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| Charles Busch returns to Washington tonight for the Ganymede Fall Arts Festival kick-off. (Photo courtesy of Ganymede) |
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Special Agent Galactica almost had a makeover last year. She of the famous pink tresses, the unofficial mascot of Ganymede Arts, was due for a new look, her creator, Jeffrey Johnson, thought, so he ordered some new pink wigs made.
Nothing radical — just a variation on her trademark pink bob. Johnson had a wigmaker he knows who does the wigs for Arena Stage come up with some options.
“We tried them but it just didn’t feel like her,” he says. “I got out there and it just didn’t feel like Galactica. So right before, like the day before, I said, ‘I’m sorry, I know you spent all this time on these wigs,’ but he totally understood.”
Galactica’s look was an accident. Conceived as blonde and a one-off for an appearance at a 2003 New Year’s Eve fundraiser for Actors Theater of Washington, Ganymede’s predecessor, Galactica was one of four drag personae Johnson and his then-colleagues were using for the show. A slapdash costume change, in which he grabbed the pink wig he’s used all along and inadvertently put it on backwards, led to her current look. Johnson’s Galactica performances each year at Ganymede (now in its third year) are elaborate lip-syncing extravaganzas that take months to put together. He also appears as Galactica at Pride and occasionally in clubs like Town, but always to promote Ganymede.
“It’s just easy for her to go out to a club or at Pride and it costs us absolutely nothing,” he says.
This year’s festival was an effort to make happen. The economic slump hit Ganymede hard just as it’s hitting its stride in terms of name recognition. It’s slightly scaled back, but Johnson says that’s an advantage — he’s felt no pressure to fill the schedule just for the sake of filling it.
The prices, too, are modest, and performances are varied. Tonight’s opening with Charles Busch is modestly priced at $30. Galactica’s show is one night only on Saturday at 9. Most of the other events feature singers, stand-up comedians and play readings and are “pay what you can.” Visit www.ganymedearts.org for complete information. All events take place at Miss Pixie’s.
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HOME > OUT IN DC > COVER
By: Joey DiGuglielmo COMMENTS
 
When Charles Busch appears at the Ganymede Arts’ Fall Arts Festival opening night kickoff tonight, it will be a homecoming of sorts. The New York native got his proverbial big break here with a series of rave reviews for his 1980 appearance in “Charles Busch Alone With a Cast of Thousands.”
Busch, an actor, playwright and drag legend, will open the festival tonight with an appearance with his longtime collaborator Julie Halston. They’ll be interviewed by Ganymede director Jeffrey Johnson in a retrospective interview of their careers. Ironically Busch’s 1980 appearance at the Source Theater was almost exactly where he’ll be appearing tonight at Miss Pixie’s on 14th Street, N.W.
“Washington was a very important element in my career,” Busch says during an hour-plus phone chat from his Greenwich Village apartment. “I’d spent a few years screwing around in Chicago, then came back to New York with vague notions of being a solo performer. I didn’t know anybody or have any money. The only places to perform were these small cabaret rooms. These dingy places that would book anyone.”
The late Bart Whiteman, who founded the Source, saw Busch perform at a party and invited him to the Source.
“It was just a tiny little space. It seated about 40, but I got the most extraordinary rave reviews, from the Post, the Blade, every weekly. It really was the most amazing thing. Up until then the few reviews I’d gotten were pretty horrible. This was the first time I really was taken seriously.”
Busch, then 24, says the experience was validating and gave him a sense that he was “doing the right thing.”
Since then, Busch has had a rich and varied career. He’s starred in several self-penned plays such as “The Lady in Question,” “Red Scare on Sunset” and his trademark, “Vampire Lesbians of Sodom,” which ran five years off Broadway. His play “Tale of the Allergist’s Wife,” which variously starred Linda Lavin (“Alice”) and Valerie Harper (“Rhoda”), ran nearly 800 performances on Broadway and won him several accolades including a Tony nomination. Busch wrote and starred in two film versions of his plays, “Psycho Beach Party” and “Die Mommie Die.” He directed “A Very Serious Person” and is the subject of a documentary called “The Lady in Question is Charles Busch.”
Playing female roles began because Busch played all the roles in his early one-man shows.
“When I was a solo performer all those years and would do these solo plays and play all the characters myself, but without changing costume, the female characters were always my best ones. I didn’t think I was terribly good as the old Irish fisherman. I was always better as the glamorous countess. But for the narrative, I had to tell the story. But then when I could get other actors to play the old Irish fisherman, I did.”
Ganymede Arts
opening night gala
Tonight at 8
Miss Pixie’s Backroom Palace
1626 14th St., N.W.
$30
www.ganymedearts.org |
Busch, who calls himself an “old-fashioned gay guy,” has been with his partner, Eric Myers, for 20 years. Busch won’t be in drag tonight. He says it’s only fun if there’s a role to play.
“I didn’t dress up in my mother’s clothes when I was a kid. I never really enjoyed just being dressed up. When I’d get together some marvelous costume for Halloween, I’d be so bored just sitting around at a party. Nothing to do. The costume and the character are so intertwined for me. As soon as I got the costume together, I’d be thinking, ‘OK, who’s the character? What lines would I say?’”
Like his pal John Epperson (Lypsinka), Busch avoids the term drag queen.
“I think maybe John’s a little tougher,” he says. “I wouldn’t mind if I knew that I could be totally sure there was not one tinge of patronization or negativity with it. Even with gays, there’s a little bit of a put down, gay self-hatred thing going on there. John and I take our work very seriously. We like to think of ourselves as professionals and we’ve worked so hard all these years. It’s just such a wide, sweeping term that embraces everyone from someone who lives 24/7 in drag, to someone who’s a heterosexual cross dresser to somebody who just dresses up for Halloween. I don’t identify with that. I’m somebody who’s created a whole career trying to refine female roles with a lot of care and intelligence. I wouldn’t want to be dismissed as not a professional or that it’s just a ...
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