Etta and the Marquis, Free-Wheeling in Jackson
by the Marquis De Marshmallow aka Christopher Stevens
The journey of a thousand miles starts with the activation of the wind-up wing-flapping angel on my dashboard. After that it’s all wishing I had cruise control and trying to stay in my lane while changing CD’s. In this case the journey (800 miles round-trip, really) was to Jackson, Mississippi, to cavort, confabulate, and otherwise hobnob with Jill Conner Browne and the Sweet Potato Queens in the Jackson Saint Paddy’s Day parade. The outbound trip was nearly uneventful, since it is I-20 West for about 90% of the distance, and there’s not much to see for 100% of the distance. The only city it passes is Birmingham, Alabama, and while it is probably unfair to judge a city by what one can see from the interstate, Birmingham looks unutterably, unrelievedly grey and boring. Past that, the trip is almost entirely woodland, marsh, and rolling farmland; pretty but unremarkable.
I made only one unnecessary stop, driven by curiosity into a Mississippi town called Chunky. As I pulled into the Chunky Baptist Church parking lot, I noticed an odd noise, a sort of rubbing sound, coming from the right rear of my car, Etta Jetta. So I got out and looked, and bounced the car a bit, and neither saw, nor felt, nor heard anything out off the ordinary. A young couple pulled up in a van and asked if I knew of a gas station in the area. I told them that I wasn’t from these parts, either, and had stopped only out of my desire to see what a place called Chunky looked like, which they thought was pretty funny. I got back in the car, drove cautiously away, and voila! The noise was gone. A miracle of the Chunky Baptists, perhaps, or something stuck to Etta’s bottom and fallen off again. It happens to all of us at one time or another.
The answer, by the way, to the question, "What does a place called Chunky look like," is, "Not much." A few shotgun shacks, one well-kept Victorian, and a herd of depressed mobile homes nuzzling each other in their dreary pasture. There seemed to be no commercial district, so it’s a mystery what the Chunkites do for a living and where they buy their groceries. Entertainment seems to be limited to the two Chunky churches, Chunky Baptist and Chunky Methodist.
There is a Chunky River, too, but at some distance from Chunky proper. It’s no more than a medium-size creek, and appears to be free-flowing and smooth. Possibly a trade of names could be arranged. Mississippi could call this river the Chattahoochee, and Georgia could use the name "Chunky" for a river that truly deserves it. A similar swap of town names might be made with Philadelphia, which, last I heard, was statistically the most overweight city in the nation, and the only Chunkian I saw looked pretty desiccated. If Helen, Georgia can transform itself into a center of Swiss Alpine culture, Chunky should be able to take gainful advantage of a name so bursting with possibility, or turn it over to someplace that can.
Westward, ho, and on to Jackson. I checked into my hotel, freshened up, and still had time for a little rest before heading for the first event, which was the Sweet Potato Queens’ Karaoke Party at Hal & Mal’s. As I backed Etta out of her parking space, That Noise was back again. (If you know anything of my history with cars, you saw this coming back in Chunky.) I decided to risk the drive to the party, but the Noise (a sort of agonized groaning, as of a grievously injured yet strong-lunged hostage in my trunk) got worse with every inch traveled. I decided to loop back to the hotel and call road service, and I almost made it. Two blocks from the hotel, and fortunately becalmed by lunch-hour traffic, Etta suddenly developed a severe list to starboard, she and her right rear wheel having parted company. Suddenly I was that person I always see by the side of the road and wonder what the hell kind of care they take of their car.
I used to be just destroyed by mishaps much smaller than this. But I seem, of late, to have packed on a lot more aplomb, or élan, or savoir-faire, or sang froid, or one of those helpful French substances. I used to be just slopping over with German Stuff – angst, weldschmerz, sturm und drang. You nom it, I had more than genug, but those days are finis. I pulled Etta gently out of the flow of traffic, walked blithely into Homer’s Bar-B-Q, and asked if I might please make a toll-free call to my road service, as my wheel is several yards behind my car. (Having road service has been shown to boost one’s savoir-faire at least twenty points, by the way.) Billy, the manager, is an affable guy, and let me use the phone. I was amazed to learn, while waiting for the wrecker, that Billy had never heard of the SPQ’s. "Who are they," he asked, "Are they hotties?" I replied in the emphatic affirmative, offering as proof the local entertainment paper, Boss Queen Jill in all her splendor on the cover, stacks of her right there in Billy’s own BBQ store. I had expected that everyone in Jackson would know about the Queens, but there are still a benighted few, it seems.
The trip to the repair shop was uneventful. Riding in a tow-truck would be fun, if it were not invariably accompanied by a sensation of disaster in progress. As it is, I always feel like a passenger in an ambulance, or possibly a hearse. Anyway, the diagnosis was burned-out bearings and collateral damage, and I might or might not get out of town on Sunday, with or without my shirt. A cab got me back to Hal & Mal’s in time for a couple hours of karaoke.
Karaoke is almost always cringe-inducing, but it helps a lot if the performers don’t take themselves too seriously. A sense of humor and a lot of spirit made the Queens’ karaoke downright enjoyable. Some did regular karaoke, and some had brought their own music to lip-synch or dance to. This included the Decoy Queens’ dance to "Shake A Tail Feather," and the sensory and sensibility overload of "The Boob Fairy Never Came For Me," performed by Nuclia Waste, the most amazing drag queen I’ve ever met; a three-breasted marvel in a riot of day-glo colors. And then there was Shannon. I forget what kind of Queen she is. None of us knew this until the end of the weekend, but Shannon has wrestled with cancer for something like 29 of her 33 years, and rarely lost her will or sense of humor. When she finally did, she happened upon the Book of Love, and credits Jill and the Book with bringing her back. Shannon proceeded to get up on stage, and bump and grind and flail her way through a rap she had composed, hilariously imploring to be made a Sweet Potato Queen. I was in awe of this woman’s vitality even before hearing how close she has come to losing it entirely. And here she was, up on stage being fabulous for our benefit, thanks, she says, to Sweet Potato Power.
I spent a half an hour or more scanning the song list for something I wanted to sing and felt that I could. I settled on "Pretty In Pink" by the Psychedelic Furs. Richard Butler, the Furs’ singer, sounds as if he emerged from the womb with a Marlboro in his face, so it’s hard to really go wrong, but I still think my rendition was crap. I don’t recall anyone congratulating me on my singing, but several people said they really liked my moves. This is quite something, as I have never been much of a dancer. However, with a couple beers and the right song, my hipbones can do some shakin’ that is rather impressive when you consider that they are connected to the thighbones and the backbone of such a very white boy.
Having enjoyed and made an ass of myself, I retired to my king-size hotel bed for a snooze before the Sweet Potato Queens’ Ball. At home I sleep on a futon, the mattress of which has more geographical features than I really like, and is only "full" size. In other words, lumpy, and too small for my 6-foot 4-inch frame, so you can imagine that a huge, level sleeping surface was an almost orgasmic experience for me. It’s a wonder I got out of the thing all weekend. But the SPQ Ball was not to be missed. In bumming a ride to the Ball, I ended up tagging along for dinner with three lovely ladies (whose Queenly affiliation I’ve forgotten), at Schiller’s. Very chi-chi, excellent food, and we each had a Revirginator, the official SPQ cocktail. Thus fortified, we were ready for the Ball at Hal & Mal’s.
A couple constants in the weekend’s doings should be explained. The first is the Sweet Potato Queens themselves, but that’s a lot of explaining which has already been done, so I will just tell you to read "The Sweet Potato Queens’ Book of Love," also known as the BOL, or simply The Book. All will be explained, and you will be wildly entertained. That said, the Boss Queen, the Alpha Female, the Ur-Potato, is Jill Conner Browne. She wrote The Book, thereby inspiring thousands of women (and a few men) around the world to discover their inner Queen and an oft-overlooked ability to have, and to be, a hell of a lot of fun. This ability is made manifest at the Saint Paddy’s Day parade in Jackson, which serves as the Queens’ annual convention. It resembles nothing so much as an unusually pleasant gathering of drag queens, except that 99% of the attendees are "real girls" whom you wouldn’t know from your own mother the rest of the year. In fact, I think I saw your mother there, and she looked marvelous.
My persona (this year, at least) was regal, yet signified humble servitude to Jill and the SPQ’s; the only appropriate attitude for any man, gay, straight, or otherwise. I was the Marquis de Marshmallow. The elaborate Marshmallow crest contains the two casserole-related family mottoes: "Sweet Potatoes Are Happier With Me On Top," and, "You Be Hot, I’ll Be Sweet, Let’s Get Sticky In The Heat." The original Latin is lost in the mists of time. My scepter, shield, and two crowns (a dainty circlet for casual day wear and a large, Imperial Margarine-style rig for State occasions) were bedecked with many precious gems ($2.99 for a pack of fifty at Wal-mart), and festooned with gilded marshmallows, regular and mini.
The other constant is Hal & Mal’s. Mal is Malcolm White, restaurateur extrordinaire, and founder of Mal’s Saint Paddy’s Day Parade. Hal & Mal’s, a fervid hive of Queenly activity, is an old industrial building converted into a really brilliant entertainment facility, encompassing several bars, a restaurant, a raw bar, concert space, and on-site brewery. I had the stout and the amber, and both were excellent. The food is good, the help very friendly and tolerant of the weekend’s endless looniness, and the urinals are painted to look like motorcycles. If I ever go to Jackson in the off season (meaning any time other than St. Paddy’s Day), I may ask Malcolm if I can just stay at Hal & Mal’s.
So, the Ball. Hundreds of people, Queens of This and/or That mostly, but also many Jacksonians who may or may not have been expecting this. Out of the entire crowd, each Queen knows only a few others, if any. I, for instance, know no-one. At times it sounds like orientation at college, except that instead of, "What’s yer major," everyone is saying, "Oooo! What kind of queen are you?" College orientation is much more awkward, though, because everyone is terrified of somehow looking silly, whereas at the Ball silliness is the whole point. So you soon meet more people than you can possibly remember, and everyone has a blast. Many Queens have taken to having cards made, some very clever and elaborate, so they can keep track of each other over the weekend and after. Jill is absolutely run off her feet all weekend (no queen ever worked harder for her subjects), but greets me like a long lost friend, and introduces me to George, the Head Wannabe, resplendent in shiny black pleather tonight, and handsome all the time. What with the early start, the long drive, the car trauma, the hip-shaking and ass-of-myself-making, and general sensory overload (Nuclia has shown up in a new outfit), I walked myself to an early bed in anticipation of big doings on the morrow.
Saturday morning I was up at six o’clock. There was to be a 5-kilometer race (a decidedly un-Queenly event) at eight, and I needed some time to have my coffee and let it work its magic. There was thunder, and torrential rain, but with two hours before the race and seven before the parade, I had hopes for improvement. The predictions were for continued clouds and possible showers, which was far better than continued deluge, anyway. The rain did start to slack off, and stopped just in time for me to jog to the race. It was a small race, a hundred or so people, running the entire fitness range from Hunk to Chunk. 5K is really not my event – it’s too short, and I’m no sprinter. My satisfaction in running has always come from going out and running entirely too far, and I can wear a lot of faster runners down over a longer distance, especially if there are hills involved. 5K is only 3.1 miles, and I need one mile just to get going. And I’m not even in very good shape right now. So you can see I had my excuses all lined up, so I was quite pleased to come in in 27th place, with a time of 20 minutes and three seconds. I just missed winning an age group award, which would have been very cool, but what I really wanted was one of the big green umbrellas they were giving out as door prizes. It looked as if they might come in handy later in the day, but I didn’t win one of those, either. There was consolation, however, in the form of food. In addition to the usual water and Gatorade, there were bananas and heaps of Archway cookies, and then about forty pizzas appeared. I held off at first, never having been the pizza-for-breakfast type. But then I considered my finances in my current three-wheeled state, and decided that free food should be taken full advantage of. Besides, it was drizzling again, and it’s so sad when someone leaves the pie out in the rain. As I walked "home" full of this rather outré breakfast, the rain came down quite hard again, then gave up, and that was the last we saw of it.
Shaved, showered, and dressed in the Marquis’s finest, I was ready for the parade. I hitched a ride with the Sweet ‘n’ Sassy Queens; twelve or so women from three different states, very concerned with getting a DeMille-like precision into their Queenly wave. In return for my ride, I took their group picture over and over, one with each Sweet ‘n’ Sassy’s camera. The concept of multiple prints from a single negative is known to these women, but some urge (which strikes me as peculiarly American) to have "my own" was at work here, and I saw this scene played out innumerable times over the weekend. Even the fact that many Queens have digital cameras, and are therefor capable of sending copies of their pictures to the entire planet as soon as they get home, cut no ice. So each of hundreds of Queens will go home with a camera full of pictures exactly like those of her friends, and I, conspicuously alone and possessing working index fingers, will have taken most of them. It’s hard to mind, though, because we are such a jolly throng, bound together by the wacky energy pervading the atmosphere, and when a gaggle of Speckle-Belly Goose Queens waddles by, one of them kindly snaps the Marquis amidst the SnS Queens with my camera.
The parade, then, on what turned out to be a gloriously sunny, hot, humid afternoon. Not only was I melting in black corduroy pants, an acetate jacket, and an elaborate crown, but all my accoutrements were copiously festooned with real marshmallows, which were softening, and increasingly sticky, and threatening to ooze. But they did not. I have childhood memories of marshmallows which melted when subjected to heat or moisture, but apparently they don’t make that kind anymore. The marshmallow of today, it turns out, is extremely durable and makes a fine accent or accessory for any ensemble. But I’ve sworn off eating them.
To be fair, we must remember that this is Mal’s Saint Paddy’s Day Parade, and by no means solely an SPQ event. There are plenty of other participants and floats, but since I line up with Queens and march with Queens, Queens are what I see. Hundreds of Queens, possibly thousands of Queens. Queens all over the place. Queens up and down State Street, quite literally as far as the eye can see. We are lousy with Queens. We are crawling with queens. Margarita Queens, Proper Prom Queens, Quahog Queens, Georgia Peach Queens, Mermaid Queens, Liquid Lunch Queens, Hot Dog Queens, and Sweetie Pie Queens with a Coleman cooler Ark of the Covenant full of pies. Queens with wings, Queens with whips, Queens of Oral Love (their banner coyly censored to protect the prudish and the under-aged, but their lollipops give them away). And here are the Head Nurses, not coy at all in their crisp uniforms, sassy red stiletto boots, and white stockings with dirty knees. And Nuclia, sporting a pink and yellow hat easily a yard wide, and she’s lucky it’s not windy because the thing would act as a sail, and Nuclia is doing the parade on stilts.
Calming down and returning to the past tense, I’ll tell you that the spectators were, well, a little scary, to be honest. As at Mardi Gras, many parade participants throw trinkets to the crowd, but the crowd seemed to want those trinkets way too much, as if they were receiving something of inestimable value that they would treasure for the rest of their lives. They wanted those plastic beads, they must have, would have those plastic beads, and they demanded those plastic beads. Rudely. I, with shield and scepter to contend with, could not toss trinkets even if I saw the sense in doing so, and quite obviously had none to give. This did not stop the demands. Referring to my gem- and marshmallow-encrusted scepter, at least three people yelled, "Gimme yer fork!" Fork, indeed. Being a Marquis, I simply nodded regally, and graciously waved the scepter, too polite to say what I thought, which was something like, "I’m sorry, but your very appearance implies a prescription for ‘No Sharp Objects’." And what did they think they would do with the thing anyway? It’s a sticky, spray-painted fork, fer crap sake!
After the parade came Mal’s annual Street Dance, the first time I witnessed a significant mingling of the hundreds of Queens with the local gentry, and it was as if this was an everyday occurrence. Probably the Jacksonians are getting used to this annual influx of sequined and bewigged madwomen. Besides, it’s a party – everyone has a good time, and beer and tequila will make anyone look more normal, in the same way that they make them more attractive. Nuclia takes a bit more adjustment. Several people approached to chat and say how much they enjoyed her stilt-walking glamour, but when Nukie asked for a ride to her hotel, they said, "Sorry, it’s out of my way," without even knowing which hotel, or, "Oh, no! Ma husbund would keel me," when said husband was not even there. Underneath Nuclia is a very brave and charming man named David. Underneath a lot of other people is something vile, and rather sad.
Still in my sparkly purple jacket and carrying my crown, scepter, and shield, I walked back to the hotel, and was verbally abused only once on the way. I took a severe shower and a light nap, and headed out to the SPQ PJ’s and Pearls Party at the Crowne Plaza hotel, the primary Queenly hostelry. I was dressed as a simple commoner, having not heard about the party in advance, and owning no PJ’s anyway. But someone kindly donated some pearls, adding that certain "I don’t know what," as the French say. The Decoy Queens were reprising their "Tail Feather" routine, I had a nice long chat with my friend the Cannabis Queen, and a splendid time was being had by all, excepting the hotel staff. They were simply overwhelmed by food orders, drink demands, and an all-pervading, inescapable raucousness. Their professional charm was still in place, but one could sense weeping and gnashing of teeth behind the scenes, and they are probably all now undergoing treatment for Post-Traumatic Stress.
Nuclia and her… consortette? Queen Gefilte appeared, accompanied by a trio of Queens (I forget what of); three loud, wild Southern women in matching floor-length gowns. SuEllen, Wannabe George’s twin sister perhaps, showed up in the mini-est of dresses and hair like terrified cotton candy, and the seven of us went for a late dinner, and then to a (or possibly the) gay club.
Small-town gay clubs are cool, because they don’t specialize. Big cities have the leather bar, the dance club, the twinkie bar, the drag club, the gym-bunny stand and model bar, and it’s impossible to feel at equally at ease in all of them, although you can feel equally alienated. Rarely is there a place for the average person, the person who has not shed his personality and interests, and homogenized and pasteurized himself to blend smoothly into the bland mass. In the small-town gay bar, you find the entire community unfiltered; all the "types" and all those without a type, and they’re having a much better time. The Gay Mecca mentality says that it will be easier to meet people and have fun if you make yourself the same. But then you just get uptight wondering if you’re same enough. And while you probably will meet a lot of people comfortably like yourself, they’re bound to start displaying some sort of individual quirks (also known as a "personality" or "self"), and all that lovely sameness you had in common disappears. Where there is no "norm," there is less pressure to conform, so people are much more likely, later on, to turn out to be the people you met in the first place; that is, themselves.
Plus, in a smaller city or town, the gay bar may be the only place people can be themselves, reversing (at least in this venue) the conventional wisdom regarding big cities as wonderlands of tolerance and small towns as unaccepting of difference. It’s true enough on the street, but step into the small-town gay bar and you’ll find comfortable coexistence. Step into any big city bar and you’ll find fascism. Better décor, perhaps, but fascism all the same.
There was a narrative around here somewhere… Oh, here it is. Nuclia and SuEllen were made much of, the former because she was new, and the latter because she was…Wait, let’s try that again – The former because she was unfamiliar, the latter because she was very… Hmm. Well, you get what I’m trying to say. And there was one whole group (pod? clump? batch?) of Queens who had found their way there, looking for ideas for next year’s costumes, perhaps. A little dancing, a bit of the drag show, and so to bed for all of us. It had been a long day, and the weekend was not yet finished with us.
The final event/ritual of the weekend was the SPQ Brunch at the Crowne Plaza. The hotel staff had made a remarkable recovery, or else had been institutionalized and replaced with fresh help, because the brunch was divine. We entered the banquet room under an archway of sweet potato crates, through curtains of burlap sacking. Inside was a sea of tables, elaborately decorated in Queenly style with little chocolate tiaras and lots of glittery things. (All the Queens love glittery things.) The centerpieces were giant margarita glasses with floating candles in them, and green glass marbles in the bottom. Many people failed to notice, until an escapee flopped onto one of the tables and elicited shrieks from the brunchers, that the centerpieces also contained live goldfish. The food (a sumptuous buffet) was everything a Queen could desire and more than she could require, being far from low-cal. (All the Queens hate low-cal.) Stand-out menu items included chocolate mousse in edible chocolate cups, and "Pig Candy"; bacon cooked with maple syrup, a secret recipe from George’s kitchen, soon to be revealed in the third SPQ book, "The Sweet Potato Queens’ Big-Ass Cookbook and Financial Planner."
Jill read passages from the Big-Ass Book, which made us laugh, and then read us Shannon’s story, which made us cry, and then we laughed again and pretty much kept it up until the conclusion of the brunch. Everyone cleared out of the banquet hall only to mass in the hallway. We all wanted a final word with the Boss Queen as she autographed books, and pictures with Nuclia in her latest outfit (immense fuzzy neon-pink robe, huge plush purse shaped like a goldfish, and four-inch-long pink plastic frying-pan earrings with fried eggs in them). Nuclia was the single most photographed personage of the weekend (although not the most photographed single person), graciously submitting to endless encounters with the Potato paparazzi, who wanted pictures of every new ensemble. She should probably have her retinas checked for flashbulb fatigue. But that’s the price of glamour, and we all felt a bit of it, being so glamorous ourselves.
Nuclia and Queen Gefilte graciously chauffeured me to the Firestone place to ransom Etta back ($350). Nukie was still in full outrageous drag, which I’m sure was something new and interesting for the mechanics. Six hours later I was back in Atlanta, tired, but with all car parts still attached, and still laughing.