Introducing Alexandra Billings

She takes a bit of introduction, I suppose.

But first: her comments on the Oscars. Too many gems to count, but one I love is:

Peter Jackson. You’ve got two Oscars, you can now afford a comb.

And this:

To The President of The Academy. We love you. Thank you for the show. For the Love of everything that’s Holy: Stay Home.

I first saw Alexandra Billings when I was living in Chicago and she appeared in a musical spoof of the play “Hamlet”. The show was a massive hit. So massive that it kind of wouldn’t go away … It kept just running and running and running … I saw it about 5 times. My friend Mitchell was in one of the versions, he played Polonius, (spoofed in the show as a completely bombastic blow-hard).

In the original version of the show, Alex played Gertrude. The campiest most hilarious most inappropriate Gertrude you have ever seen. One of her numbers was entitled, “Mamma is a Boy’s Best Friend”, as I recall, which gives you some idea of the sensibility of the show. Gertrude slithering all over her son Hamlet, whispering “Mamma is a Boy’s Best Friend” in his ear.

Also, every time Hamlet started his “To be or not to be” soliloquy, he would be interrupted.

He would take his position, center stage, hold up his hand in a Master Thespus manner, clear his throat, and say, “To be or not to b—-”

Knock on the door.

This would happen 3 or 4 times. Camp-humor. Hilarious.

I remember going to see it a couple of times, because one of my favorite old flames of ALL TIME (you got that?? I must shout it: OF ALL TIME) played Claudius to her Gertrude. His Claudius was a simpering conniving soulless moron without a brain in his head, completely dominated by his sexed-up wife.

(Ann Marie: Member the evening we went to see Hamlet and I sent a gourd backstage to the old flame? Why couldn’t I just have bought him a bouquet like a normal person? Why a gourd? I suppose it’s better than a photograph of the back of my eyeball – but STILL!)

The show was only an hour long, and I remember literally laughing, out loud, from beginning to end.

Alex was a wonder. She was ferocious about getting laughs. Not in a desperate way … although perhaps there was some desperation. Having known a couple of wonderful comedians, they have a NEED to make you laugh. And sometimes you don’t laugh, and sometimes you do, but their need to make you laugh exists, regardless. Desperation for laughs without a comedic GIFT is terrible, and makes an audience squirm. But Alex was like a comedy carpet, unfurling out endlessly. You could not believe how consistently hilarious she was. She decided WHERE she would get a laugh, and without seeming to break a sweat, she would succeed.

I don’t really know Alex that well, although she and my dear friend Mitchell are very very good friends.

I have met Alex a couple of times … and she seems so cool and so fabulous that I admit, I feel like a stuttering junior high school kid looking up at one of the cool seniors. I would shake her hand, grinning like Forrest Gump, grinning just as wide as Forrest and just as vacantly.

Will Alex think I’m cool? What if I’m not funny when I talk to Alex?

She has gone on to create a highly successful cabaret career for herself – although I probably shouldn’t even label it in such a limited way. She’s written a one-woman show, she’s toured with it – she’s worked at Steppenwolf, she’s won a Joseph Jefferson Award (a very big deal in Chicago) – Her resume goes on for days.

I had met Alex maybe once or twice, the couple of times I had gone to see MY FAVORITE OLD FLAME EVER in Hamlet – The Musical. I had heard a lot about her, because of Mitchell’s growing friendship with her. I knew she was tough as nails, I knew she was a happily married transgendered female, and I knew that she was talented as all hell. Everyone wanted to work with Alex.

But basically, our contact was, “Sheila, this is Alex” “Alex, this is Sheila.”

A month or so after September 11, I had a dream – my first dream in ages. Certainly my first dream since September 11. I only remember it because I never have dreams anymore, and also – I associate the dream with the terror, panic, and chaos of the months following that horrible day.

In the dream, there was a nuclear holocaust, which pretty much only affected New Jersey and Manhattan. It was like that movie The Day After. You just knew: It’s over. I am going to die. But the bomb had already been dropped – and the sky was a heavy crayon-black. You knew you could not escape, but everyone was trying to anyway.

Everyone was trying to get to the ocean, everyone in Manhattan and in Jersey were trying to get onto the New Jersey turnpike, towards the Atlantic. But there were too many cars. It was like the roads were backed up from Cape May to lower Manhattan. You could not get out. Literally.

There was panic. People were running, and screaming, with their hair on fire, their clothes falling off. The bomb had already been dropped, that blackness in the sky was the fallout, and we were trapped – we could not get out.

I was alone in the dream. I was climbing down the cliffs from Jersey Heights down into Hoboken, looking at the blackened smoking skyline of Manhattan and seeing the roads below me, filled with cars, stalled cars as far as the eye could see.

And suddenly – climbing down the cliff with me – was Alex, who was hugely pregnant in my dream. Maybe 8 or 9 months along.

She was not panicked. Not at all. She knew what to do, she took me in hand, she knew a way out. She was on some other plane of thought, entirely.

“We’re gonna get to the ocean,” she said, as she climbed down the cliff, huge belly in front of her, moving gracefully and certainly. “I know the way.”

I do not know why Alex showed up in my dream during that crazy time, I do not know why I would dream about her when I have had so little contact with her … but for some reason, in my mind, and perhaps it is because of how caring and wonderful she has been to my friend Mitchell, she would be that person. That person who would know the way out of the nuclear fallout. Carrying new life with her.

I have recently discovered that Alexandra Billings loves my little blog over here, and reads me all the time. When I found that out, again I felt like the goof-ball junior high school student grinning gawkily up at the glamorous (transgendered) senior.

In her online journal, she has a very pointed entry on one aspect of gay marriage, an aspect I had not considered before, because, although I am for gay marriage, I am not gay – and so there are subtleties of the issue I miss.

Alex addresses the people racing to San Francisco to get married:

…we began talking about a few same sex couples who are flying to San Fran and marrying legally after being only friends. Their marriage is a sham. They’re not in love, they never were in love and they have no plans to settle down. They’re doing it for “The Cause.”…

How in the world are we to get anywhere if people begin making a mockery of marriage NOW?! I just have this vision of bubble headed gay people running willy nilly down the street waving marriage certificates in straight people’s faces and cackling like Joan Crawford at a cocktail party. Although however amusing that may be, I have to say, this isn’t a game. What those people are doing is irresponsible and stereotypical. Don’t feed the public’s idea of what Gay Marriage would be, ADD to it.

“Bubble headed gay people running willy nilly down the street waving marriage certificates in straight people’s faces and cackling like Joan Crawford at a cocktail party.”

Welcome to the blogroll, Alex.