Land's End: A Walk in Provincetown by Michael Cunningham Page B

their desks but glass cases full of stuffed birds, Indian artifacts, and petrified shells.
    Up a double flight of wooden stairs, past a mural of fishermen and cranberry pickers, is the auditorium, where town meetings are held. It is also available to anyone who needs to accommodate a large audience. The annual Provincetown AIDS Support Group auction is held there; Karen Finley, Barbara Cook, John Waters, and many others have appeared on its stage.
    The auditorium at Town Hall is a big, imperturbably stodgy room, with a bare wood floor and a matronly brown sweep of balcony overhead. It is more classically New England than most of the interiors in Provincetown; more stolid and dim; stingier about comfort. It is sad, anachronistic, and somehow rather grand; a thoroughly indifferent room that seems, even when full, to be empty in its heart; to be waiting patiently for these fools to finish up their business so it can return to its dark, musty contemplation of itself.
    The outdoor area in front of Town Hall, however, is far more gregarious. It is lined with wooden benches that were once, years ago, known as the meat rack, where gay men hung around after the bars closed. The benches are now mainly the province of weary tourists and the elderly, whether they are Portuguese women who’ve raised five children or former bad boys who have gotten too old to dance. In summer you will probably see someone performing for change there: a violinist or folk singer or mime, most likely. One summer a group called the Flying Neutrinos worked the bricks in front of town hall, a ragged group of adults and children (they said they were a family, and might in fact have been) who sang, in a way, and banged on various drums, tambourines, and xylophones. They were the rough local equivalent of Gypsies—they had that quality of treacherous seduction, that sly and defiant otherness. They lived on a houseboat moored off the East End, and all that summer you’d see one or more of them around town, dressed in motley clothes, cheerful if deeply odd, reminding Provincetown that even its people, in all their variety and outlandishness, were still part of a world larger and stranger than any of us can imagine. The next summer they were gone and have not been heard from since. Most recently the bricks were the preferred arena of a man in a clown suit who whistled incessantly and made balloon animals for children, and who was frequently drunk, which inspired him to shout insults at anyone he suspected of being homosexual. Next summer we feel confident that he too will have moved on and been replaced by someone else.
    T HE M AIN D RAG
    The center of town is also the theater district—the place you go to see drag, comedy, and other sorts of shows, at the Post Office Café, Vixen, Tropical Joe’s and, back a ways toward the West End, the Universalist church, Town Hall, Antro, and the Crown and Anchor. The acts vary from season to season, but you can rely, every summer, on seeing men perform not only as Judy Garland, Barbra Streisand, Bette Midler, et cetera, but as divas less often seen on the drag circuit, women like Joni Mitchell and Billie Holiday. They generally do their own singing—drag acts have, I’m glad to report, evolved beyond lip-sync. Some, of course, are better than others. I am especially fond of Pearline, who can only be described as a Sherman tank in a wig; Varla Jean Merman, who does a truly filthy rendition of “My Favorite Things” and another number that involves singing while consuming considerable quantities of cheese; and Randy Roberts. Randy is the only one of these people I know personally. Out of drag (or rather in his male drag—as RuPaul once said, “We’re born naked, and everything after that is drag”) he is a kind, intelligent, unassuming man who lives in Key West in the winters and Provincetown in the summers. In drag he is most visible as Cher, riding up and down Commercial Street to promote his show on a motorized