By Richard Hack
Photo: The showgirls of Lips: (top row) Twat, Velvet, Alexis, April, Chocolatta, Jennifer
(middle row) Nicolette, Diva, Misty, (bottom row) Nicole, Charlize, Deja, and Franchesque.
To enter the queendom of Lips, the restaurant, nightclub and show palace, is to enter a place that lavishes enchantment right along with its signature knock-you-on your-ass frozen cosmos. It’s not just the chandeliers shaped like stiletto pumps or the gauzy drapes in fuchsias and limes and the occasional tangerine. Nor is it the stage no larger than a postage stamp decked out with more tinsel than the Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center. It’s not even the food, though the menu, heavy on large portions and sauced dishes, is quite good.
No. This queendom is special because of its royalty – the multi-talented assortment of drag stars and their transsexual equivalents who perform Tuesday through Sunday in an ever-changing kaleidoscope of feathers, sequins, push-up bras, and wigs the size of Cincinnati. With names like Velvet, Deja, Franchesque, Charlize, Nicole, April, Chocolatta, Jennifer, Charity, Martina and Champagne, they sweep, wiggle, and saunter their way through numbers that are bawdy, brazen, and cosmically comic mixing generations, genders and polite bodily movements in a ratatouille of wit and wisdom, all girdled in bustiers.
This mélange of crowns, tiaras and rhinestone excess is the responsibility of Yvonne Lamé – the Southern Belle who created the concept over thirteen years ago in New York, where all things are apparently possible, opening the first Lips in Greenwich Village.
Several years later, an off-spring sprouted like a wild orchid in San Diego, to equal critical acclaim. Four years ago next month, Lips Fort Lauderdale was born.
In a city where drag is as common as seashells, the unique collection of talent at Lips brought gays, straights, and other unidentified lifestyles and whipped them into a fricassee of excitement, themed to various nights of the week. Each has a hostess who reigns over their evening, shedding joy like confetti on New Year’s Eve. And it is to these four super-drags, if you will, that we pay homage with a curtsey and bow. After all, royalty they are and royalty they shall always be.
DIVA
The Queen Bee of the bunch reigning supreme on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday evenings is the blonde and bejeweled Diva – no last name necessary.
“I started out as a window dresser at Marshall Field’s in Chicago in the 80s,” Diva remembers. “It was really the dream job for a budding drag queen, having access to every department in this enormous department store that had a little of everything. The drag part came as the result of a dare – when friends coaxed me into entering a talent contest at a Chicago bar called Off Broadway. It wasn’t a drag talent contest per se, but I dolled up in full ensemble, and ended up winning the show!
“I’ve never been good at reading the fine print, but as it turned out, in order to collect my $100 prize money, I had to make a second appearance at the place the following week. For some reason, the hostess for the evening was a no-show. The club’s owner asked me to fill in, and I had such a good time, I stayed on for the next two years – hosting the event every Monday night!
“When Marshall Field’s got bought out by Macy’s, I got transferred to Florida to do the windows in a new store being built at Broward Mall in Plantation, and ended up supplementing my income by doing drag at the old Boardwalk in North Miami Beach. At the time, I never thought of it as a career. That happened the moment I realized that I was earning more money doing drag on the weekends than I was Monday-Friday at my day job,” Diva reveals.
There were pit stops in Miami, Opa-Locka, and Hialeah, before Diva became a Fort Lauderdale fixture at the original Trannie Shack show at Elements, housed in the building where the current Scandals bar is located.
“The owners of Lips saw me at Elements, offered me a job at their club—then under construction and I’ve been working the room ever since.”
Friday and Saturday nights, birthday and bachelorette parties abound with audiences that get so enthusiastic that the word “wild” becomes a p.s. for the night. A third show on Saturday night called “Taboo” is Diva’s favorite since it allows the girls to reveal a bit more skin and push the envelope to just this side of naughty.
“During the week, we’re the Disney of Drag,” says Diva. “The late show on Saturday night is where we get sexual. We even have a different menu.” And the way she says it, you just know Diva is licking her lips.
MISTY EYEZ
The always upbeat Misty Eyez is a big woman with a big story. She was raised to be a pastor and graduated from Oklahoma’s Oral Roberts University. But it wasn’t the pulpit that turned out to be her eventual calling. All that changed on one fateful Halloween, when Misty dressed in drag to celebrate the holiday.
“Anything is possible on Halloween, and since I was struggling to come out of the closet while living with my very conservative Christian family, I dressed up as this gorgeous woman for a contest, which I was absolutely convinced I would win. Looking back at the pictures now, I was a hideous mess, but at the time I thought I looked gorgeous. While I didn’t win, it did make me more comfortable with myself and my sexuality, and eventually I just began to dress up more… and well, one thing led to another,” she says, fluttering lashes that seem poised to fly right off of her eyelids and across the room.
“My drag career began in 2003 at a bar called Trixies in Hollywood, but it wasn’t until two years later, when I moved to Elements, that my drag career really exploded. It’s funny, ‘cause I’m really very sweet,” she says, flashing a grin as sly as it is witty. “They called me the South Florida Sweetheart. I’m just nice by nature,” she says.
Hard to believe that this is the woman chosen to host Lips’ Wednesday night Bitchy Bingo, where cattiness is queen right along with
Misty Eyez. “It’s really funny,” she says, “but sometimes I’m half-way through the show and I have to remind myself to be nastier. It really doesn’t come naturally to me. I’m all about peace and harmony.”
It’s easy to feel the love from this drag star whose chosen career has caused a seeming unmendable rift with her family. “Oh, they think of me as a backsliding homosexual who’s going to burn in hell. Now, I still think of myself as a good Christian. Yet, they won’t even consider talking to me until I return to Jesus.”
And that’s not the only struggle that keeps Misty Eyez busy, separating the personas while hoping to heal what she sees as segregation within the gay and lesbian community itself. “Here we all are fighting for equality, and we can’t get along among ourselves. Gays don’t talk to lesbians who don’t talk to trannies. The circuit boys don’t talk to the bears who don’t talk to the twinks.
The leather queens don’t talk to anyone. We need to respect ourselves, before we can expect the rest of the world to respect who we are. I will never give up my fight to bring us all together. Never,” she says. And she means it.
NICOLETTE
Nicolette is a tiny bundle of talent known for her ability to transform into famous superstars, Reba McEntire among them. Hosting Lips on Thursday nights’ Dinner with the Divas, Nicolette rotates the spotlight between Barbra, Judy, Lisa, Tina, and Marilyn among
others.
“Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined doing drag for a living,” she says. “The first time I tried it, I was 22-years-old in Monroe, Louisiana, and entered a drag contest in a club called Hot Shots. I had never seen a drag show, so needless to say, I didn’t win. However,” she pauses, hoisting a well-manicured finger into the air, “two months later, I returned with a new look, a new song, and a new attitude about the whole business. This time, I won, I’m happy to say.”
At the time, the bar didn’t have a regular drag night, but the events proved so popular that they turned their Tuesday nights into an all-drag event with Nicolette getting her first regular paid engagement.
“I worked there for several years before moving on to Nashville, where I worked for several more years. Then about 10 years ago, I moved to Florida and began working at the old Madame’s Restaurant & Cabaret in Sunny Isles with Franchesque and Nicole. When Lips opened, we all moved here, and each of us developed our own celebrity impressions.”
Diana Ross, Cher, Madonna, Bette Midler – all get their moments on stage most Thursday nights as the lookalikes threaten to outdo the originals with costumes and creativity.
Nicolette returns on Sunday afternoons for Gospel Brunch, leading the always-irreverent Sisters of Sequins to raise their voices in joyful song. It’s the only standing ovation where the audience is on its knees.
“My mother is so supportive of what I do,” Nicolette smiles in appreciation. “My twelve-year-old sister too,” she adds. “My father… well, not so much. He knows what I do, and once he saw me on television. Never said whether he liked it, but… maybe some day,” she says still smiling. Talent has a way of making the impossible happen.
TWAT LaROUGE
Tuesday nights at Lips is Dragalicious, the new game show evening when strangers become the best of friends in impromptu contests that involve gags, props, and prizes galore. The game show night is the creation of Twat LaRouge, and it’s only fitting that this multi-talented costume and jewelry designer-turned-showgirl should keep the fun rolling with a $16.95 prix fixe menu and $5.00 frozen cosmos.
“I got dressed in drag for the very first time in 1999 in Kansas City Missouri, at a club called Cabaret,” she says. I was getting my BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and created this character for my senior thesis. She was a mother figure, with no breasts, no hips, a flattened face – downtrodden and emotionally abused by her family.
“During the show, the woman makes a trip to a store and comes out transformed! She went from brunette to blonde, had a huge head, huge eyes, and these giant hips that have since become my signature look. It was like nothing anyone had ever seen… and it’s still unique today,” Twat says.
The following year, on January 2, 2000, Twat, now a regular at the Cabaret, met a kindergarten teacher named Johnny, a graduate of Marymount Manhattan College, a theater and dance school in New York City. It was one of those love-at-first-sight kind of things, and the pair have been together ever since. (They were officially married a few years back.)
Since Johnny moonlighted as an actor in an underground drag show called Late Night Theater, it took only a small leap of networking before Twat was designing their costumes and sets. And when both of these lovebirds lost their jobs unexpectedly, a leap of faith (and Twat’s ailing step-mother) brought the pair to South Florida where fame (and Lips) awaited.
Both Twat and her Johnny, now working in drag as Chocolatta, were hired by Her Majesty Yvonne. And the rest, as they say, is history. The pair have this remarkable ability to finish each other’s sentences. Such is the stuff of true love. And they can often been seen together on stage in Lips.
For Dragalicious, while Twat runs the show, Game Show Johnny is out of drag and by her side. It’s a one-two punch not to be missed.
“We’re together for the long haul,” says Twat, who Chocolatta happily announces is the “creative one.” “We’ve had so many great times together it more than makes up for the occasional bitchy drag queen we’ve come across.
“We’ve had cigarette holes burned in our costumes, and drinks poured into our suitcases,” says Chocolatta. “But for the most part, drag queens are sweet. That’s how we always try to be, welcoming the scared newcomers and extending a helping hand.”
But that’s hardly the only thing that sets this team apart. “We sew all our own costumes, make our own jewelry, mix our own music,”says Twat. “Nothing in our acts are ever duplicated anywhere. We always give a positive, embracing, creative show.”
As a way of giving back, Twat and Chocolatta volunteer at Drag It Out, a not-for-profit organization that teaches drag to both men and women. “From ages 19 to over 50, they just want to have fun.” Sign us up for some of that.
Dinner with the Divas A Special Benefit for Neighbors4Neighbors
The Ladies of Lips bring their special divas to life in support of Neighbors4Neighbors to help South Florida children and families in need. Hosted by Diva and CBS4 News Anchor George Estevez, the evening showcases songs by Madonna, Cher, Diana Ross, Tina Turner and illusions newly created for the show. Michael Goodman and Jen Klaassens co-chair the event, Wednesday, November 9, starting a 6 p.m. with a VIP reception. Dinner and show follow at 7 p.m. Tickets are $50 per person. VIP tickets are $75, including a champagne reception and premium seating. To purchase tickets, call 305-597-4404 or www.neighbors4neighbors.org.
Lips is located at 1421 E Oakland Park Blvd. in Oakland Park, FL. For information or reservations, please call 954-567-0987.
