We recently made a
trip to New Hope, PA, to the Rrazz Room supper club, to see Leslie Jordan’s
one-man show “Show Pony”. Jordan is, of course, best known for his role as
Beverly Leslie on TV’s “Will and Grace”, as well as the film “Sordid Lives” in
which he plays Earl “Brother Boy” Ingram, a mental patient who’s convinced he’s Tammy Wynette. He makes
his entrance in a clown’s outfit, complete with enormous yellow shoes, a red
fright wig and the requisite red nose. The outfit comes off early in the show,
but it serves to underscore the putative theme of “poor, sad clown”. (That and
the loop of circus music that played pre-show and all through dinner.)
To say Jordan’s
life has been interesting is to understate the case. Sober by his own admission
for something like 17 years, it’s been the proverbial roller coaster. While the
show chronicles his fascination and disastrous relationships with otherwise
“straight” young men, it’s not as comprehensively autobiographical as the other
show of his, “Like a Dog on Linoleum”, which I saw some years back. Still, it
does give the audience a glimpse into his background in the South, his relationship
with his parents, his early school days and anecdotes about his life in show
business.
Jordan was born in
Chattanooga, TN to devoutly Christian parents. His father was a lieutenant
colonel in the Army who died when Jordan was still a child. For years he
thought his father was ashamed of him and didn’t love him, until his mother
told him of the Christmas eve, when Jordan was three, that his daddy spent
scouring Chattanooga for the bride doll Jordan had pleaded for from Santa. His
mother, proud of her son’s success, nevertheless wonders why he has to air his
dirty laundry in public. “Why,” she asks, “can’t you just whisper it to a
therapist?” His fascination with straight men began early, in junior high, with
his attraction to a 19 year-old janitor named Elrod. Pulling no punches, he
describes this first “relationship” in hilarious, if intimate, detail.
There are several
of these relationships with straight men that Jordan goes through, keeping us
laughing all the while. (And “ooh-ing” and “aah-ing” with the reveal of each of
the mens’ portraits, larger than life size, as though to prove they were all
real.) Still, there was an undercurrent of regret there, over the fact that
he’s apparently not been able to maintain a true relationship with a gay man for
all these years. A touch of wistfulness crept in at a couple of points, not
enough to bring the show to a melodramatic halt; just enough to let us know
that the poor, sad clown is, in fact, flesh-and-blood.
By the way, the
club itself is a very nice, very intimate venue where there’s a constant stream
of cabaret acts week after week. The food was fine, if a bit pricey, as was the
service. Depending on the headliner we might just go back.
