*snort* oh dear god - my life as a boy

[rm]

Okay, so I have this audition to play Billy Tipton today. Billy Tipton, if you didn't know, was a girl, who lived her life as a boy so she could be a jazz musician. And no one knew, not even the three women s/he married at different points in her life and their adopted children, until the funeral director called after Tipton's death in 1989.

Now, the casting notice is all, must be believeable as a man!!!, so I figure, I got butch it up for this a little.

After much ransacking of my wardrobe, I come up with: black cargo pants, a blue men's work shirt, a black tie (notably, my black Karl Lagerfeld tie that I love with all my irrational heart). at this point I realize I need more, my waist and shoulders are so little, it's hard to disguise. Ahha! I have this fabulous tan suede jacket I bought a few years ago, because it was clear to me someone had seen the old Battlestar Galatcia's and just seriously toned it down and then sold the design to Express. Brilliant!

So I walk into the bathroom, looking for my hair stuff (of which I can't find anything) and am greeted by the sight of me in all this in the mirror, but my hair is still down and wet and doing what it does these days, and I'm still this angular boney little soul, and I'm just saying, it's like '70s HP crack!fic central around here. Not good, not good. Funny, not good.

On the butch scale, I probably look marginally more masculine than Daniel V. in Nick's suit. Which is to say, I still look like a girl.

WHERE THE HELL IS MY HAIR STUFF? although the temptation to go out like this is actually pretty strong, too bad I have to go to work first.

Hrrr.

ETA: Shit, I just put my hair up, and it's totally believeable. eeee, now I got to get nervous about this baby.

ETA2: I am so funny. The audition is SUNDAY. Yay test run. Now to change! Wow, so glad I figured that out before I left the house.

Comments

[lanthinel.livejournal.com]

Oh, hey, Billy Tipton! I read Jackie Kay's _Trumpet_ which is a take on Tipton's story (in which the Tipton-like character was a black Scottish woman who did so in order to play jazz trumpet, married a white Scots woman, and they'd adopted a son). Kay's novel is set after the death and begins with the revelation from the funeral director, focusing on the wife, son, and the writer hired by a publisher to put together a sensational biography. Really cool stuff.

[trifles.livejournal.com]

I was just about to mention Trumpet here -- I loved that story.

[tommx.livejournal.com]

the billy tipton story reminds me a bit of the affair between bernard boursicot and shi pei pu which became the subject of m. butterfly.

[redstapler.livejournal.com]

On the butch scale, I probably look marginally more masculine than Daniel V. in Nick's suit. Which is to say, I still look like a girl.

Best. Description. EVER. ;)

[rm.livejournal.com]

Thank you. I also have to confess though that as badly sewn and girly as that suit was, I utterly died over Daniel V's runway walk in it, especially when he pulled off the scarf, but as my roommate says, "and then there was the sound of a hundred keyboards clacking."

[abnormal-apathy.livejournal.com]

An open casting call just got distributed on a f2m trans lj list I'm on. I just thought that it was incredibly bizarre that here you were just talking about it...

[rm.livejournal.com]

The very strong impression I've gotten based on the number of casting notices I've seen for both agented submissions and open calls is that they are despairing of finding anyone that they think is both pretty enough to be Billy when we first meet her, and manly enough to portray the rest of his life. I was really feeling dubious about my own abilities until this morning, now I'm sort of really focused on the whole thing. The prospect of going to work as a man was sort of interesting, as my male identity, such as it is, is strongly wrapped up in another era, where men were extolled for a number of virtues we now consider entirely feminine, such that I come off more eccentric than male in my presentation. Like people at work think I'm a weirdo, but they don't question my gender. as a kid, gender questions (of which I got a lot of) were code for (or accompanied by) "you're ugly" and it's interesting to me (and more than a bit shameful) that I felt really nervous today about what I might have encountered. Hell, I feel nervous about it going to the audition on Sunday. I remember being snarled at in Grand Central when I was 15 and in a suit and tie, "are you a boy or a girl?" and I was never so clever or brave as to know to say "which would you like?"

[abnormal-apathy.livejournal.com]

I think your nose is more delicate than hers, but otherwise you do have some similar features. She didn't look like she was MANLY...she didn't exude "macho" and certainly wasn't burly. I think you could easily pull off the character. I can't wait to hear how it turns out.

I was always called a butch, a lesbian, a DYKE, like those words were supposed to hurt me. I grew up around a lot of gay people and when I "knew" I was heterosexual those words didn't bother me. It wasn't until I started questioning my own sexuality that I had to come to terms with it. As I've aged, I've realized that these labels that people like to hurl really only have as much stigma as you allow them to.

Good luck on Sunday!