The trip to Oregon was easy. It was simply a matter of heading south from Winnipeg to Fargo, North Dakota, hanging a right, and driving straight ahead for 1,300 miles. The grandeur and vastness of the wide open country hit me over and over again through very wide Montana, then through very skinny Northern Idaho for a few hours and finally into Washington before hitting Pasco and turning left. I had pushed my daily driving time up to twelve hours and as a result, had arrived in Portland a day in advance of my estimate. All the more time to settle into Greg and Adair’s glorious mountainside mansion before starting rehearsals.

            I was assigned most of the lower level as “home” for the next seven weeks, complete with a real office, a large bedroom suite with a huge balcony looking out into a forest of pines through which owls skillfully and silently winged between branches at various times of day. It was heaven. There were two additional humans in the house – Ariel and Aurora, Greg and Adair’s daughters, aged 2 and 6 – with whom I fell deeply in love over the weeks that followed. We all quickly became bonded and, with “Richard in the Basement”, established a happy daily routine. It would be a very profound experience for me.

            I set up my office before unpacking clothes. I had lost three days communication being on the road and there were some payrolls to prepare and technical snags which needed immediate attention. It’s always amazing how quickly things can fall apart when one isn’t on the spot to taking care of them. The Instant Messaging program proved to be a boon, and I was thankful we were doing evening rehearsals so I could take care of the MSI grind during the day.

            I arrived at my first rehearsal to find that Greg had blocked the entire show. He’d done that because Rick (Lewis, playing ‘Georges’ my co-star) had to leave town on business for a whole week and there were only a couple of evenings before his departure. It was a matter of fitting me in to the staging with Rick and then dealing with all my details while awaiting his return. We had just over three weeks before opening, one without Rick, but at least it was on its feet. I could now face all the production numbers and solos – and there were a LOT of each. Before he left, Rick and I sat for a couple of hours just to get to know each. I could see that this was going to be smooth sailing. He was smart, very funny, easy-going and wonderfully talented. At one blocking session we got to “The Best Of Times Is Now” number, which I sing with ‘Georges’ “accompanying” me on the “grand piano” on the set. I had just assumed that the piano was a set prop, and that Rick would mime the playing and the pit player would do the rest. Imagine my astonishment when Rick played the opening arpeggio on the real piano with a great flourish and looked up, waiting for me to start singing! I stood there for a moment with my mouth agape, astonished that it was going to be happening this way. “This is a little song, nostalgic and unique” I began, and Rick was right there with me all the way through. I just kept smiling, utterly happy that my performing partner was also an incredible pianist. I went over and hugged him when it was over and was once again assured that we were going to be great duo!

            The following evenings were taken up with a lot of production numbers! The ‘Cagelles’, the Ensemble that works in the Club of the show’s title, were all in-town drag performers with varying degrees of experience. There was a bit of wariness at the start, but I think I won them over with some banter and quips and by being a great big onion having as much trouble with the choreography as some of them were having. Fortunately I just had to strut about and pose most of the time. In no time at all we were bonded. During breaks I was being grabbed away for costume fittings with Jim Crino, our costume coordinator/designer. I had known Jim back in the old days, and he’d decided that I was going to be “properly taken care of” as far as he was concerned. He had designed a number of elaborate gowns and accessories and was excited to share all his ideas with me. After being measured for “boobs” and “hip enhancements” and being told that I should start shaving my chest and shoulders now to acclimatize myself to those rigors, I realized how very serious everyone was about making this a first-class production. It was a HUGE show, and nothing was being left to chance or the last minute. Greg was securely at the helm and on top of everything. I was feeling extremely safe.

Before coming to town, I had agreed to do a Concert at The Old Church for the Portland Civic Theater Guild, an organization for which I had done many Reader’s Theatre performances over my years at Civic. It was a venerable institution with a large and very devoted audience of ladies who had been attending the morning presentations for decades. Putting Richard Hurst back in their midst had been a no-brainer for Guild President Adair to book. On performance morning I arrived to find the auditorium packed with more than 300 folks waiting for me to appear. As I looked out over the audience from the stage I could see familiar faces scattered all through the house and those wonderful days came rushing back to me. I found myself a bit emotional at times singing some of the material that Adair had requested I do, some of it with her, all of it for old times’ sake. The fact that the applause sometimes lasted longer than the song I’d just sung let me know that they were totally into the experience. Afterward I was besieged in the Reception Hall, everyone wanting to reminisce and hug and plant kisses on my face. It had been more than twenty years since I’d been in that environment, and felt tremendously warm and comforting … as if I’d never left.

One important detail we had to deal with was the taking of the publicity photos. I had been told that someone would be available to do my make-up for the shoot and that I should be available a couple of hours in advance of the photo session. A couple of hours? A guy named Darryl was waiting for me when I arrived. He was armed with an arsenal of powders, paints and potions, a huge selection of brushes of all shapes and sizes, pancake make-up in every imaginable colour, all laid out on a huge table. This was ultra-serious business! His first attack was on my eyebrows … with nose putty! He melted the hard putty with a lighter and began working the thick goo into my eyebrows until they had completely disappeared. I looked like an alien! Then with a brush and liner he painted in “new” eyebrows high above the originals. He constantly chattered away about my face and my great cheekbones and his choices for the colours and contouring and two and a half hours later he was done. All the while, people with costumes, wigs and accessories for the shoot kept coming and going, always stopping by the chair to “ooh” and “aah” about the changes. After letting me see the eyebrows, they had kept the mirror away from me until the end. When I finally got to see my face I was astonished! Richard had disappeared and there was this attractive woman who looked mighty like my Mother highly made up. The wig was secured on my head, and I was stuffed into a dazzling pink dress with huge sleeves and lots of ruffles. The end result was pretty spectacular. This was wa-a-ay beyond what I’d expected, and I realized there was no way I was going to look this good for the show. The make-over had taken more than two hours to achieve, and the actual transformation takes place on stage as part of a six-minute song/production number called “Mascara”. How was I going to get anywhere close to achieving this incredible look in that amount of time? The photo shoot went extremely well. I went for bust with the poses. Our Producer, Jutta Allen, was beside herself when she popped in to see how it was going. She howled and gushed and told the photographer to get every angle and pose. I was glad she was happy, but it took days to get the rock-hard putty out of my eyebrows!

            I was tugging at the bit for Rick to return. It was like I was in a vacuum. Trying to learn lines without my partner was getting depressing and doing choreography, now in heels, was doing a number on my legs and my back. The costume fittings and re-fittings were constant and some of the gowns were so tight I could hardly breathe. I needed someone to be there beside me and help me through this – my partner-in-crime. Finally he was back, and we headed into a ten-day stretch for all of this to come together.

            The “Mascara” staging was, on the surface, uncomplicated. It was the many details in which the devil lurked. It is, initially, a tightly-lit solo number that starts with ‘Albin’ in a funk looking at his reflection in a “mirror” while seated at his dressing table on a five-foot-high platform wheeled on during the set change. “Once again I’m depressed by this tired old face that I see” he informs the audience; but getting ready for his nightly performance at the club cheers him up – “I apply one great stroke of mascara to my limp upper lash, and I can cope again!” The action required me to apply the mascara and eye shadow, attach preset glued eyelashes, add some powder and blush, put on long white gloves, the wig and high heels, all while singing. Hidden beneath the platform was a staircase which, at a specific point in the song, is pushed out for me to step onto and walk down as it moves downstage. At the same time, the platform in which it was housed is moved upstage and off. These set moves were done by stagehands hidden inside the stairs and the platform. They took their movement cues from the lyrics because they couldn’t see anything except the tape marks they were to follow on the stage floor. It all seemed a bit dicey. In one of the final rehearsals I got everything right but forgot, stupidly, to put on the wig. Greg was sitting in the audience and started yelling “The Wig! The Wig!”. I dashed to the back of the platform grabbed the wig and made it just in time to step onto the now-moving-downstage stair unit. It struck me that there would be no recourse once those stairs separated from the platform. It would just keep going until it hit its mark way downstage and stop for me to step onto the deck and join in the production number. It was all in the timing … for both me and the stagehands!

            There was no time for a breather during the show. I was on stage constantly and when I wasn’t I was making very fast costume changes with Jim, now my prime dresser, pulling and tugging at me while I sucked some water from a plastic bottle. There had once been a small break for me, but it was lost late in rehearsals. It turned out that a costume change for the Ensemble was going to take longer than anticipated; so to give them time Greg decided that ‘Albin’ would now deliver a five or six minute stand-up routine in front of the stage curtain, something that wasn’t in the script and would have to be written … by me! Gawd! Greg offered a few corny old burlesque jokes to tell but I needed more. At a night out with the Cast to a drag club downtown (“Darcelle’s” … for further research) I got a lot more suggested by Darcelle herself. These were a bit racier but rather funny … at least I had laughed when she told them. The preview audience a few nights later would test it all out.

            There were 500 people at the Dress Preview, most of them freebies, but it was still a baptism by fire, at best, a rough performance. The tech still needed work – a curtain didn’t close properly, a couch was in the wrong place and some lighting cues didn’t happen – and the cast was tentative, and some lines were dropped. The nervousness I felt was something I’d not experienced in a long time. I needed more rehearsal but that wasn’t going to happen. This was do or die. Of course, that perspective was only ours. At the curtain call, the audience’s response was overwhelming. During the show, I’d been caught completely unawares by the reaction to the stand-up thing I had to do. I came sauntering out with a glass of champagne in my hand and, like a weary old show biz whore in a comfortable environment (after all, this was my Club) I began to luxuriate in this power and their laughter. The material was cornpone at best: “Oh Lord, I’m feeling old and tired tonight! I’ve been working all day. Anyone else feeling tired? (a lot of “yeahs” from the house as they bought in to the premise). I was doing some ironing this afternoon and Harold, my husband, walked in. Hey, Harold, I says. That shirt you’re wearing looks awfully wrinkled. Take it off and I’ll give it a press. He looks at me and says, I’m not wearing a shirt” (Drums: ba-dum-bump). They roared! And: “I was at the beauty shop for two hours today. That was only for the estimate. I got a mud pack and looked great … then the mud fell off” (Drums again.) I was overjoyed at the response, and I played it for all it was worth! I reveled in it every night!

            The Opening was spectacular. The house was made up of the Portland Theatre Community and they ate it up big time. There were parts of the show that took the audience (to my continuing incredulity) by surprise … like the reveal to the antagonists in the final scene that I am really a man. They screamed every night when I pulled off the wig and I was bewildered over and over at the reaction to what was, to me, so obvious. At the restaurant reception afterward dear Greg was in seventh heaven. He was beset by folks offering their congratulations and praise. It had been a hard slog toward the end of rehearsals, but their reactions were deserved, and we all took them in gratefully. There was only one person who had some trouble with the show and that was my old boss, Isabella. It wasn’t the show so much as it was me. She had a really hard time watching me play a very effeminate man and then seeing me dressed and acting as a woman. She had a certain context for me, mostly as the Robert Goulet/John Barrowman romantic baritone lead, and seeing me now with hands all aflutter prancing about in drag was a bridge too far. Rather than her usual effusive self, she was tense and remote. Fortunately as more and more folks arrived at the party and stopped by our table to offer their congratulations, she relaxed a bit. She said she had been on the verge of leaving during the first Act, but by the time I got to the monumental “I Am What I Am”, the aria which ends the first Act, she’d been won over, especially, she told me, when she went out to the Lobby during intermission and heard people’s reactions. She actually came back and saw the show again.

            The run went by very quickly. Everything smoothed out and there was an excitement backstage every night before we went on. Those crazy ‘Cagelles’ queens had me in stitches in the dressing room and before curtain-up and they maintained that mad energy from start to finish. There were moments though. One night, I managed to get behind in my make-up application in “Mascara”. Everything was timed to the split second but for some reason the glue on the false eye lashes had dried a bit more than usual and they wouldn’t initially stick to my eyelids. This was my final action before standing up from the dressing table, putting on the wig and walking to the stair unit which was always perfectly on time. I was only a couple of seconds late, but as I rounded the table still grappling with the wig and adjusting my eyelashes (singing all the while) I could see that the stair unit was already out from under the platform and heading downstage. I arrived at the edge of the platform and the gap was widening. One foot. Two feet. I looked down at the darkness ten feet below my eye level and made the decision to jump the gap. The gown was floor length, and I couldn’t see my feet. This was either going to be very good or very, very bad. With a huge leap, I launched myself from the platform praying that I would feel my feet on the top of the stair unit which was now almost three feet away! I was out of my body, watching as everything went into slow motion, assessing each nano-second of flight. It wasn’t pretty by any means. I tried to make it look like it was all meant to be this way. I felt the breeze on my face and could see the feathers on my gown waving in the wind and, after what seemed to be forever, was suddenly jolted back into the reality as I landed on the top step of the unit … just! I steadied myself, adjusted my wig, struck the pose (in the photo) and I walked down the stairs and onto the stage floor. I was shaking and slightly dazed but managed to pick up the right steps in the dance that I’d walked into and took my final position to end the number. I never knew if anyone had noticed. Perhaps it was bigger in my mind than it was in real life, but no one said a thing to me about it. However, it happened that this was the night the show was being video-taped for the Company. So now, out there somewhere (I’ve lost mine) there exists a permanent visual record of me doing “The Great Leap”! The show ended, and I said goodbye to the incredible group of people who had been so generous and loving and supportive over the life of the show. I had packed up my life once again and the morning after we closed it was time to move on.

There was a great sadness leaving Portland. The time had whizzed by. Seeing old friends and once again being in some achingly missed and familiar stomping grounds were added bonuses. Portland had been such a huge part of my life for so long and feeling a part of it again filled my soul in a profound way. Staying at the house with Greg, Adair and the girls had given me a real sense of home during the show. Since I’d become so connected to them and they to me, the morning of my departure was as upsetting a few moments as I’d ever experienced. The girls hugged me goodbye then ran into the house so I wouldn’t see them crying. Greg and Adair waved as I headed up and out the driveway, and it was over. As I got to the outskirts of Portland, I could see Mount Hood in my rearview mirror. It seemed to rise up as if to say “Come back! Don’t Go!” and stayed in my eye line for two hours down the highway. I found myself weeping, at times uncontrollably, as this perfect mountain finally, reluctantly, got farther and farther away. The loneliness was overpowering. I rolled down the window and kept taking great gulps of air trying to ease the feeling, but it stayed with me all through the long drive home.

            It took days for the depression to ebb. I called Adair to let her know that I’d made it home alright and found myself near tears again just hearing her voice again. The night after getting home, I sat down and watched the show video. Everything came flooding back on me. Hearing the audience roaring with laughter and applause settled me a bit. I became more objective as I watched and, probably through my own criticism of my performance, I began to let it go knowing that I’d done a good job. I still miss that show.