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A Chanteuse and her Piano Player

By Sarah Stodola

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I moved to New York City at the age of 23. I'd just been laid off from my job as an editorial assistant at an Internet startup that had run out of funding (I know, crazy story, I'm sure you've never heard of anything like it). This was just around the time that I decided once and for all that I wanted to be a writer. So I moved to New York with the intention of spending my days becoming one. I looked for a job in a bar so I'd have my days free. Just when I was ready to give up the search and start temping - the thing with New York bars is that they invariably want you to have New York experience - I landed one.

Bear with me here for a minute - This story is not actually about me. This is so far a combination of relevant narcissism and preamble. Sit tight.

My first night, I showed up not knowing quite what to expect. I was completely green when it came to the downtown New York scene, and I'm pretty sure it showed. My new boss sent me to the basement to learn the ropes. He said I could watch what was going on for the night, just to get a feel for things.

So that night I had free entry to Kiki and Herb's 2000 Christmas show at Fez. I perched on a stool near the door and faced the stage. The room was empty and the lights were on. But soon they were dimmed and the doors opened upstairs. Hundreds of fabulous people began to flood into this underground club, order Martinis and indulge in their fabulousness. Finally, music began and a 6-foot-something-tall drag queen erupted onto the stage. This was a presence, in the proper noun sense of the word. A presence in the same sense that people say Bill Clinton is a presence, if that makes any sense. There aren't many people in the world who intimidate me out of the reverence I develop toward them, but Kiki would become of them. (Also, this will be the only time it will ever be possible to place Kiki and Bill Clinton in the same category.) It’s something about how she (and her real life counterpart) is so unapologetically and confidently original. You seldom to never come across individuals like this; someone who you get the feeling is exactly the same person on the inside as he is on the outside.

To my inexperienced eyes, what I was seeing was quintessential New York, everything I'd known I was missing out on growing up in the Midwest. It still represents quintessential New York to me, even a few years later.

I've tried a thousand times since then to explain Kiki and Herb to people, because I want everyone to share in the brilliance that I discovered on my first night as a nightclub hostess. This is how the conversation usually goes:

"You have to see Kiki and Herb’s show!"

"Oh yeah? What is it exactly?"

"It's this drag queen and this piano player and they sing 80s love ballads and stuff and ad commentary in between the music. It's sooo good!!!"

"Right, didn't you used to like the New Kids on the Block, too?"

It's true that any literal description of the duo simply can't do them justice. The character of Kiki is an aging drag queen still dying to make it in show business, and Herb is her depressed, dim-witted, piano-playing sidekick.

Kiki and Herb in real life are Justin Bond and Kenny Mellman, two performers who met years ago in San Francisco, formed an act, developed it over time, and eventually brought it to New York. Each of the two characters has a fully detailed, occasion-filled, and often sordid past. Kiki is the star, and Herb the perfect accompaniment. Their act is decidedly outrageous; too much so to find a place in the mainstream. And while such entertainment often comes across as a gimmick, it is clear that Kiki and Herb are not outrageous in a deliberate way. They aren't outrageous for shock appeal, although they certainly aren't afraid of shocking anyone. They are outrageous simply because they say things that no one else seems to have the balls to, or that no one else has the creativity to cook up.

It's hard to bring to life in writing the sheer brilliance of a towering drag queen bursting into the room at the beginning of a show screaming the lyrics to Peaches' most famous song; "Suckin' on my titties like you're wanting me, calling me, all the time..." and then a little later on, "Fuck the pain away, fuck the pain away..."

Or that same queen telling a story of how she crashed a Rolling Stones hotel bash a couple of decades ago, or reciting her own unique version of the Christmas Story, or talking about her recent hysterectomy.

Kiki and Herb don't just entertain, they illuminate. They are what comedy should be but most of the time isn't; an offering of intelligent commentary that also makes the world interesting and fun and seemingly different from what it was just a few minutes earlier. They are downtown scenesters, to be sure, but they aren't just glitz and nightlife. They're smart. Better than smart, they're intuitive. After a show one night I had a drunken conversation with Bond (Kiki) about whatever Radiohead album was the new one at the time. At first I was mildly surprised that he was as into Radiohead as I was. But upon reflection it makes perfect sense.

I ended up working at Fez for a year and half, during which times I saw roughly a hundred or so Kiki and Herb performances. Celebrities from Debbie Harry to Parker Posey to Peaches flocked to their shows. Harper's recently called Kiki and Herb "celebrities' celebrities," and it's true. Mainstream America doesn’t know them, but in the world of the famed, they are household names. Most of the celebrities I have met in my life, I've met because I worked the Kiki and Herb shows.

Kiki and Herb have gone big time now, boasting their own off-Broadway show. I'm sure it's great, but I also suspect that something is lost in the new performances. Kiki and Herb have become theater, where before they were a drunken cabaret on acid, known only to those hip enough or famous enough to be let into the club, both the literal and the figurative ones. In a way, they have found validation. But I'm glad I was there to see the raw version; the one in an East Village basement nightclub with a two-drink minimum and a 10x15 stage.

Onward and upward, of course. Goals are good, but in this case the journey may have been even better.

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Sarah Stodola is the Managing Editor of Me Three.  She can be contacted at [email protected].

© 2003 Me Three