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In Las Vegas, an improbable city increasingly constructed out of replicas, no other vocation embodies the unbridled instinct to be something else than the ubiquitous impersonator
There are many things one might reasonably expect to experience in Las Vegas, though one should, and even must, be willing to embrace the unexpected. Potential surprises will have nowhere to emerge otherwise—surprises like finding one’s self in a room late at night with a 6’2” drag queen fluttering his peacock feather eyelashes over lime green contact lenses as he says, “I’ve got all the time in the world for you, honey… and I’m not just saying that.”
In such moments of unanticipated human intercourse, so to speak, one is presented with a variety of options, which can be reduced to a simple decision: to ignore the flight response or obey it. In this case, staying the course for the full interview proves the more fruitful choice, since, as drag queens go, Joey Arias—one of the more famous members of his community—is also certainly one of the most amiable (though that is, admittedly, something of a guess).
Arias is the host of
Zumanity, the Cirque de Soleil show playing at New York, New York, the large faux-NYC hotel on the south Las Vegas Strip.
The self-described “she-male” was (ironically, given
Zumanity’s location) a key figure in the drag underground in New York City in the late ’80s. His impersonation of Billie Holiday became so iconic that stars like Madonna and Andy Warhol lined up to see him perform.
Nowadays, he struts around the
Zumanity stage, pulling people out of the crowd, making lewd jokes and trying to get the audience to play along with his “Mistress of Seduction” routine.
“I was always drawn to the darker side of life,” he tells me, as he and I sit in a room high above the show’s stage. And this show, he says, “is a marriage of me and Zumanity, exposing people to this kind of element of our world. But I’m just one diamond on the bracelet here in Vegas… shining a bit more brightly than the others, of course.”
One of the other brightly shining diamonds on this bracelet would also certainly be Frank Marino as Joan Rivers in
La Cage at the Riviera.
Though it’s hard to imagine living unchanged with one’s self year after year after year, let alone living as Joan Rivers, Marino is now into his third decade impersonating the bitchy celebrity. He’s pulled it off, and put it on, for so long now that he’s an institution.
Other impersonators talk of him with the respect rookie college football coaches might talk about Joe Paterno. “He’s the king of drag in Vegas,” says Arias, though he undoubtedly meant “queen.”
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