Knock at my bedroom door, loud, uncompromising, not to be ignored. The music in my head diminishes and twists away, the real bongos sputter and cease, lights up, movie’s done. It’s my mother at the door.

What would you say if you found your ten-year-old son performing a drag show?

My mother says, Son.

I haven’t learned to recognize it yet, the look on her face, the crinkled skin around the eyes, the mouth somehow fallen, but I recognize it now, in memory: she’s drunk.

She says, Werner, you get on home now.

She says, What are you doing?

I say, Werner and I are putting on a show, explaining about Tom Thumb’s Wedding, and how there will be many musical numbers, how we’re going to sell tickets, and even as I’m saying it I know I wasn’t really planning to do these things. Only a game. No, more than that: what I liked was the daydream of the performance, how I could feel utterly free, dreamed and improvised Judy, because Werner wasn’t about to judge anything.

She says, “You can’t do that for the neighbors.”

Now I’m wilting; whatever flamed up in me in my singing is wavering and chilly now. I know, all the way through, that she isn’t going to love me the same way now. Am I standing there with the filmy piece of red chiffon limp in my hand? Am I wearing her lipstick? I feel blank; I have no explanations.

She says, with a hiss, with shame and with exasperation, Son, you’re a boy.

And now a performance begins again, this time not a movie but a play, no set for this one but darkness, one little island of light in which a boy and his mother stand, in absolute silence, as if there were a vacuum around them, and the play has begun just as their dialogue is over. Nothing else to say. It’s a stopping place. How can they move? They’re held there in the mother’s disappointment, her fear for what her son will become. His dissolute future spreads out in front of her like an oil slick: shameful, worthless, sick.

And they’re held frozen also in the son’s fear and shame, since of course he knows he’s a boy, doesn’t need reminding. The fact that she feels she must tell him this means he has failed: he isn’t who she wanted, he absolutely does not know how to be who she wanted. And wasn’t he also somehow like her, wasn’t he coming close to who she was, herself a vulnerable Judy, jazzed on a vodkaand-speed cocktail of her own devising?