up on stage, just like she always does, when "a boob had slipped out, and it just happened to be that night there was an undercover agent."
The bar didn't have a license for nudity, and had to pay a fine, but otherwise, Bob and Barbara's has been controversy free. The crowd comes to have a good time, and usually they do.
Now, the crowd is diverse. Lisa Lisa asks, "How many straight women in the house?" and applause and hoots follow. "How many gay men?" she continues, to cheers and whistles. "What about straight guys?"
"How many straight men going home with gay men?" someone shouts out, and everyone laughs. Well, everyone but the straight men, who offer more of a courtesy chuckle.
Then Lisa Lisa moves into her shtick. Between acts -- and usually, three to four "girls" dance and sing and generally get down each Thursday night -- she teases the crowd, dragging the spunky and the bashful alike onstage.
"You know lesbians can't dance," protests one girl, with spiky blond hair.
But Lisa Lisa doesn't care. It's all in good fun, anyhow, and at the end, she hands her victim a green carnival ticket -- good for a free drink.
When College senior Rachel Meadows steps down off the stage after about 30 seconds of solo shimmying, she says she's still so nervous that she marches straight to the bar and orders the house special -- a Pabst and a shot of Jim Beam.
That's the sort of bar Bob and Barbara's is, where beer chases the whisky down, and smoke fogs the air. Above the stage, four colored disco balls rotate atop one clear ball, and the stage itself can't be more than four inches high, three by six feet wide. But the drag queens perform in front of the stage, usually, strutting between the tables to pick up tips and run fingers across some lucky boy's chest.
The bar itself is dark and overwhelmingly brown -- brown ceilings, brown walls, rust brown carpet stained with brown pox of gum. Old and faded PABST ads cover the walls. The bar is not unpretty, but damn, it's a dive.
Meanwhile backstage, the performers dress and undress in their hodgepodge of a room. An ashtray overflows cigarettes onto the table, alongside an antique-looking oil lamp and a fishing box full of makeup. Thick lipstick cakes the straws of the plastic cups. A mirror, streaked and propped against a chest, reflects "Les Harrison" -- The Legendary Les Harrison.
Everyone calls Les "Mama," and it's easy to see why. "How's your love life?" Les asks "Skyanna." Skyanna, who goes by Sky or by his "boy name" -- Mike Noto -- says that things have been slow lately. Les listens, then nods her head in understanding.
"She paved the way for us," Mike says, his jaw trembling slightly. "Back before, performing wasn't easy. People would throw bricks."
But Les walked down the street in drag. She's the reason why girls, or guys, rather, can walk down the street in drag today. At 62, Les is the last of the first drag queens, and says she got her start 33 years ago, at the age of 23. The ages and numbers don't quite match up, but some of what you hear at Bob and Barbara's adopts this whimsical, fluid quality -- not grounded in fact, but not outright mistruths, either. The ladies are entertainers, illusionists, and this is their illusion.
"I'm two totally different people, Mike and Sky," Mike says. "I'm in the illusion of Sky."
Mike is a gay man. When he performs, he's a gay man performing as Sky. "I don't get turned on when I put on women's clothes," he says. He just has fun, dancing, singing and maybe picking up some tips here and there. About $20 per number. $100 on a good night.
If you saw him down on South Street, leaning against the pole just caddy corner from Jim's Cheesesteaks, you wouldn't even look twice. Like on one Tuesday in February, when he's propped against that pole, wearing a black do-rag, a long white shirt and orange warm-up pants. Pulling on his cigarette, he could be any guy, just wasting the daylight on South Street.
Then there's "Latina Montgomery," who goes by Tina when she's not performing. She says she's just 30 -- she's probably been "just 30" for the past several years -- and she's a transsexual. Born as a male, she lives her life as a female, complete with silicone in her hips and hormones for the rest.
Now, save a thong, she's standing naked in the dressing room. She keeps peeking out of the dressing room curtain, to where a line has formed for the two bathrooms. One is for men, the other for women, but usually no one follows the signs anyhow, because really, who is to judge a boy or girl here at Bob and Barbara's?
Understanding the nuances of this community can be daunting at first, like why a transsexual drag queen who likes to date men isn't just a gay guy. Or how Tina has a four-year-old daughter, with her "husband," a female-to-male transsexual and drag king who goes by "Rome."
This new mention of Tina's daughter throws another kink in your understanding of her world, and you're trying to figure everything out when, finally, she turns toward you. She turns toward you and says, loudly and staring straight at you, "Honey, I have a dick! And it works!"
It's jarring to hear these words coming from a woman with such a feminine face. Although while dressed in drag, it's polite to call drag queens by their "girl names" and treat them as women, after the show, as they're pulling on their jeans and baseball caps, the shift back to "he" becomes almost intuitive. But with Tina and other transsexuals, the "she" is what comes naturally.
Sure, Tina may "have a dick, and it works," but Tina is a woman. The role is so natural for her that it becomes natural for you, too. Look at her, you might whisper to a friend. Or, wow, I loved her routine But the choice of pronoun just rolls off your tongue. Tina is a "she."
Her shoe rack towers 20 high, and five cubbies across. On the dashed together shelves sit pink stilettos, leopard print stilettos, red stilettos and, of course, elegant and classic black stilettos. More than 50 wigs line the upper part of the walls -- mainly long black and brown wigs, straight and curly, but also short neon pink Uma Thurman wigs and long fire engine red ones.
The next thing you notice, when Tina leads you to the third-floor living room, are the two large school pictures, drab and matte, that sit on either side of the TV. The picture on the right shows Rome, age seven. Rome looks exactly the same as he does now, round-faced and grinning, except that seven-year-old Rome is a girl, with a white ruffle shirt tucked into a blue skirt and tied with a scarf.
On the left side, the picture shows Tina as a little boy, wearing an open plaid shirt, in the dull beiges and browns of the time. The boy looks like he must be about seven? Eight, maybe?
"I don't know," Tina calls from the kitchen. "That's the part of my life I try to forget."
Although, Tina says she didn't have a tough time coming out.
"I knew... all my life," she says. "You know you're not a boy. It's something that's inside of you."
So she started changing in 6th grade, wearing "boy pants but a girl shirt." Slowly, her parents started calling her their "daughter" because, well, they sounded pretty silly saying "son" as they pointed to a boy dressed like a girl. And then she became "Tina," after Tina Turner, a name her mother helped her pick out.
Tina's mother, 80-year-old Ruth Williams, has been Tina's biggest fan -- both onstage and in life. That Tina still lives in the house she grew up in, sharing it with her mother, is a testament to the strength of their relationship.
Williams laughs remembering back to when Tina was just becoming "Tina."
"That was when she used to sneak out of the house," Williams says. "Her friends used to come over and get dressed. I let her know she wasn't exactly sneaking out. I was looking out the window. She didn't need to sneak out."
Tina was free to be a girl, if that's what she wanted, and her friends were welcome in William's house, too.
"I don't know if any of them know my name, because they all call me mom," Williams laughs.
Indeed, with an easy laugh and jars of candy filling her bedroom, Williams is the type of woman you call "mom." Pictures of her 80th birthday party this January are filled with Tina's gay and transsexual friends, and these same friends wander in and out of the house in a dawdling stream, laughing with "mom" or playing with Tina and Rome's four year-old daughter, Cione.
As Williams watches TV on the ground floor, one of Tina's friends lounges upstairs on a couch, spooning General Tsao's and fried rice from a Styrofoam container and watching Wheel of Fortune.
In the otherwise nondescript West Philadelphia home, food is always cooking, friend are always over and pictures of Tina and her five older siblings cover the walls.
"I am a housewife during the day," Tina explains. "I take care of my mother, my daughter, my husband. I love to cook, do the laundry."
Still, Tina and Rome haven't planned out exactly what they're going to tell Cione when she's a few years older, and books like Heather has Two Mommies and Daddy's Roommate seem to fall just short in this situation. Not that they'd use them, anyway.
"We're gonna be like, 'This is Rome, but he's your mom. And this is Rome, and he's your dad," Rome says. "I think she'll understand. I don't think she'll care."
"She will always stand strong," states Tina, giving the ultimate word on the topic.
For now, Cione calls Rome "Rome," and calls Tina "Tina" or "Mama Tina." In a video that Tina plays , a young Cione walks onstage and hands a crumbled bill to a drag queen.
"We just are who we are," Tina says. "I don't consider myself straight. I don't consider myself gay. I'm just Rome's woman. We're a family. We have a daughter. We're just trying to do stuff to improve our lives."
Tucked near the front of the third floor, and just off the common room that's just off the kitchen, the bedroom is the one part of the house that seems less homey. The bed has a white canopy, a sprawling mattress and are those black satin sheets?
"Yes it is, boo," Tina says, almost teasing. "Black satin."
"We are a rich poor family," she adds.
Now Rome is going to school, a 15-week program at Orleans Tech -- "It's a start, I got to start somewhere," the 22-year-old says -- but he's worked odd jobs before, and they're using the money from those jobs now.
A black camera on a tripod sit in one corner, trained on the bed. You can't help but notice the camera, maybe you even raise your eyebrows or offer a smile, and Rome answers: "We don't use that camera. We just have it."
He pauses, then laughs. "It looks hot."
Also looking hot are the two mirrors, on either side of the bed.
"Well, yeah, those mirrors were so I could see what was going on sexually," Tina says, half smirking.
But now, one mirror is partially covered up with makeshift animal-print curtains. Rome walks out of the room and into the kitchen. Tina heads downstairs as Rome opens the oven to check on a big pot of lamb, covered with peas and gravy.
Minutes later, Rome calls downstairs, "Ask mommy if she wants a piece of lamb."
Tina asks, but now Williams is busy pointing to pictures. That's her beaming beside Rome and Mayor Street, that one there is of her and Ed Rendell, snapped at some gay pride event, and there's one of Tina at Bob and Barbara's. Tina's wearing a white, frilly dress, and looks as if she's being swallowed by a boa constrictor of ruffles. Williams points to another picture of her daughter, now in a black dress with one leg curled up under her on the couch.
"And that's her showing her butt!" Williams laughs.
Twenty-four-21 and it's over -- Superbowl XXXIX belongs to the Patriots, and Eagles fans must settle for another typically green-and-white ending. But on that post-Superbowl Thursday, Lisa Lisa is ever the optimist.
"T.O. -- His body is so tight, he made me wanna do things," she trills, elongating the "s" into a racy hiss. "So they Eagles got something... They got T.O. with his nice body."
Lisa Lisa's prepping the crowd for the show, getting the drunk and sober, the gay and straight, the black and white, the newbies and regulars, the Emo and Rocky Horror Picture Show folks ready for some drag. She announces the next performer and then clomps offstage. She's half giggling and half falling, like a prom queen embarrassed yet delighted to be wearing the crown. This is the persona Lisa Lisa assumes when onstage -- sultry, whiny, wet.
"I want to lick cherries off you with whipped cream," she says, extending the "cr-e-e-e-eam" into a moan. "I want to lick you like a lollypop."
And before that: "Have you ever had two chocolate bunnies at the same time?"
And even earlier: "Hey David, I'm gonna come out later without my panties on. I don't wear panties in my show."
When Latina struts to the front of the bar to "I'm Every Woman," she's wearing what looks like a low cut bathing suit, but the fabric is sequined and stretchy. The front loops downward in a sharp V, right down to the belly button. She pivots around, revealing only a thong pulled tight, then throws her hands up against the wall and shakes her body as the crowd erupts.
When the chorus breaks, she rips her costume to the side, showing breasts that are each adorned with a metallic sticker, much like the ones that led to Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction. But this time, the malfunction is intentional, and Latina shakes her chest in time to the beat as the audience hoots and cheers.
After the show, Latina turns to the dressing room as she throws a white leather jacket over her white stretch jeans and white boots.
"I would like to say goodnight to all homosexuals, faggots, gay girls and freaks," she says.
Goodnight.
