Just finished watching Felicity Huffman's tour de force performance in Transamerica . I was aware that she had done an amazing job as a pre-op transexual (a woman playing a man who wants to be a woman), but was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed the film as a whole. All the performances are excellent and it's smartly written. Highly recommended.
The film also reminded me of a pre-op tranny in our own lives. We had a "manny" when my daughter was born, in 1985. Who knew we were such trend setters? Anyway, the story of Arthur our manny is fodder for entire blog post, and he's not the tranny, so I'll get to the story at hand.
Arthur had a childhood friend named Frankie who, at 40, was a pre-op transexual. She had breasts but still had her male goods as well, and went by the name of "Miss Pearl." Always over-madeup, over-accessorized and overdressed, she looked more like another "Miss":
She was unintentionally hilarious. She took herself very seriously, strutted her stuff with confidence, swinging her bleached blonde ponytail from side to side and sending us into fits of laughter with her endless Brooklynese malaprops. When writing a thank you note one day, she looked at Arthur with a puzzled expression: "I want to write, 'Remember the fun we used to have'. How do you spell "Yoost?"). Or she gravely reported that a friend who had been killed in a car accident was "Very dead."
The most memorable moment, however, was the day she got into an argument with a woman over a parking space in her very straight-laced Bay Ridge neighborhood. She was pulling into the space, the woman was trying to back in simultaneously, and they were at an impasse. Finally, the woman got out of her car and marched over to Miss Pearl's driver side window. "If you don't get out of this space I'm calling a COP!" she hissed. And without batting a false eyelash, our leading lady shot back, "Suck my dick."
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