Forty years of playing dress-up looks good on Darcelle

Weekend!Nightlife: On the Rocks

By Anne Marie DiStefano

The Portland Tribune Nov 2, 2006

Denise FARWELL / Portland TRIBUNE

This New Year’s, Darcelle will celebrate 40 years of vamping on the stage at the Darcelle XV Showplace, where drag queens, cabaret entertainment and rhinestone bras rule.

Putting on false eyelashes isn’t easy, no matter how many times you’ve done it. “Sometimes, I glue my eyes open,” Darcelle says. “One eye stays open the whole time.”

Ten minutes ago I was talking to septuagenarian Walter Cole in the basement of his Old Town nightclub, but a vigorous application of makeup has transformed him before my eyes into Darcelle XV, Portland’s most famous drag queen.

Darcelle’s cabaret-style showcase for female impersonators is a Portland institution, and will celebrate its 40th anniversary this New Year’s Eve.

I’ve always known the club was there, but only recently did I finally go to a show. Now I would say, if you’ve never been to Darcelle’s, you don’t really know Portland.

With its feather boas, brassy jokes and endless waterfalls of rhinestones, the show is more than a living bit of cross-dressing history. It’s a piece of entertainment history, a holdover from a time when nightclubs looked very different from how they do today.

“There was a time when Portland was, I swear, the nightlife capital of the world,” Cole says, “when I was young, young, young.”

Small jazz clubs and big, glitzy hot spots thrived in the Portland of the 1950s and ’60s. Cole remembers when Jimmy Durante and Sophie Tucker performed in town, and nightclubs along Third Avenue played host to famous striptease artists.

There was a club up on Southwest Barbur Boulevard with a swimming pool inside, where water ballet was the attraction. The show at the renowned Hoyt Hotel featured singers, dancers and a 12-piece orchestra.

In 1965, Cole took possession of a small downtown tavern called Demas, which became a lesbian hangout. Then Cole met a man named Roxy Neuhardt, a dancer from the Hoyt Hotel, and the two decided to put on a show.

“I learned my craft the hard way,” Cole says, “just stand up there barefaced and do it. … Well, not barefaced.”

Cole took on the role of mistress of ceremonies, and taught himself to make costumes, which he still does to this day. Neuhardt was, and still is, the choreographer. The two have been a couple now for many years.

The wisecracking, evening gown-clad Darcelle gradually earned her status as a Portland celebrity, winning the title Darcelle XV by becoming the 15th empress of the Imperial Sovereign Rose Court pageant in 1973.

In addition to hosting her cabaret four nights a week, Darcelle often is invited to charity events and civic festivities such as last month’s Under the Autumn Moon festival in Chinatown.

A recent article in the L.A. Times Magazine profiled the star, and local filmmaker Jan Haaken has just finished a documentary about the showcase, titled “Queens of Hearts,” which debuts at the Northwest Film and Video Festival (7 p.m. Nov. 17, Whitsell Auditorium).

Haaken takes an anthropologist’s approach to the gender-bending cabaret. She believes the club serves as a type of group therapy. “The performers have to have a deep understanding of human psychology to do what they do,” she explains.

Show has its own culture

There’s a psychic release in the laughter here, Haaken says, because we’re “poking fun at gender codes that are binding and restrictive for all of us.”

She asks some tough questions: Why do we laugh when we see a man in women’s clothes? Why is the show so popular with bachelorettes?

I arrive at Darcelle’s to find the cozy theater full of women. More men come to the early show, Darcelle says, while the late show is full of bachelorette parties and suburban ladies celebrating 45th birthdays. Some stick around for the male strippers who dance after the stage show; some leave.

Each bachelorette and birthday girl gets her moment in the spotlight; some get a regular ribbing. “Where I really have fun is when I talk to the brides or I talk to the birthdays or I talk to people from out of town,” Darcelle says. “I love that.”

The whole point is to get everyone to loosen up, to lift us out of our drab, workaday selves, just as the performers transform themselves into something more glamorous than they were before.

Some of the cast look remarkably like women. Others, not as much. Really, Darcelle says, “We’re not doing a queer thing … it’s all just fun and loud and bawdy.”

Not that everyone is comfortable with what goes on at Darcelle’s. There are those who refuse to cross the threshold. Her response? “Maybe you should know who you are. … If it bothers you, why, yeah, you should find out why.” With a final stroke of her eyeliner she adds, “Maybe it’s just a little too close to home, honey.”

annemariedistefano@portlandtribune.com

Darcelle XV Showplace

When: 8:30 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday, also 10:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday

Where: 208 N.W. Third Ave., 503-222-5338

Cost: $15, reservations recommended

More: www.darcellexv.com