The Diva Rules Page 8
Anyway, I went to this fancy Upper East Side doctor, who had done my stripper friend Jennie’s boobs, which were high and tight, and also Shirley Bassey’s face-lift, which, gawd, was even higher and tighter. I told him I wanted my As turned into Ds, and after marking my chest with a Sharpie, he put me under, playing “Goldfinger,” a nod to the name of Jennie’s strip club (and later mine). You’ve gotta love a plastic surgeon with a sense of humor. Or, you know, not.
When I woke up and looked at my expensive new rack, I was so f*cking pissed off. “Irate” doesn’t begin to describe the fury I felt. I wanted more than anything to have boobs like Pamela Anderson’s, but rather than abide by my wishes, this asshole gave me 110cc saline implants. I paid eleven grand to become barely a B-cup. “Are you f*cking kidding me?” I yelled, looking in the mirror, still hazy under the anesthesia.
“Calm down,” he said. “You’re only ninety-eight pounds. You just don’t have enough skin to stretch over anything larger.”
“This is not what I wanted,” I said, before breaking down into angry tears. “I never wanted to look natural. Natural is not my thing, nor does it interest me!”
Later, when Seduction broke up, I needed money to support myself, and I thought that stripping was the only way I could earn it. I also knew that no man without a magnifying glass was going to pay any cash to see my tiny silicone ta-tas, so I decided to make another investment in my future. A second boob job would cost me another five digits, but if I was as successful as Jennie, I figured I’d earn that back in literally just a couple of weeks at Goldfingers. So, like an asshole, I went back to the same doctor who’d given me my first set. I was basically just so shit-scared of anesthesia, and since I’d lived through my first surgery with him, I thought he was, if not the smartest choice, then at least perhaps the safest one. Right before I went under, I sat up on the operating table, my hair in one of those surgical poofs, and threatened him: “If I wake up and my tits are not the size of my head, you are going to pay the ultimate price.” He laughed and told me to think happy thoughts. I dreamed of watermelons and halter tops.
When I eventually came to, I was so nauseated from the anesthesia that I could hardly focus. My mom was with me, and seeing the color, or lack thereof, in my face, she said, “This is it, Michelle. You’re never doing this again.” The doctor had given me a C-cup, one barely noticeable size up from the Bs he’d given me before, and when I saw them, I started crying and practically didn’t stop until my chest was healed.
I was fully drained, emotionally and financially, which only made me more determined to nail my audition at Goldfingers. Jennie came with me, and as we made our way through the snarl of midtown traffic in my Pathfinder, I tried to mentally prepare myself to climb on that sweat-streaked stage and take all of my clothes off for any guy who’d give me a twenty. Or fiver. I’d already danced in clubs for years wearing next to nothing, and I once did a fashion show in a sheer top with no bra. Could stripping really be that much different?
In the car, as we were listening to “Pour Some Sugar on Me” by Def Leppard, Jennie started prepping me for the audition. John, the general manager of Goldfingers, would choose a song, and when it started playing, I was expected to hop onstage, take my clothes off, and dance, spin, twirl, and stick my tits and ass in his face, as if he were a paying customer.
“If you turn him on, he’ll hire you,” she said.
And right there, in the middle of the Queens Midtown Tunnel, is when I decided that I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t be a stripper, and not because I had any moral qualms about it. I have a shitload of respect for those women—single moms, most of them—for doing whatever they had to do to turn it out night after night to support themselves and their kids. But me? I knew I wouldn’t be able to check out that way. I’m way too much of a clown to get on stage naked and gyrate to “Pour Some Sugar on Me” with a straight face, and I knew if that was what was expected of me, there was no way I would ever make a dime. Being a serious, sexy stripper was not my truth. This may surprise you, but my wits, not my tits, are my greatest strength.
You know how the rest of this story goes. When we got to Goldfingers, Jennie introduced me to the hot-oil wrestling guy instead, and since wagging my tongue came far more naturally to me than wagging my tail, I became an emcee rather than a stripper, which ultimately led me to my decades-long and successful career in radio.
My truth became crystal clear to me in the Queens–Midtown Tunnel. I had tried to convince myself I was someone else, someone who’d take her clothes off for cash, but in that dark under-the-river passageway, a light clicked on for me: I became even more certain of who I was. I was going to use my voice, not my body, to take me where I wanted to go. That’s what I needed to feel happy and authentic, not a handful of crumpled fives in my bra.
THE
HAD I GOTTEN UP ON THAT STAGE AT GOLD-FINGERS THAT DAY, I probably would’ve gotten the job, and maybe I would’ve even made bank doing it. But I know it would’ve cost me my soul, and even for a thousand dollars a night I could never have bought it back. Listen to your gut. Find and respect your own boundaries. Do what feels right to you, not what feels right to someone else. And always, always live your truth. That is the only way you’ll ever be happy.
Maybe, right now, you don’t know what your truth is either. That’s OK, because I promise you that one day it will become apparent to you, and when it does, you have a responsibility to yourself to listen to it. So many of us swallow our truths to make someone else happy. We do things to please other people, rather than ourselves, and that’s dangerous for a diva. Do that, and you’ll become part of someone else’s chorus, rather than the lead in your own musical. In drag and in life, you must first know who you are in order to know where you need to go.
By the way, I had my tits done for a third time in 2002. I’d just finished breastfeeding my youngest daughter when I noticed one was looking a little floppy. So after extensive research, I went to a new doctor in LA, Dr. Robert Rey, aka Dr. 90210, and sure enough, I had a slow leak in one of my implants. I had to have surgery to fix them anyway, so before I went under, I asked the doctor to right the wrong from so many years before, and he finally did. Now, I have 550cc implants, which make me a respectable 36D. I love them. They’re fun. But, you know what? If I could go back and give my nineteen-year-old self some advice, I’d tell her boobs do not make a woman. But they do make a great fashion accessory (especially when you pad them with cutlets, and point those babies so far north they’ll guide Mary and Joseph to the manger).
rule no. 15:
IF THERE’S A CROWD, WORK IT.
Whether you’re in a cubicle or in a club, onstage or on television, every diva has to know how to work a crowd. Any crowd. No matter how big or small, drunk or sober, straight or gay, flat or fluffy. Why? Well, it’s sure as hell not to massage your own ego. It’s because you never know who is in that crowd or what they will one day mean to you. Your job is to command everyone’s attention the moment you walk into a room and make every one of them feel special. If you can do that, you’ll be able to accomplish anything you set your mind to.
I’ve worked all kinds of rooms in my life: teen clubs, dance clubs, arenas, even dank, basement-level, hot-oil wrestling rings. In each of those places I learned how to connect with my audience, and that skill has always served me well. In fact, it’s what’s led me to and through my illustrious seventeen-year career in radio—and even more important, it’s what led me to my best friend, RuPaul. This is the story of how we came together. (Professionally speaking, you perv.)
It was February 1996. Seduction was over. S.O.U.L. S.Y.S.T.E.M. was over. My engagement to my roller-skating fiancé, Michael, was over. I felt like I was in danger of being over, but you know I wasn’t about to go down without a fight. I’d moved back to the Upper West Side—Seventieth and Broadway—and I was living with my gorgeous stripper friend Debbie, who’d recently left Goldfingers to go work at this “classy” new strip club called S
cores. Howard Stern never raved about Goldfingers on the radio, but every day he talked about Scores. As a result, Debbie was making five grand a night, and even though I couldn’t will myself to take my clothes off at that club in Queens, stripping was once again looking like a promising career choice for me.
Just as I was about to swing my titties around the stripper pole of life, Laura, my best friend from high school (who, incidentally, is still my best friend today), called me up. “Have you heard this new radio station WKTU?” she said. “They’re playing all of our songs. ALL OF THEM!” Now, I’ve been obsessed with listening to the radio since I was a kid. Every Saturday, I’d tune into Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 Countdown and write down every single song on the list in order in my notebook as they played on the air. If I missed one, I’d listen to the entire show again when it was rebroad-cast later that night. So, when I hung up the phone with Laura, I tuned my radio to 103.5-WKTU, and started listening—and then I kept listening for hours. It was like I’d fallen in love all over again, and though I’d never been a DJ, all I could think about was how I could get on that station and finally make my childhood obsession with radio turn into a career.
After twenty-four straight hours of listening to Exposé, Lil’ Suzy, and George Lamond, I had a revelation. Working at WKTU was my destiny. Of course, the station owners didn’t know that yet, but I did. So, I worked every connection I could think of from my Seduction days, just to get a shot at an audition. I spent the next week, first looking up and then calling every DJ who’d ever interviewed me just to ask if they happened to have any contacts at this new station. No one did. I dialed dead end after dead end after dead end. Shit.
Then one morning, my roommate, Debbie came home from her shift at the club. It was ten a.m., and I was sulking on the couch. “Hey, so you know that radio station you want to be on?” she said, like it was no big deal. “I think my manager at Scores is going to work there. I’ll check for you tonight.” Her boss, it turns out, was “Goumba Johnny” Sialiano, who had just gotten himself hired to write for DJ Sean “Hollywood” Hamilton. I basically freaked when she told me that, and when she saw how excited I was, she went to work that night and scored me a meeting with Hollywood and Goumba at the club the next night.
If you don’t already know this about me, then you should know this now: I’m a closer. I’m the f*cking Mariano Rivera of interviews. (He’s a Yankee pitcher, nay, THE Yankee pitcher, if you don’t know him. That’s a baseball team, not a candle, queen.) If I can just get the chance to get in the game, I will always bring home a win. And Debbie is the one who got me in the radio game. Who would’ve ever thought I would’ve gotten my big break in radio from a stripper? Fine, maybe you would’ve, but I didn’t. And that’s, by the way, why you work every crowd and never look down your overcontoured Magnolia Crawford nose at anyone. Everyone can help you. Every day, I thank my lucky stars for Debbie, her giant knockers, and her generosity.
As you may have guessed, after a night of gabbing with Goumba and Hollywood at Scores, they hired me in my first-ever paid radio gig: their Girl on the Street. I spent the next week in the most random places, including the Tick Tock Diner on Route 3 in Clifton, New Jersey, and the parking lot of a bar on Eighty-sixth Street in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, handing out WKTU T-shirts and feeling amazing because: a) I was paying my radio dues, and b) even though I already knew I was, they thought I was good enough to be on the air with them! Talking to strangers with a microphone in my hand and getting them excited felt so natural to me, because it’s what I’d done at Gold-fingers for so long. I was so good at it that the following week, the station asked me to come into the studio and do the traffic reports. I had no idea what I was doing with that, but somehow I managed to deliver the copy but also insert jokes (“car-be-que” instead of a car fire, and other winners like that) and I stayed in that sweet spot, until they shifted me yet again. This time, they paired me with this crazy egomaniac named “Magic” Matt Alan. I am pretty sure he did not want me as his sidekick, but the station managers did, so he was forced to tolerate me. Tolerate me he did: We ended up getting along quite well, and he told me he thought I had talent. He also did a show about cigars on AM radio and brought me on to cohost a day with him on there too. See? I told you I can work any room. I mean, WTF do I know about friggin’ cigars?!
When I say you’ve got to know how to work any crowd to be successful, that also includes a crowd of one. Sometimes, if you pretend to like someone long enough, you find that you start to find things to really like about them, even if they’re an egomaniac like Magic Matt. But here’s the real T on working an egomaniac: Stoop down. Pretend you think you’re way beneath them. Act incredibly interested in every word that passes their lips, even if you don’t give a f*ck what they’re saying. Eventually they’ll rely on you to feed their ego. They’ll find themself needing your praise, and when you reach that point—boom!—you’ll be the one with all the power. (That’s called “topping from below.” And that’s not about baseball. But you already know that, queen.)
By the end of that week. Magic and I were LIKE BUTTAH. But the auditions weren’t over. The next week they were bringing in a NYC radio heavy hitter named “Broadway” Bill Lee. Now, Bill was a one-man show. He was known for rhyming while deejaying, and he was a ball of energy. He wasn’t interested in having me as his sidekick. He wanted another girl, Lisa Taylor, an experienced radio girl who was on the station when it played country music. I was gutted. I was doing so well that I didn’t want to lose momentum, but I had no choice but to sit back and let her audition for my role for the next week. I sat back and listened with a discriminatory ear, critiquing every word that came out of her mouth and interjecting my own punch lines from my apartment. Guess what? The bosses called me up again once his audition week was up. Fashion Week was coming, and they wanted to try me with yet a different partner, one who already had a show on VH1. His name was—you guessed it—RuPaul.
I hadn’t seen Ru at all since 1992, when we were both performing at a radio expo in New York. I was there to sing “It’s Gonna Be a Lovely Day,” and he’d just blown the eff up with “Supermodel.” I remember the moment distinctly. I’d just walked into the green room in my full-lace bodysuit with nothing but a bra and G-string on underneath when I spotted him across the way. I’d watched Ru in the clubs for years, but I’d always admired him from afar. We were acquaintances, not friends, so I felt a little shy. Still, I steeled my nerves and approached him: “Hey, I don’t know if you remember me or not,” and he takes one look at me and goes, “Bitch, stop right there. I used to watch your little blond ass bop all around at the Red Zone. I kept my eye on you for years! You’re a f*cking superstar!” He actually said that shit to me. I was like, “Oh my God! Really? Go on!”
When they put us together for Fashion Week in 1996, I was the first to arrive at WKTU’s studios in Jersey City. I had no idea what he thought of being—surprise!—paired with yours truly, and I remember just sitting there, waiting for Ru to show up. When he walked in and saw my familiar visage, a big grin spread across his face. He threw open his arms for a hug, and as he squeezed me hello, he said, “Of course, it’s you. Of course, you’re the one sitting right here. You have more f*cking lives in you than anyone I know.”
That week on the radio, we had more fun together than any two humans should ever be allowed. They’d paired us with a New York radio legend, “Fast Freddie” Colon, whom I used to listen to when I was a kid. He was our straight man, and they let us be complete animals. To this day, when I look back on that first week together, I think (and I know Ru would agree) that it was the best time of our lives. We were so damn good together. In fact, we did so well together that we beat Howard Stern for the top ratings spot that month, and that, my friends, is HUGE.
And that was it. WKTU made us the permanent cohosts of the coveted morning-drive slot. And after that, Ru brought me in as his sidekick on his VH1 show, The RuPaul Show, where I played Ed McMahon to his Johnny Carson, on
ly he let me shine way more than Johnny ever let Ed. My favorite part of the show was when he let me open with a segment we called “Mission Visage,” which was a Candid Camera–style hidden-camera prank, where I’d get to punk an unsuspecting person. To this day, Ru and I still talk about that show. That conversation usually ends with him saying, “Bitch, we are not done with that.” Consider yourself warned.
I felt like I had found my true home behind the microphone. So, even after Ru left radio to move to LA and focus on acting and other ventures, I stayed on the air in New York, then Los Angeles, then New York again, then West Palm Beach, and finally Miami—for a total of seventeen straight years. I’ve lived my whole life on the radio. I got married on the radio. I gave birth to my first daughter on the air. Literally. I had a C-section, and I was holding a microphone before and immediately after my sweet baby girl arrived. There’s a scene in Madonna’s Truth or Dare in which Warren Beatty grumbles, “She doesn’t want to live off camera, much less talk. There’s nothing to say off camera. Why would you say something if it’s off camera? What point is there existing?” I live my life, out loud, with a microphone in my hand, and I’ve always shared everything with my listeners. Why? Because I respect them too much not to. That, and I’m an idiot. But, I feel like if they’re getting up every day, tuning in, and making me a part of their lives, I want them to be a part of my life too.