Turnabout...

...Dressing as a member of the opposite sex and "turning about" (usually with a drink in hand).
Tonight is Twist's fifteen annual Turnabout party where all employees, male and female, straight and gay, have to "turn" and dress as the opposite sex. Nearby business owners, politicians, and just plain-Jane friends like me are encouraged to participate. Everyone already knows how much my dear husband, Leopoldo, likes me to "dress up", but I am lobbying hard to get out of it this year. Of course, if that battle ax Mamie Stuyvesant-Fish was to partake, I might just have to open the drag locker, the glove box, the pantyhose box, the wig trunk, and--let me think--Oh, yes the woman's shoe closet to counter a threat like that. It would be a sort of Drag-Con 4.

In past years I tried to shy away from showmanship and flashy demonstrations of tranvestitism. The year I went as "Berlin 1945", I came with a story (which was hilariously quoted in the press). In it, I had stayed in the Fuhrers Bunker almost to the end in order to help Martin Borman get into a drag that would pass at checkpoints. Russian tanks were rumbling overhead and I was squeezing him into a third pair of nylons and a girdle which Eva Braun was baking a cake out of sawdust. I had an in with a band of Russian cross dressers who smuggled us to Lake Como, from whence it was just a jump and a skip to the coast and the waiting submarine. Miami was the logical pick; never was a town so in need of a Kosher deli, and--giggling--called it Wolffies. It was just a game.

The next year brought a strong feeling of noblesse oblige: The great struggle of the American woman to gain the right to vote. I had always been intrigued by the support our very own Newporter, Alva Vanderbilt, devoted to the cause. Breaking away from the confines of New York and Newport society, getting rid of her husband when it simply wasn't done, and then throwing her immense fortune for the suffragette movement, Alva did what she did best: Take on the world. She paid the office rents, the bails, the ads, and was regarded by the male members of power who ruled this country then as a heretic. But, note is was the "male" members; their spouses, just as powerful and often wealthier, smiled silently and offered immense support and money. Of course, the men backed down; noone could stand up to Alva for long.

That particular night found me dancing with Twist's go-go boys. Women never have to worry about voting again, so I was just trying to express the fact that a woman of achievement, of strength, of need.... Well, she could enjoy a go-go boy, too, in this modern age.