Blessed Sisters and Cross Dressing: Christmas in City Hall
Monday, 20 December 2010, 5:10 pm
by Binoy Kampmark
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL1012/S00184/blessed-sisters-and-cross-dressing-christmas-in-city-hall.htmThe much admired rotunda is filled with anticipation. The audience gathered within San Francisco City Hall awaits the annual Tree of Hope Lighting ceremony. They are in for a treat of contradictions, a pastiche, a pantomime. Towering transvestites in immaculate dresses with pin-point stilettos; the 'queer nuns' of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, an order armed with Christmas glitter set to banish rather than farm guilt; Rev. Nobuaki Hanaoka, a survivor of the atom bomb; a comedian Marga Gomez, and a jazz rendition by Veronica Klaus.
[...]
With the Christmas tree lit, the charming and arresting Veronica Klaus, a transsexual blonde with smoky voice, appears with her jazz troopers. They perch themselves on the stair case leading up to the tree. Klaus made much mileage with her gender reassignment surgery in 2006, speaking of her privates as 'my remodeled rumpus room'. The audience is enraptured.
