"Lady Chablis host for fashion event"
(1.45 minute read)
Source: The Florida Times Union
Times Union staff writer: Sharon Weightman
Date and location: Jacksonville, Friday, May 15, 1998
Tomorrow's show at The Florida Theatre is billed as featuring "female impersonators", but The Lady Chablis rises above that term. When she sings onstage, she's just "borrowing" other artists' songs, she says in her publicity material. "I work too hard to be impersonating someone else, honey", she said. "I am an original. I impersonate myself." There will be other impersonators, though, when The Taste of New York Female Impersonators Fashion Show hits the stage at 8 p.m. tomorrow at the Florida Theatre.
Hosted by The Lady Chablis and co-hosted by Tiffany from Miami, the show will present female impersonators Jened, Josephine, Afrika, Modiva, Godeeva and Terra-X from New York clubs like Tunnel and Sound Factory. The evening will include comedy, fashion and house music by DJ Kinetic. But the main attraction, of course, will be The Lady Chablis. When The Lady Chablis was born in the Florida town of Quincy, the name on the birth certificate read Benjamin Edward Knox.
She knew very early that she didn't fit that name or gender, Chablis told People magazine in 1996. By the time she was 14, she dressed only as a woman, and by the time she was 17, she had begun performing for a drag act. Although her nightclub act in Savannah, Ga., had given her a measure of celebrity; it was John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil that brought her wider fame.
When the best-selling book was made into a movie, many critics lauded Chablis as the highlight of the film. Plans are in the works for a movie about her own life, as revealed in her autobiography, 'Hiding My Candy'. Chablis has been known to end her act with this remark: "If you enjoyed the show, my name is The Lady Chablis. If you didn't enjoy the show, may name is John Berendt."
Here is an online excerpt of it:
https://www.questia.com/newspaper/1G1-57455463/lady-chablis-host-for-fashion-event
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