keyword: drag, title: the woods of steel and glass in "the next big thing" flash fiction

It took Margaret Nussbaum years to become The Amazing Mitzi, according to Frank Yetti, to reach the modest success she’d attained as a stage mage. She hadn’t started as a slight-of-hand artist alternating conjurations to keep audiences guessing, at first, all full-blown enchantments masquerading as staged, hoping it’d be easy to simulate illusion-craft with sorcery. It wasn’t.

She ended up on the drag-burlesque circuit as a non-dancer performer, that vestigial remain of vaudeville roots. When they couldn’t book a bawdy stand-up or ventriloquist, she got booked. On one hand, she enjoyed their body positivity, sharing stages with so many sizes and shapes made her less self-conscious about her weight. On the other, their applause was never much more than polite. She worked miracles and received the ovation afforded to a party clown.

Finally, one night their headliner Terri Darling took her aside. “Maggie,” no one else called her that, “it’s because you have actual magic. If you don’t pass them off some trick to try and figure out, there’s no reason for the audience to give a damn.”

Terri was an enigma, even to the other dancers, no one knew their age or gender. Darling could pass a rough twenty-six or a graceful fifty. Tuxedoed, Terri looked a glamorously androgynous woman, begowned, Terri seemed a lumberjack who’d just won Prom Queen. The star, however, also required guidance off the stage each night due to a near-total blindness.

Asked how they performed without sight, Terri said “I know when the stage lights hit, that’s all I need.” Asked how it happened, Darling joked “too much jilling-off… or jacking-off, depending who you’ve believed.”

“How can you know what I am?” Mitzi asked. “Partly, we’re the same, impossibilities hidden in plain sight. Partly, I can’t be lied to by eyes. Understand that people desire nothing more than to be led astray by suggestions. They come to shows like this to brush up against our silky secrets. We sell them the fantasy they’re smart to what’s behind the curtain. That’s our real transaction.”

Terri smiled, just barely.

“Everything is drag, simply everything. Woman or man, young or old, plumber nun senator or anything, Maggie, it’s all just drag. Living’s the act of swapping convenient costumes to cover over our delicate deep-down actual unmentionables, our goddamn souls.”

“Get them by the short hairs, bring the tricks they came expecting then hit them with a peek at divinity, scant enough to leave them wondering if they’d seen anything at all.” Terri handed her the card of the Magic Castle club. “Only one place you learn how to lie about lying. Hollywood.” That was where Nussbaum learned to fool those rubes into believing they knew how they were being fooled, where Mitzi truly became Amazing.

“Frank,” I said, “you’re messing with me now, that’s just the Greek myth of Tiresias. That’s an ancient legend.” Frank simply lifted one long hairy arm in the air to signal for more coffee.

“They say the same about the sasquatch, Mike.”