Boys just want to have fun

What: Drag shows, held once a month, usually on a Saturday.

Where: The Q Bar, 226 S. Ninth St.

When: Shows usually start between 9 and 10 p.m.

Cost: Admission varies. Certain shows are 19 and over.

Inside the Q, the backstage dressing room is crammed with lit cigarettes, strangling corsets and goopy cosmetics. Clouds of powder and smoke suffocate their occupants, fluorescent ghosts in the glow. The sounds of belches and hair-spray chime the coming hour.

The curtain will rise in less than two, and Jason McMorris needs to become a woman.

"Beat the hell out of your eyebrows," he barks to a man slapping down pale powder. "And I need clear tape for my boobs."

"Yeah, me, too."

"Yeah, I'll need that."

Tonight, Jason and an 18-member cast will suffer bruises, blisters, welts and other bodily punishment. Some guys will become girls; some girls will become guys. Few will maintain their biological genders tonight.

This is Jason's gig, a birthday gift to himself. A $2,000, eight-weeks-in-the-works drag show in a medley of song and dance from Baz Luhrmann's flick "Moulin Rouge."

Jason's done well; the scene is just as dizzying and faux-glam as the pop musical Nicole Kidman made famous.

Jason hasn't been to bed before 3 a.m. in a month. He can't count the hours spent stitching ruffles, though he knows each underskirt has enough thread to encircle Memorial Stadium.

"It hurts to be beautiful," is the drag queens' credo, as the men tape, pluck and paint themselves into their female personas: Fanta Cee, Skyler, Jewels.

Some queens dress to be someone they're not; others want to be more like themselves. All of them want to entertain.

Jason, who will soon become Jezi Bel, explains a drag queen wants to portray a woman for a only few hours, not a lifetime.

"Those are transgenders," he said. "(Drag) is about illusion. It is just for theatrical purposes. And the best part is that we get to be boys again."

It will be a few more hours, though.

For now, the men transform themselves - from the truck driver, the state immigration services employee, the cosmetologist, the massage therapist into a troupe of sparkling, saucy divas.

Backstage, Jason ties his hair back. The mirror reveals a 5 o'clock shadow.

Behind him, Sarah Buhrman is gasping. With every yank of the laces, the buxom woman brims out of her corset, two fleshy dots evident beneath a white sheath.

Jason brakes.

"Honey, I will not have your nipples showing. That's tacky. You need a bra. Go find one," he snaps. Someone is on it before the last sentence ends.

Jason returns to his reflection, hand running over stubble. He contemplates the burn of a dry shave or the telling mug of the Bearded Lady.

"Oh, fuck it," Jason says, razor to cheek. He begins.

***

In true mom sensibility, Connie Martin wishes her son would have started sooner.

It is the night before Jason's 28th birthday, still hours away from "A Night at the Moulin Rouge," and can-can dresses are still being sewn.

The basement of Jason's house resembles a sweatshop: yards of satin hug the walls, bandit rhinestones on the run, metal boning hacked to pieces, orphaned thread clings everywhere.

For the past six weeks, the pace has been relentless. Sans the men's suits, shoes and pantyhose, every costume is handmade. The staffs at JoAnns Fabrics and Wal-Mart now know each cast member by name. Each underskirt has consumed six spools of thread at 350 yards a piece. Jezi Bel's tiara, built from 3-inch copper wire and faux emerald stones and pearls, waits on the mantle.

Tonight, Jim Hurlburt, Nick Woodard and Julia Eilers work the sewing machines, spewing out yards and yards of ruffles. Their sarcasm flies just as fast as the needle.

On the couch, Connie sits, a quiet overseer with hands folded almost in prayer. The petite, soft-spoken woman is the crew's biggest critic; like all children, they care what Mom thinks - of their stitching, their stilettos, their solos.

"You know, I have two daughters, and when they were growing up, I told them they had to act like ladies and to be classy," she says. "And so when (Jason) went into drag, I said well, OK. But you have to be classy and act like a lady. And he does. But sometimes, he ... well, you know, gets off track. But that's the man in him."

Jason, in his fourth year in drag, says he "fell into it by accident." While doing makeup for a show, one of the queens got sick. Somebody had to fill in.

"I was petrified to perform as a woman at that point; I didn't know how to walk or act. It seemed odd to me to be playing the other role," said Jason, who had acted in theater before. Now the guy's a drag champ: as Jezi Bel, Jason won Lincoln's Miss City Sweetheart contest last February.

"Thank God! It's almost over," he sighed, his yearlong reign almost over. Title-holders keep a busy schedule, often performing shows for charities such as Toys for Tots, Friendship Home and the Nebraska AIDS Project, Jason said. But the journey to a drag queen title is slow and steady.

"When we all start, we look really, really bad," he said. "We have to blot out the boy parts, and that's the hardest part to learn."

Queens get trade secrets from seasoned pros, makeup books and just plain practice. But "paint by numbers," as the process is sometimes called, isn't the hardest part to do.

"It's where to put our boy parts," Jason said. "The corsets bruise, but it's the hardest to tape things where they are not meant to go."

After a performance, when the numbing high of adrenaline (and perhaps pain) vanishes, the drag queens rush to become men again.

"Suddenly, afterward, it feels like your whole body has been beaten with a pipe," Jason said. "It looks like a woman just exploded in my living room, with a trail of garments everywhere. It's true and utter heaven when that last bit of eyeliner is finally scrubbed off."

***

Backstage, their names start to ebb and flow.

From Jim to Mystic, Nick to Fanta Cee, Jason to Jezi.

With each layer of panstick and pantyhose, pronouns of "she" begin to replace "he." A swagger creeps into their steps, stained lips turn pursed, eyelashes flicker with flirtation.

"Tits 'til Tuesday!"

"Duct it, baby!"

"Life's a bitch - and then you look like one!"

The catcalls ensue as curtain time approaches.

Players swarm the dressing room in pursuit of cinchers, feather boas, heels and deodorant. Mystic survives the garish chaos with smokes and Pepsi.

"I'd prefer a cocktail, but we're not allowed," Mystic says wistfully, cigarette dangling in her lips. Alcohol makes for a slippery chorus line. Instead, the cast sips water through straws.

The Q holds monthly house shows on Saturdays, which usually entail a rapid succession of individual drag queens performing solos, said Sean Applegate, the Q's entertainment director.

"Some people worry because it's a 'gay bar,' but this isn't (Showtime's) 'Queer As Folk' with everyone touching each other. That kind of stuff doesn't happen here," he said.

Out in the club, high-top tables and booths fill up. Connie, of course, has a front-row seat of the catwalk. Jason's friend, Meredith Hrubi, sits beside her. Both wow over the metamorphosis.

"(Drag queens) learn the stuff that nobody teaches girls," Hrubi said.

Connie, the ever watchful mother, says of Jezi: "She's done better than she's ever done before in the past. She's really improved. And I'm so proud of him."

At a back table, Tim Blizard has sat this show out. In face, he is Tasha DeVor, a 20-year-veteran of the drag circuit. Blizard calls drag an art that's "the best way to compliment a woman."

Once inside their cocoons, drag queens find a new appreciation for women. It takes just as long to get into face as to dress, which is about two hours, Jezi said. The list of garments is stifling: two 2-inch foam pads cut in the shape of Africa to form curvy hips, two to three pairs of tights to hide leg hair, tucking underwear to create the "man-gina," one to three corsets or cinchers to suck in guts, tape or makeup to form cleavage and stuffing to fill out brassieres. The body now is a blank canvas, to be painted how each queen prefers.

"When people don't know my boy face from my girl face, that's good. It means I'm doing my job. If you can tell it's Jason underneath, then I'm not doing it right. If you're not doing it right, then you're just a boy in a dress," Jezi said.

It's 9:30 p.m. The crowd is thick with pomade, bleached tips, Marlboros, martinis, stage lights and silhouettes.

Up front, Alisha Arnold sits at her first drag show. Her former boyfriend Joe Van Ansdale, a 22-year-old health aid, offered to pay the $6 cover.

"I just had to drag my ex-girlfriend to a drag show," Van Ansdale said.

Said Arnold: "Some people are uncomfortable with a guy in drag. But some (men) do a really good job to look exactly like a woman."

Backstage falls eerily silent, a stark contrast from its earlier "drag hell," as makeup assistant Aaron Sundberg dubbed it. Jezi reminds the ensemble "beauty is pain."

Jezi slips her feet into clear slides reminiscent of Cinderella's slippers. Soon, the drag courtesans will parade through the audience. Feather tails will tickle noses. A mélange of Elton John, Madonna, Nirvana and The Beatles will collide and falsies will slip. Like any stage production, the cast is nervous and ready to perform.

The curtain rises, the queens rush out, the crowd hushes. Let the burlesque begin.

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