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DuBarry isn’t old. Vintage, maybe, like some of her spectacular clothing, but certainly not old. The legendary drag queen celebrated her 80th birthday — “Double 40,” she corrects — on Wednesday, and Toronto’s gay community marked the milestone with a gala and a tribute show. DuBarry still performs and entertains with her wit (“This was my old boyfriend,” she says when we walked by the statue of Alexander Wood). She still makes her rounds of the Village and shares stories from when she was with The Great Imposters, a travelling drag queen troupe.
[For a photo slideshow of Michelle through the ages, click here. ]
In her anecdotes, she always describes what she was wearing. Like the time she fell down a flight of stairs at a downtown movie theatre — she was wearing a short mini-dress, a picture hat, pointy-toed high heels with bows on the back and a white fox stole — and a man helped her, adding: “Here’s your heel, lady.”
Or the time she attended the Halloween party at St. Charles Tavern — “I had this gorgeous hand-tied blond wig” — and a mob outside pelted her with eggs. “I went home and changed. Put on a red wig and came back out again.
Source: National Post