FISH, DORIS

Transvestite actress, comedienne, San Francisco, 1953 - 1991

From "The Memoirs, Volume Two" -

            About half way through the first day of our Hug-A-Hunk booth, a new drag queen appeared, this one not Latino and just showed up and volunteered to take a spell as M.C.  Her name was Doris Fish and she was slaying 'em.  I was watching from across the street and whispered to Jefferey, get her number!  We would use her again.

            The following year, 1990, we started early on another booth for the AIDS Emergency Fund.  This one would be called Care-A-Thon.  I drew up a little sketch and said I knew just who that little lady on the stage should be.

            I called Doris Fish to come talk about it.  After our Hug-A-Hunk experience, she said sure!  She got the idea right away.

            Well, it was a big hit, and long remembered.  Doris Fish soon attracted an enormous crowd and occasionally would draw the audience’s attention to our good-natured neighboring booths, encouraging their patronage, on both sides of us as they were completely smothered by the overflow crowd watching our show.

            She changed her outfit a half-dozen times, once into a Marie Antoinette drag, below.

            Doris was playing around town and getting a lot of ink in the papers.

            Doris got all the cute boyfriends, of course.  Marcel ...!

            And she loved to play famous ladies, of course.

            One of her favorites was the evil bitch, Barbara Bush.  Gee, it's hard to tell which is Doris, isn't it?

            She even did a big benefit show for herself at the nearby Victoria Theater.  She called it:

            She entered the stage doing cart-wheels to thunderous applause.  Less than a year later, she had died of AIDS.

            Doris taught us all what a drag queen should be.

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   ...NEXT:  GIOVANI