Tiny Love Stories: ‘Also, He’s a Magician’
Blazing a Path Trading poodle skirts and blouses for trucker hats and flannels, decades before the term “gender nonconforming” entered the mainstream, Aunt Barbara stopped trying to fit into her Missouri farm town.
I innocently called her “Uncle Barbara” as a toddler. She always laughed. For all of her standing out, for the acceptance that she demanded and received, Barb’s inner life is unknowable.
Long gone from cancer, she left me two important gifts: a record of her courageous clothing preferences — deeply provocative in her time — captured in family photos, and a blazed path for her family to accept me, her gay nephew. — Dylan Connell The Magic Dress I was 27 and single when my real estate colleague offered me the file of a potential client, a handsome man seeking a larger home. “You take it, he’s single and cute,” she said. “Also, he’s a magician.” Laughing, I took it, swearing I’d never end up as a magician’s assistant.
Several months later, he offered to buy any dress I liked as long as I wore it in his show just once. That dress must have been enchanted, because I’m still regularly cut in half, vanishing and reappearing onstage, 25 years later. — Susan Wilcox Sing, Don’t Cry At my great-grandmother’s 100th birthday party, the D.J.
