George Gets His Dragon

And then, as he did one day every week, George disappeared.

It wasn’t instantaneous, and it took time and effort. But for two or three hours, once every week, George vanished, and you couldn’t see him no matter how hard you tried.

George is pretty much an everyman. He works an 8-hour day in administration for an insurance company. George could tell you what he did for those eight hours every day, but honestly, you’d probably have tuned out (or nodded off) before he got to the end, and even he wouldn’t be paying attention to what he was saying.

All you need to know is he worked there, and they paid him, and he took a bag meal from home every day (he and his wife made meals for themselves and their two kids every evening) and commuted there and back again, then the next day, he did it all again. Yawn. The company remunerated George for his time, so in turn, he could afford half the mortgage, and the other bills and suburban life went on for the family as it does for millions of families around the world: The family had a standard house on a street of similar houses with more-or-less interchangeable families and identikit silver-grey cars and two-week annual vacations to somewhere sunny and warm with a beach.

So far, so dull and predictable.

But George had another aspect to him, something not shared by everyone. It wasn’t a secret, as such – he’d tell you if you asked him – but it also wasn’t something he chatted about around the water cooler at work.

On Sunday evenings, after his kids had had their baths and the little one had listened to his Dad read him a story, after lights went out and George went back downstairs to his wife, George put his coat on and headed out.

At a time of the day and day of the week when most families in his street were settling down to a movie or some other Sunday evening TV, George kissed his wife, picked up a couple of bags from the hall closet and slipped out. George gently closed the door not to disturb the kids, got into his car and drove quietly away.

George was heading for the pub, the ‘Horn of Plenty’ (known to the locals as the ‘Plenty Horny’). He wasn’t drinking, though: And he wasn’t going to work as a barman or a doorman, either. George was heading for the Plenty Horny to disappear for a while.

No one noticed George as he slipped into the pub and went straight through to the area behind the tiny stage. That wasn’t new either – pretty much no-one ever took any notice of George.

In the backstage space, George set about his disappearing trick. After a ‘tuck’ and some clever foundation garments came a bra with false breasts and underwear with a bottom that offered more than George’s own, relatively slight, posterior. The flame-red floor-length gown was sequinned, and the bolero jacket covered in Swarovski crystals: Subtle, it ain’t.

Under a barrage of make-up, George’s rather pasty face disappeared, and gradually, the features and colours of the Dragon Lady emerged. As George faded into the background, this confident person emerged in his place.

The final elements were at opposite ends of George. First, he stepped into the vertiginous 7” sparkly red stilettos. Added to his 5’11”, George – or rather, the Dragon Lady – was now 6’6”, an effect only accentuated when she added the crowning glory, her head full of stunning red hair, piled high. The Dragon Lady was now in the room, near 7’ of red-headed, genuine fire-breathing stunner. This was not a woman, and you would have had to be very drunk to have mistaken that; this was a Drag Queen, and she was about to grant an audience to an enthusiastic (and very slightly nervous) audience. They knew her well enough to know that hecklers rarely came away unscathed.

The Dragon Lady bent down slightly to check her appearance in the mirror. She flicked at a tiny bit of lint on her shoulder, then straightened up and stepped confidently towards the stage door. They might not have seen her come in here, but by God, they’d see her come out.

Lights! Music! For an hour, it’s goodbye to George.

George has got his drag on.