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Wednesday August 22 08:49 AM EDT

A Presidential Adviser Trades Neckties for Boas

By JANE GROSS The New York Times

Ben Schatz, a former adviser to President Bill Clinton, has a new full-time gig as a sassy drag queen named Rachel. PROVINCETOWN, Mass. Ben Schatz stole the show at his recent 20th Harvard reunion during a panel discussion about unconventional careers.

He did not dwell on his legal work during the AIDS epidemic or his appearances on "Nightline" as an upstanding ambassador for gay rights. He did not boast of writing briefing papers for President Bill Clinton or delivering commentaries for KQED-TV in San Francisco. That was all behind him, Mr. Schatz said, appearing before the convocation of high achievers in a lavender satin dress, matching hair bow, strapless bra, waist-cincher and pantyhose (two pair, to hide his hairy legs).

Mr. Schatz had had the midlife crisis to end all midlife crises, expressed in a far more original way than by buying a sports car or running off with a sweet young thing. These days he has a new full-time gig: as a sassy drag queen named Rachel performer, lyricist and manager of an a cappella drag quartet that is taking the gay cabaret world by storm.

"How can I say this in a way that isn't trite?" Mr. Schatz said in an interview, explaining his bold career move in the context of two decades when he lost too many friends and too many political battles. "The 80's were pretty bleak times. I wanted some joy in my life. And this makes me incredibly happy."

Mr. Schatz, 42, recounted the reunion story between performances here of the Kinsey Sicks (more about that later), which bills itself as America's Favorite Dragapella Beauty Shop Quartet. The group is playing at Tropical Joe's on Cape Cod until after Labor Day and then opening in Manhattan in October as the inaugural act at a new cabaret space at Studio 54.

The Studio 54 engagement, with a seasoned executive producer, Maria Di Dia, and director, Glenn Casale, is a coup for a bunch of friends who used to amuse themselves by turning up in drag for Halloween parties and Bette Midler concerts in San Francisco, where such behavior barely warrants notice.

All were recreational musicians who sang in choruses or amateur theatricals while working conventional careers as lawyers, marketing executives and the like. Their first performance, if you could call it that, was on the corner of Market and Castro Streets seven years ago, when friends and passersby tossed $37 in a hat.

From their beginnings on the street corner, the Kinseys got a couple of $100 gigs at a San Francisco youth hostel, then a longer run at Josie's Juice Joint, a nightspot in the Castro district. There they caught the eye of a producer from the New Conservatory Theater, where they became regular performers. Soon there were nationwide appearances, two CD's and rave reviews in publications as varied as The Jewish Bulletin of Northern California, Billboard and Poz magazine.

Mr. Schatz burned out as a lawyer and blessed with a healthy savings account gave up his regular legal job in 1999 to "push us forward to the next level." That meant "moving from being a friendship group to a business," with partnership agreements, investors, public relations, tryouts for understudies and other tasks that came naturally to a media- savvy attorney.

"This uses every side of my brain and my personality," Mr. Schatz said.

The side that was largely hidden before erupts in the character of Rachel, a rebel with unshaved armpits and a foul mouth who is a distant cousin to the characters created for "Saturday Night Live" by Gilda Radner. "Everybody should have a Rachel," Mr. Schatz said. "She gets a lot out of my system."

The character, he said, is a "direct response to the work I was doing," which required him to be a "likable, respectable, consumable homosexual on TV, as a public speaker and to my board of directors." But "being diplomatic 24 hours a day really doesn't suit me," he continued, "as Rachel can attest."

Irwin Keller, a onetime corporate lawyer and later the executive director of an AIDS legal services agency, found similar liberation in becoming Winnie, a nerdy lesbian with thick glasses, who begins each performance with a bossy command that the audience sit boy-girl, boy-girl. "The tension between being good and being bad is something all gay people feel," Mr. Keller said.

The other Kinseys have also created signature characters. Maurice Kelly, as the platinum blonde Trixie, and Chris Dilley, as slinky Trampolina, are a pair of divas, one past her prime and the other too young to understand that someday she will be. Mr. Dilley, 29, was the last to join the group, originally as an understudy. Along with Mr. Keller, 40, he arranges the songs that Mr. Schatz writes. Mr. Kelly, also 40, is the costume, set and lighting designer.

Drag usually means bad lip-synching and Cher impersonations. And that is what most clubs offer in this honky-tonk resort, where performers take to the streets each evening for a ritual known as barking, in which they pitch their acts to the crowds outside the tattoo parlors, taffy stands and tour buses.

Since their first night in town, when the Kinsey Sicks rode down Commercial Street singing in a red Rambler convertible, Rachel, Winnie, Trixie and Trampolina have been the hottest ticket in town. The group, which delights in bad puns, is named for the one-to-six scale devised by Alfred Kinsey to measure sexual orientation, in which a six (get it?) signifies exclusively homosexual behavior.

"P-Town has not seen an act like this is years and years and years," said Joe Pezzulo, owner of Tropical Joe's, who normally shuns drag shows. "People who want drag don't expect talent. But the minute they open their mouths, crowds form around them, asking: `Who are these guys? We've got to see them.' "

The Kinseys get 90 percent of the ticket sales at Tropical Joe's and are selling out the 100-seat room almost every night. They have been doing six shows a week, at $20 a ticket, since the Fourth of July and added extra weekend performances this month. They poll the audience each night and find that most have come after seeing them in the street.

When the Kinseys bark, everyone listens, including parents pushing strollers, foreign tourists and elderly day-trippers.

The crowds block traffic, and Trixie urges them out of the middle of the street. "Dead people can't buy tickets," she says. Trampolina offers a song to a particularly avid cluster. "You want to hear another one?" she asks, in a flirty falsetto. The spectators howl in affirmation. "Oooooo!" Trampolina warbles. "You're so easy. I like that."

Rachel, in a femmy dress and combat boots, is the enforcer. "It's like my mother said to my father," she says after a song or two. "If you want more you have to pay for it."

The barking is an exhausting, exhilarating prelude to the 10 p.m. show. Trixie compares it to fly-casting. "We get them in one by one," she says.

Is it harder than the performance? "Oh, God, yes," Trampolina says. "Exponentially."

The Kinseys wear bad wigs, cheap jewelry and too much makeup. Their shows are punctuated by Jewish shtick, with more to be added for the New York audience. Mr. Dilley is a natural lyric tenor and the others baritones, but all can move from bass to falsetto.

Some of the songs, about gay sexual practices, are unabashedly gamy. But others tread more universal ground, drawing a crossover audience. To the tune of "Maria" from "West Side Story," the Kinseys poke fun at Ikea, the furniture store that broke ground by advertising to homosexuals. "Bali Ha'i," from "South Pacific," becomes a gripe about telemarketing: "MCI may call you, any night, any day."

"Titanic: Why Does Celine Go On?" is a lampoon (lasting five minutes and five seconds) of the Academy Award-winning song "My Heart Will Go On," which loops back on itself interminably. And then there is Bobby McFerrin, turned upside down in "Worry," with its chorus: "Oy, oy, oy, something always could go wrong. That's the moral of this song. Something could go wrong."

Until this summer's profitable Provincetown run, only Mr. Schatz had quit his day job. But now the others are on indefinite leaves of absence, with a commitment from Studio 54 through at least March. The group needed to raise $400,000 to mount the show and collected $377,500 in 90 days, Mr. Schatz said. Among the investors are their families.

Rachel trolls the audience for investors at the end of each show. "Do something socially destructive that humiliates your parents," she urges. Then the "girls" kibitz with their adoring fans. "Our egos will be as big as our hair before this is over," Mr. Schatz said one night in July.

After midnight, a show behind them, they wheeled their bicycles along Commercial Street, which was slowly quieting down for the evening. With no audience but one another, they did an impromptu oldies-but-goodies concert, their voices sweet as bird song.

"I don't think I've ever known anything," Mr. Schatz said, licking an ice cream cone, "that gave me this much joy."

-- Anonymous, August 22, 2001

Answers

I frequently took out-of-town visitors to a female impersonators show on Bourbon Street. The entertainers were extremely talented and clever, though the drinks were horrendously expensive (two-drink minimum!) and never failed to delight and impress with their talent and humor. I expect Schatz will do a gig in the Quarter sooner or later.

-- Anonymous, August 22, 2001