KELLY MCMANUS, North Shore Outlook, May 7, 2009
In her lucite pumps, Conni Smudge is seven feet tall, a 220-pound pillar of W-O-M-A-N. She spells it out like that, too, with a flick of the hips, “Doubleyew-ohhh, Em, Ay, En. Woooooo-man.”
Her dress, a billowing blue chiffon number, catches the afternoon breeze through the window.
“Daytime drag is always a bit scary,” the drag queen says, considering herself in the mirror.
She is wig-less, and arches one carefully-drawn eyebrow for effect. “The nighttime hides a multitude of sins.”
Daylight is one challenge, social frost is another. Whether hosting a ladies’ soiree for symphony supporters or MCing a biker’s night in Nanaimo, Conni Smudge sometimes has to blast through the deep freeze to help kickstart a party. As an MC, she sings or tells jokes, compliments people’s shoes — whatever works.
“They (clients) hire us (queens) out to walk around and be glamorous and fabulous … some people might be a bit nervous about it at first,” she pats more glitter over her brows. “It’s like, I know I’m a man in a dress. Let’s get over it. Tell me how fabulous I look.”
Chris Bolton grew up in North Vancouver, whereas Conni, his stage persona, had her start in little dives in and around Nanaimo, Comox and Port Alberni. Her first show, back in the early 1990s, was choreographed to perhaps one of the most ubiquitous of drag anthems, Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive.”
In one of Smudge’s first weekly gigs at a biker-frequented establishment on the island, management put up chainlink fencing around the dance floor – where she and a few of her fellow queens did their lip sync shows, baring chest hair through their faux fur get-ups – just in case unenlightened patrons threw beer bottles.
A few years later, some connected guys from Nanaimo’s bar scene arranged for Smudge to MC a biker party at an undisclosed location on the island.
With two exotic dancers, one known as Celica, Smudge boarded a float plane in Coal Harbour one windy afternoon, her sequined dress whipping at her legs. She agreed to be blindfolded. A couple hours later she removed that blindfold to peer from backstage into a room packed with about 150 bikers.
“I was really scared… they were hooting and hollering,” she remembers.
“Well, gentleman, the ladies have arrived,” shouted the organizer, and Smudge steamrolled onstage, guns blazing.
“I walked in first and said, how the f*** are ya? And they were like, what the hell?”
It was a tough crowd: huge guys, some with huge bellies drooping past their seats towards the floor. Guys with scars and scraggly beards and tattoos. Some muttered, “fag.”
In the front row, one of them leered at her, arms crossed.
“I walked up and said, listen pal, I’m more of a man than you’ll ever be and I’m more of a woman than you’ll ever get.” Soon after the men were lining up for polaroids with Smudge. When she MCed for that crowd again, she made a thousand bucks in one night just charging for snapshots.
“I started out doing drag because I wanted to change people’s opinions,” she explains: “The name is ‘Smudge’ because I wanted to smudge the lines between heterosexual and homosexual. We’re all just people.”
It’s the same reason Smudge tears off her wig after every Sunday afternoon show at The Oasis on Davie Street. “I think it shows the transformation. It ruins the illusion,” Bolton explains.
Instead of morphing completely from one to the other, he sees a continuum, “the whole journey” of Chris and Conni.
Chris Bolton was teased sometimes mercilessly by kids at Ridgeway elementary, an experience he shared with a sociology class at Malaspina University as an adult. “It was cathartic.”
He was a shy kid who went on an exchange to Germany in his teens and came back full of confidence and exuberance. He gravitates to service or sales jobs because they allow him to work with people and he loves to tell a good joke. His North Van home holds witticisms like a pillow that reads “It’s not easy being queen.”
“Connie is just me but ten times more,” Bolton explains in the blue chiffon and lucite pumps get-up, his voice beginning to fill the kitchen like some smokey clandestine watering hole, or a “Love Boat” party bus heading off into the night for a Vancouver Island pub crawl, one of his all time favorite gigs.
His gestures tumble forth with increasing gusto as he grabs a wig. Choices range between a purple afro, a Liza Minelli-like mop, and the blond Streisand bob that makes the cut.
“Oh! Just gorgeous!” Smudge booms. “Now just let me powder my chest.”
A few years back, Conni Smudge committed to multiple evening engagements in Vancouver’s West End. Her route between gigs took her, heels and all, past some downtown alleyways, a bit dark, away from the rainbow flags of Davie. Bolton’s mother worried a drag queen might run into trouble crossing one of those alleys.
Smudge shudders for a second when she mentions the more recent West End “fag bashings.”
Then Smudge lets her voice drop to Bolton’s range. “But are you going to f*** with this? I don’t think so.” She draws a long, theatrical hand down the many, many feet of her blue getup, saying sweetly: “Especially if I’ve painted one eye brow higher than the other.”
For all the snapshots out there of Conni Smudge – evading “handsy” bikers, twirling on party boats and party buses or holding court with other queens – this moment deserves a polaroid, of Chris and Conni congratulating one another with a resounding high-five.
Conni Smudge appears in Fit for a Queen, the Vegas-style drag show to benefit the Shooting Stars Foundation, running May 14 at the River Rock Casino, 8 p.m. Tickets: $30 through Ticketmaster, 604-280-4444. Last month the foundation donated $100,00 to local HIV/AIDS organizations including A Loving Spoonful, AIDS Vancouver and Positive Women’s Network. More info at shootingstarsfoundation.org.
Conni Smudge also hosts Hott Smudge Sundays at the Oasis Ultra Lounge. Info: 604-685-1724 or connismudge@yahoo.com. May 11 catch Conni Smudge on Studio 4 with Fanny Kiefer.
