Enter the wacky, hilarious world of Paul Pearson
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BY CINDY LANGE - KUBICK / Lincoln Journal Star
So you don’t care for theater.
You wouldn’t be caught dead — really, now — at a drag show.
You don’t frequent costume shops, sniffing out feather boas, fake handcuffs, silver eyelashes, the ultimate in flapperwear.
And his name? It means nothing?
So. We’re good.
We love it.
Because even people who think they know Paul Pearson, director, designer, actor, drag queen, costume shop clerk — who think they know him because they’ve seen his stuff, his wacky, zany, outrageous, incredible, hilarious stuff — don’t necessarily.
Which means we can start fresh. …
... with 120 girls and one boy
Before we get to all those girls at William J. Palmer High School in Colorado Springs, let’s start with the women.
The women in white who cared for a baby boy born at the Child Saving Institute in Omaha in the spring of 1949.
For three months, baby Paul with all those nurses.
Maybe that’s why he’s so female-identified, Paul says, wearing Mardi Gras beads on Fat Tuesday, listening to John Waters from behind the counter at Fringe and Tassel, a costume shop tucked under the O Street viaduct.
He’s thought about it.
But, really, who knows?
Paul is open to that, too. Who knows?
The fact is, he was born in an orphanage and adopted three months later and went home to Geneva, the only child of J. Wilber and Muriel Pearson.
His adoptive mother was beautiful but aloof. And his adoptive father was dynamic and warm.
And Paul, well, everybody said the same thing, “My, he’s precocious.”
And because he had asthma, his parents took him to live in Colorado Springs.
Where he was clever and outgoing.
Where he started fads, like getting all the fourth-grade boys to wear clip-on bow ties for a week.
Where he developed an interest in fun houses and freak shows.
Where, when he had a sixth-grade assignment to write a paper entitled “What I want to be when I grow up,” he vacillated between airline pilot and actor.
Where he went to the high school gym one day with his Beatles haircut and his dad and 120 of his fellow students, all girls, and tried out to be the school’s first male cheerleader since World War II.
And didn’t make it.
Although, as fate — fate? — would have it, a few years later he ended up in Crete, Neb., and got another chance.
And cheered his heart out (while his enthusiasm lasted) for the Doane Tigers.
And although the gay man, now a widower, a father of two grown daughters, believes the universe to be an indifferent place, that doesn’t mean it hasn’t given him what he’s wanted these 58 years.
The chance to be an actor. A father. A director. A mentor. A lover. A friend. A boy cheerleader.
“I even wanted to be a stripper once, and I got to do that.”
Paul shrugs his shoulders, his eyebrows arch.
He laughs, a signature Paul Pearson laugh, the laugh his friends all talk about, a laugh that his actors all hear from the stage, a laugh that makes him seem bigger than his 5-foot-10-inches, a laugh that says …
So? See? It all works out. Isn’t life grand?
Larry reviews Paul
Before we return to Paul growing up, coming out, getting married — although not necessarily in that order — let’s go forward.
Let’s see what hard-to-please local theater critic Larry Kubert has had to say about Paul’s stage work over the years.
As director of “James and the Giant Peach”: “… then there is Pearson’s personal inventive brilliance … who but Pearson would have thought to add … rap and yodeling to a kid’s show. … The man is simply ingenious enough to get inside a child’s mind. …”
As director of “The Little Prince”: “… a production so inviting, so enchanting, so plain and simply good.”
As director of “Quasimodo” and “Vampire Lesbians of Sodom”: “… as directed by that wacky master of mayhem and wanton lasciviousness.”
Don’t get the critic wrong. He hasn’t loved everything Paul has brought to the stage.
As director of “Quills”: “… the play is an exaggerated and overwrought endeavor that engages in bleak histrionics to deliver a raw and desolate message. …”
He didn’t care much for his acting in “Standing on My Knees” either, Paul remembers.
“And, you know, he was right.”
Today, being a director is about the best job Paul can imagine. He’ll take the occasional brutal review.
But, before all that there was …
Paul and Annie (and David)
Paul and Annie met at Doane. He asked her to homecoming.
She said no.
He was all long hair and drama department and partying.
She was an Earth Mother. She was smart. She thought he was funny.
And, eventually, they became engaged.
By then, his father, the man who hugged him and told him he loved him after the failed cheerleading episode, was dead. Suicide, three days after the start of Paul’s second semester.
His grades by junior year were miserable when a dorm counselor called him in. What’s going on?
Paul had been depressed since losing his dad. And then there was that feeling he had, that attraction to men, he didn’t have a word for.
He met with the counselor three times. They brought Annie in, too. So he could tell her.
Annie knew.
“But she hadn’t figured out how to tell me about myself.”
They married anyway. Why? Because life is complicated. Because they loved each other. Because Annie was the finest person Paul would ever know.
College was over for Paul by then. His mom died the summer of 1971 — cancer — and after that his grades didn’t recover.
He took up as Buddy Starr — part David Bowie, part Lou Reed, part Tammy Wynette — and traveled the Midwest doing his drag show act.
The act evolved. Buddy Star and the Starletts. The Mime to Madness Revue. The Screaming Kupcakes.
Day jobs brought in money: regional center worker, machinist, clerk.
The marriage was open. An extended family, Paul says. David was Annie’s lover and Paul’s best friend.
They all lived together in a big house on 13th Street.
The Ritz, a friend dubbed it.
It wasn’t perfect.
Annie kicked Paul out once.
They nearly got divorced.
They talked to a counselor friend once, Annie, Paul and David.
Annie was pregnant.
How should we handle it? They asked.
Don’t tell anybody your situation, he advised.
They went home and decided that was a terrible idea. They believed something, says their daughter Molly.
“If you’re going to live outside the norm, you should do it to the fullest.”
The way Paul sees things
1. I don’t think things in life are generally black and white.
2. I look at the world as funny.
3. Even though I’m narcissistic and greedy, I’m not that way all of the time.
4. I think patience is a poor excuse for a virtue.
5. Love is going to happen to all of us. Death is going to happen to all of us. Laughter is going to happen to all of us. Disappointment is going to happen to all of us.
6. 3-D Gel makes the best fake bullet holes.
Scene from the costume shop
Paul behind the counter. GAP hoodie, blue jeans, handlebar mustache, deep-set eyes, hands moving (and moving) as he talks (and talks).
A customer walks in.
She wanders, a middle-aged woman in a winter coat, brown hair pulled into a ponytail.
She approaches the counter.
Excuse me, do you have anything that will turn my hair gray?
Paul’s hands fly up, waving beside his face.
His mouth opens. Out comes a horror movie scream.
A pause. Laughter. His (loud). Hers (not so loud).
“That didn’t work? Spray on or comb in?”
Paul and death
Paul has been a single dad for the past 14 years.
He is the legal father of Megan, 28, and Molly, 20.
David was their biological father. In 1989, he died of complications from HIV.
Annie died of AIDS on an April morning in 1994.
Paul has tried to write about it. He can’t get past that first page.
The phone ringing at the house on 13th Street.
“I can’t talk right now. I think Annie just died.”
The phone ringing again.
“I can’t talk right now. Annie just died.”
He’d left her side for just a moment. Cowboy Junkies playing on the stereo. Molly on the computer, a second-grader, playing Paintbrush.
There was an initial pang of guilt — I had walked away leaving her alone.
That was followed by The Knowing: It was time to go. Nothing more to do here. Nothing more to say.
Holding your hand wouldn’t have held you here.
His father, his mother, his best friend, his wife, countless friends.
Death feels like a theme. Each loss a rehearsal.
He feels it, the older he gets.
Every five years he puts on the wig, the lashes, lip-syncs his way around a bar.
For his 55th birthday he staged “Buddy Starr’s Pictures of an Exhibitionist.”
He told the crowd he didn’t feel middle-aged anymore.
“I don’t know that many people who are 110 years old.”
If he makes it to 60, Buddy will be back.
He’s already got a title: “That Sync-ing Feeling: A Love Story.”
Bad habits (according to Paul)
Smoking.
Procrastinating.
Watching too much television.
Poor housekeeping.
Talking about himself too much.
Paul the (off stage) father
Molly and Paul had a ritual.
Instead of storybooks before bed, they sang two songs: “Lullaby of Broadway” and “42nd Street.”
Only Paul could get the little girl to sleep.
“You still remember those songs?” he asks her now. “You’re going to need those to come home from college.”
Molly grew up at The Futz, a small theater Paul opened after her mom died.
She watched him doll-up for drag shows.
He nurtured her creative side. He let her make mistakes. She could talk to him about anything.
“It didn’t seem strange at all. He’d come to my little school assemblies and people would be like, ‘Whoa, who’s that guy?’”
She wouldn’t trade a moment.
“I love him so much. If they can’t understand him, that’s the way it goes.”
This spring Paul will walk her older sister down the aisle. Megan was angry after her mom died — father and daughter were estranged, but they’ve mended.
After 30 years at The Ritz, Paul has downsized. He lives in a bungalow, has a roommate.
Every week he makes a pilgrimage to Barnes and Noble. Watches TV. Subscribes to four or five magazines, keeping tabs on pop and gay culture.
He’s happiest when he’s working on a show. Right now he’s doing costumes for “Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day” at the Lincoln Community Playhouse.
“A lot of people wouldn’t believe this,” Molly says, “but when he’s home he’s completely boring.”
The quotable Paul
“Because I have this ability to make something flashy and I’m also fond of shallowness, I have a tendency to apply that to my work.”
“I usually try to talk to kids like they are adults (and vice versa when necessary).”
“Very few people are going to get close to me and not get a hug.”
“I have been known to be sulking, depressed, mean-spirited, aggressively insulting and have entertained thoughts of my own demise — but I am mostly an optimist, with a dose of cynicism.”
“Sometimes I accidentally make art. Usually I make entertainment, and that’s OK, too.”
“I’ve got a good resume. I’ve got a point of view. Just gimmee some work.”
“I do think it’s stupid that everyone can’t get married. Don’t we all have the right to be as miserable as Britney Spears?”
Paul and impressions (first and last)
He’s played one of Cinderella’s evil step-sisters and painted whiskers for 50 human CATS. He’s directed serious productions on AIDS and staged melodramas for the developmentally disabled.
For six summers he’s directed the Beatrice Children’s Theater.
Karen Reynolds remembers the first time she met him — that booming voice, that raucous laugh, that Castro Street meets Larry the Cable Guy look.
They’re letting HIM influence my child this summer?
Now she’s seen the passion he has, the patience, the way he can turn a single line into a spectacular theatrical moment.
“Paul has been — and continues to be — a role model for my son.”
Rhonda Lake worked with Paul in the ‘90s at the Lincoln Community Playhouse.
He’s caring, smart, open, a great director, one of her favorite people in the world, she says.
“Oh, and of course his laugh. Who doesn’t love to hear him laugh?”
Ward Lewis was 22 when he met Paul in the early 1980s.
He’d come to Lincoln from a small town, uncomfortable with being gay, hiding behind his weight, his hair, a bad attitude.
Paul greeted him from a bar stool.
“Get away from me, I’m fat,” Ward growled back.
So?
Later that night they talked. Ward cried. He left town. Lost 150 pounds and all that hair and eventually returned.
“Who knew exactly what he said, but I know I thought about it all the way home and every day after that for a long time.
“I just knew I wanted to be that kind of comfortable person.”
That comfortable person
That’s it.
Sorry, we never did figure out where all the crazy, wacky, hilarious ideas come from.
They just come, Paul says, and he writes them down. Dresses them up. Waits for the chance to put them on a stage.
At the costume shop, if you like, he’ll make you a bullet hole out of 3-D Gel, and dust it with powder with a sort of manic joy.
He understands if people don’t take to him right away.
Once, one of the parents of a new kid in the children’s theater told him, “I wasn’t sure I liked you.”
Paul nodded.
“Well,” he answered, “I take some getting used to.”
Reach Cindy Lange-Kubick at 473-7218 or clangekubick@journalstar.com.
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