Bios

Meet the Cast of the Real Dream Cabaret...

DORA is the house manager and door girl of the Real Dream Cabaret. She has a long history of being door girl in such reputable establishments as the Cotton Club, the Grand Ole Opry, Studio 54, Miss Tina’s House of Delights, Wal-Mart, and Cabaret Parasito - which was, of course, her favorite. The Parasito was Dora's first experience in Buffalo and she's likely not to leave. Miss Dora’s other talents include taming large wild animals (and small domesticated ones), knife throwing, bubble blowing, and over 30 tricks involving unicycles. She would like to thank her family, friends and the Church of Scientology for this opportunity.

LIEULIEU DEUXFLEUR is the last of the spawn of Monkey Girl and Alligator Man, the World’s Strangest Married Couple and a well-known sideshow act. She came of age on the midway in Gibsonton, Florida eating corndogs and fried dough. Her first performance was Daughter of Monkey Girl, but her desire to break away from the family fold led her through various incarnations and reinventions of self, resulting in performances such as BatGirl (brought on by visions of grandeur relating to nocturnal tendencies); CatWoman (Dufour’s love of sleep); Wasp Woman (her tendency to float like a butterfly and sting like a bee); and the World’s Tallest Midget (inferiority complex). Deuxfleur traversed the sideshow circuit until the age of political correctness and the resulting downfall of the “sideshow freak.” She relocated to Millersville, Pennsylvania, where she became the assistant manager of a Wilson Farms, but after two days of frying french fries in chicken grease, she left a note for the manager and, stealthlike, escaped in the dead of night. She found her home briefly in Bumping Grind, a Canadian avant-garde circus based in Alberta. E.C.W. Pernell, Grind’s visionary, soon fell in love with Dufour and promoted her from an anthropomorphic seaweed to a banana-eating sea monkey in the Living Liquid Ladies installation. She found herself in an illicit affair with Plastic Woman, a contortion artist from Paris; in a fit of anger, Pernell accused Dufour of intentionally trying to “thwart and sabotage surrealism” by not eating the bananas correctly and fired her. She found herself in Toronto and, on the brink of success with her one-woman show, Danse de la Femme et les Cigarettes, was caught as the culprit of a long string of vintage clothing cat burglaries in Kensington Market, where she left graffitied notes on living room walls that said “I’m sorry, but do you have a flapper dress I could borrow?” She finally found one when she burglarized the home of a well-known Toronto-based performance artist. Feeling successful in her mission, she politely returned the dress to its owner and two days later turned herself over to the authorities. After serving five years in a provincial penitentiary, Deauxfleur moved to Buffalo in search of art and work. If anyone has a lead on a flapper dress, please do let her know.

KITTY JUNG traces her roots to the medieval noble class of Beckelheim, West Franconia and counts Hildegard von Bingen among her illustrious ancestors. The Jung family fell on hard times during the eighteenth century. Some of Kitty’s family left for the new world, settling in South Central Pennsylvania and making the famed slipware pottery of that region. Kitty’s great, great-grandparents, however, stayed in Germany and became laborers in a pretzel factory. As a fifth generation pretzel twister, Kitty was a protege to the master Fritz Schneider. Alas, she did not love her work. Kitty left the factory compound in the dead of night in 1993 to seek her fortune as a cabaret performer.

COMRADE LAMPKIN’S story is told elsewhere and may or may not be trustworthy.

JACK PAPIER was born in Breakneck, New York in a tiny artist’s colony for GM-“employed” blue-collar tradesmen located near a major military base, which brought diversity and cable TV to the rural area. Threatened by a career filling thermometers and blood-pressure gauges with mercury, Jack moved to Buffalo to test subsistence farming in fields of asphalt and giant plates of Friday-evening fish fry. The agricultural attempts failed miserably, but the curious smell drew the attention of notorious high-wire artist Tim McPeek, who, along with songstress Penny Lee, introduced Jack to a community of “bleu cheese transcendentalists” who showed Jack that spirit and community can, in fact, flourish in Buffalo’s urban, rust-belt landscape.

RONAWANDA is a professional gender disillusionist born and raised in Tonawanda, Mississippi sometime after the Great War. At the tender age of 3, he or she (we’ll stick with the latter for simplicity’s sake) exhibited an affinity for the piano. Her initial enthusiasm waned, however, after she learned that it was not intended to peel or slice potatoes or any other vegetables. Disenchanted, she joined the circus as a teenager, where she learned the value of shiny headgear in drawing a crowd. Despite her utter inability to carry a tune, she recorded sixteen albums of torch songs during a five-year period in an attempt to send a subtle message to her lover that their relationship was doomed. Alas, he neglected to listen them and the couple remained together for another thirteen miserable years as a result. Ronawanda’s acclaimed one-person show Meine Buckett Hast Eine Holle In It consisted entirely of country-and-western novelty songs translated into a vaguely Germanic-sounding gibberish. The production was nominated for nine Tinglemacher awards, including Outstanding Accomplishment with an Eyebrow Pencil, but sadly did not win a single one.

SIGMUND THE SATISFACTORY has been performing magic for the past 50 years, delighting few and giving hundreds a banal way to pass the time. Recently upgraded from “Sloppy” to “Satisfactory” by the Magicians’ Guild, Sigmund is primarily known for such daring tricks as “The Detachable Thumb” and “The Magic Vibrating Wand.” Sigmund was reluctantly invited to join the Real Dream Cabaret after repeatedly threatening to cut Ronawanda in half.

THE STAGE MASTER abandoned a sizable trust fund and his parents’ Westchester home after attending a performance of the Real/Dream Cabaret during its off-off Broadway run. He was immediately smitten with Ronawanda and returned the next night. He inserted himself into the crew, despite having no previous experience in theater, simply to be near her. He soon found that the position of stage manager perfectly suited his sadistic temperament. As the years passed and with only Ronawanda’s torch songs to sustain him, the Stage Master became bitter and angry. He turned to drinking and gambling to pass the miserable years of his life. Finding these activities to be too healthy and life affirming, he has since taken to courting death. His frequent bouts of food poisoning and outbreaks of venomous festering pustules have only served to further erode his humanity. His only notable accomplishment to date was an Honorable Mention in the International Low-tide Fishing Competition, a hobby that explains the redolent miasma which surrounds the Stage Master and nearly earned him the nickname “Stinky”-but only nearly, because he immediately stabbed the man who dared to voice it.

Some people look at the world and ask "why?" THE WHY (NOT!) GUY looks at the world and asks "oh my God, did you see Gossip Girl last night?" TWN!G is well-known in the graphic design community for his razor-sharp wit and fearless (some might even say reckless) use of the Franklin Gothic family of typefaces. After making his stage debut as Scrooge in Webster Elementary School's weekend-long production of A Christmas Carol, TWN!G took the next 29 years off from performing to pursue other interests before making a triumphant return to the stage with the Real Dream Cabaret in a performance that had critics raving (Richard Huntington of the Buffalo News called him "...another man dressed as a Levitra tablet.") He is an outspoken advocate for various social and humanitarian causes, including sensibly-portioned meals and hygienic food handling, issues close to his heart after an unfortunate incident involving off-brand mayonnaise at a mid-August family reunion.