Robert Manners

I Almost Forgot!

Oh, no, the Friday Five, I almost forgot it again! Thank goodness I checked in before midnight, I would have missed it. The "Saturday Five" doesn't have so much panache.



1. If you could eat dinner with and "get to know" one famous person (living or dead), who would you choose? I've always been fascinated by Alexander the Great...but I don't suppose he would be much fun to eat with, and I don't speak ancient Greek. So I guess it would be my idol, Miss Marlene Dietrich. I could ask her if Gary Cooper's dick was as big as Cecil Beaton said it was.



2. Has the death of a famous person ever had an effect on you? Who was it and how did you feel? When Diana, Princess of Wales died, I was utterly distraught. I remembered following her engagement to Prince Charles in all the magazines, and getting up at four in the morning to watch her wedding live on TV. I just about worshipped her when I was a kid, so pretty and glamorous and apparently nice. I felt bad when she had all those emotional problems, I expected better of her, and was really angry when she broke up with Charles, it seemed so déclassée. I mean, sure he was a big-eared mook, but I could put up with a lot to get my mitts on all those jewels, not to mention my own live-in couturier. But when she died I felt like I lost an important person of my youth; worse, I felt that every fairy tale suddenly had an unhappy ending. I never even met her, but I grieved for her.



3. If you could BE a famous person for 24 hours, who would you choose? Brad Pitt. And I'd spend the whole time masturbating and feeling myself up.



4. Do people ever tell you that you look like someone famous? Who? Not really. Most days I think I look like Charles Nelson Reilly. When I was a teenager, people used to say I looked like David Bowie, mostly because I was so skinny and because I wore oversized jackets and ties to school (this was in the "Let's Dance" and "China Girl" phase of Bowie's career). When I started doing drag, people told me I looked like the actress who played Natalie on All My Children. I hear lots of other things along this vein...I think it's terribly unimaginitive to tell people they look somehow remotely like some famous person. Kind of tacky, if you think about it, implying that it's not good enough to look like oneself.



5. Have you ever met anyone famous? Not to speak to. I saw Richard Simmons once outside of Macy's Men's Union Square (he was taller than I expected). I saw Elizabeth Berkley at a restaurant in Hollywood (she was very tall and extremely striking...too bad about her career). And of course one runs into local news-people now and again. But otherwise, I've never met anybody more famous than myself.

Say Cheese!