By Victor Greto
REHOBOTH BEACH — “There she is!” says Kevin Buice, batting his eyelashes at the reflection in the dressing room mirror.
The moment Buice puts on his long and thick black lashes — “You’re not going to find these at Eckerd’s,” he says — and turns to see himself marks the moment he self-consciously becomes drag queen Mona Lotts, a “Blue Moon diva.”
He’s already been applying makeup for nearly an hour, and the show at the Blue Moon restaurant on Baltimore Avenue is only an hour away.
He performs every other Friday night with several others, all of whom alternate songs and dances. He hosts “Karaoke & Martinis with Mona” on Thursdays.
But Buice-Lotts seems in no hurry.
He just took a cigarette break, padding his way out of his dressing room, down the creaky wooden steps and around the back of the restaurant, puffing and chatting away with Joey, who helps him change clothes between songs.
In fact, now he’s really enjoying himself.
Putting on a CD of the three songs he’ll perform this evening, he looks in the mirror and preens, puckers his lips, rolls his eyes, waves his arms and lisps words to the song made famous in the musical Chicago: “When you’re good to Mama, Mama’s good to you.”
Unlike many drag queens who only lip-synch, he’ll be singing these words himself.
“That’s one of the things that separates Mona from all the others,” says Blue Moon co-owner Tim Ragan, who hired Buice two years ago to lead the show. “He’s a great talent.”
Nor like most others does Buice directly imitate drag favorites, including Judy Garland, Liza Minnelli or Cher.
“I’m always Mona Lotts doing someone else,” he says, including, this night, Dolly Parton — with high hair and big red, frilly dress — belting out “Harper Valley P.T.A.”
Before Jenell Collins (aka Jerome Simpson) helped him glue on the lashes, Buice had finished putting on layers of pancake mix, lipstick and gloss, eyeliner and powder, while applying large areas of shadow under his chin and along the sides of his nose.
“It makes my nose look thinner,” he says of the shadows. “And it actually gives me a chin.”
It really does.
Kevin Buice, 44, is a large, amiable man whose love for performing and acting is expressed through drag.
“I’m an entertainer, not just a drag queen,” Buice says. He also calls what he does the “art of female illusion.”
“Anyone can put on a dress or a wig; it’s about acquiring a degree in your art.”
Performing in drag has been a part of gay culture for decades, but there are different reasons many do it, Buice says.
“People assume, ‘Wow, this guy likes to dress up like a woman,’ that it’s something we do to get our rocks off.”
Not so for him.
He equates his desire to dress in drag with “someone coming in to a theater, going in to makeup, putting on a costume and doing a performance.”
This is different than transvestites, or men who enjoy putting on women’s clothes, and getting their thrills from it, he says.
It’s also different from transsexuals — men who psychologically believe they are women.
“I have no desire to be a woman, to wear women’s clothes,” he says. “Who I am is the guy who loves to go on stage and entertain. It gives me a forum for free expression.”
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Buice has strutted his stuff for a relatively short time — four years — compared to many drag queens in the show.
Scott Beadle, who lives near Baltimore, has been dragging for more than two decades. During the summer, he comes to Rehoboth three nights a week and becomes Regina Cox. He also has performed at the Purple Parrot on Rehoboth Avenue.
While Buice made up, Beadle glued playing cards to an outfit he planned to wear while performing Juice Newton’s “Queen of Hearts.”
“It had been in the trunk of the car and wilted,” he says.
Beadle also acts in community theater back home.
“It’s different, but the same,” he says.
Like Buice, Beadle says he loses himself in character — so much so that he says he has no idea how well he’s done after a performance.
“I’m not the person that comes back,” he says. “I won’t remember how I did.”
Tonight, Beadle also will be performing Cher’s “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves.”
Beadle loves Cher: “She’s an all-round entertainer,” he says.
And for many of the drag queens at the Blue Moon, this is what it’s all about.
For a drag queen show, Beadle says, the Blue Moon divas are pretty tame backstage.
“I’ve been involved in some battles at other places,” he says, referring to backstage arguments about who is the prettiest, or has the best number to perform.
“It’s about drama.”
Jerome Simpson, who has lived in Rehoboth for nearly 10 years, went to school for theater, but singing and dancing in drag is his “main thing.”
This evening, he planned to impersonate Gladys Knight, Donna Summer and Mary J. Blige.
Like others, Simpson (known as Jenell Collins when he’s dressed) studies his subjects’ performances on DVDs or on YouTube.
“I have a more creative flow doing this than I have with theater,” he says. “You have to give in to the characters completely, and you gain more of their personality over time.”
Beadle says he will do this as long as he can.
“Katharine Hepburn did it for a long time,” Beadle says of the actress who died at 96. “We’ll do it till no one wants to see us anymore.”
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While making up, Buice drinks a bottle of water and takes small sips from a plastic cup filled with Mike’s Hard Lime.
“I usually drink fruity martinis,” he says.
But this mid-July night is exceptionally hot.
“I know I look almost clownish,” he says, his stark white-pancaked face looking past his reflection. “But I’m making up for the bright lights.”
He’s also making up for lost time.
Originally from Atlanta, Buice moved to Delaware from Charlottesville, Va., about six years ago with his partner because of the acceptability of the gay lifestyle in Rehoboth Beach. They had vacationed here for years.
“I remember leaving a club in Atlanta and getting hit by a two-by-four,” he says.
With his family, it had been just as hard.
Buice even married and had a daughter before he finally came out, he says.
After discovering that his son was gay, Buice’s father told him bluntly, “Don’t be gay.”
“How about I lay in the garage and be a car?” Buice says he asked.
“That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard,” his father replied.
“Exactly.”
Even so, Buice says, “My family still doesn’t accept my being gay — they’re Southern Baptists and will not change — though they’ve accepted me.”
Buice began doing drag four years ago at Partners on Rehoboth Avenue.
“We were looking to do something to enhance our brunches on Sunday,” he says, and he recalled hearing of a Florida restaurant that held a “drag brunch.”
He got up in drag and started telling jokes while people ate. A friend taught him how to put on make-up, and Buice began entertaining at drag pageants, and performing shows at the Cloud Nine and the Purple Parrot.
Buice has a strong voice, and he began to distinguish himself by singing many of the songs himself.
Watching Buice perform one evening nearly two years ago, Ragan asked him to run the show at the Blue Moon.
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Because he headlines the show, Buice has his own dressing room.
His “drag closet” is filled with dozens of frilly boas and hand-made dresses, many garish and over-the-top. The rest of the small room holds a half-dozen assortment of wigs on styrofoam heads, large platformed and well-heeled shoes, and a stand-up fan and air conditioner that blow madly. A film of make-up powder covers everything, including his portable CD player, which, accordingly, skips a lot.
His dressing table is a working mess of cakes, blushes, powders and brushes. The large mirror is ringed by dusty light bulbs. To the right of the mirror, his CD player sits precariously plugged into an outlet twisting with a tangle of wires.
Buice works as an associate manager at Applebee’s on Del. 1, and says a lot of straight co-workers have seen him perform.
“What’s fantastic about this, is we get to cross those cultural lines,” he says. “Not only do I express myself artistically as an actor and performer, I get to do something that is entertaining and brings people into the gay culture who otherwise wouldn’t come.”
He likes it that people like Joey O’Brien call him Mama — a nickname that stuck when he befriended a younger man — a name that the wide-hipped Mona Lotts seems to embody.
The first Thanksgiving he and his partner moved to Rehoboth they held a big Thanksgiving dinner.
“There were so many people we became friends with, who had been rejected by their families,” he says.
“We had 25 people at our house that day, mostly younger guys, and we cooked for them and gave them a sense of family.
“One of the things I tell these guys is, ‘You have a lot of freedom now here: You can be openly gay, walk down the streets and hold hands and not be the freak.’”
They have continued their Thanksgiving tradition.
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A half-hour before the show begins, Mona Lotts and the other “girls” hobnob with customers.
It’s called “drag time,” and the show begins 20 minutes later than its scheduled 9:30 p.m. start as people slowly gather round the small stage.
When the lights go down, the dance floor around the stage fills with couples holding on to each other. “Boogie Wonderland,” blasts through speakers.
Introduced, Mona Lotts enters, bigger than life, a flapper dress sporting sparkling sequins, black pumps, black boa, blond wig and an attitude.
Buice has disappeared fully into his alter-ego as she sings, “Ask any of the chickies in my pen. They’ll tell you I’m the biggest mother hen. I love them all and all of them love me, because the system works the system called reciprocity.”
Mona Lotts shifts like a lumbering wave, her arms moving as if to keep her afloat.
“Got a little motto,” she sings. “Always sees me through. When you’re good to Mama, Mama’s good to you.”
The last line is drowned in cheers.