Keleigh Klarke is wearing royal blue.
It’s a snug, fishtailed, floor-length gown with cascading layers of electric-blue ruffles at Klarke’s shoulders, with just enough of a train and sequins to serve some drama. But that’s not what seems to draw some of the crowd to stand inches from the stage. Nor is it her blonde wig with dark roots, hot-curled and hair-sprayed to stay closer to heaven, or her bejeweled fingers.
The audience members stand to offer tribute to the performer sometimes known as the Diamond Doll. It’s a Saturday in mid-March, about a half hour before midnight, and inside the confines of Dru’s Bar, a gay pub open under different names since the late 1960s. The Boom Boom Effect drag show is well under way.
But where other performers have shimmied, Klarke steps forward, then back. In the very spot where another performer will land a kick split and backbend in a leotard and over-the-knee boots, Klarke stands like a queen, back straight, head high, heels and toes together just the way somebody’s Southern grandmother would advise. When Klarke accepts a patron’s dollar, she grasps their hand. She makes eye contact. She leaves the sense that the donor has had a moment in the sun.
So it’s also, in a way, jarring that Klarke is lip-syncing a rendition of 4 Non Blondes’ “What’s Up?,” a song about an uneasy sense of concurrent crisis and surface calm.
For Klarke, a Memphis drag queen approaching her 22nd year on the stage, it is a strange and unsettling moment. It’s been...
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