From SLUG Magazine
by Princess Kennedy
Issue 250 / October 2009
I’ve been writing my column for a year now and I hope I’ve helped readers of SLUG realize that this gender-bending world I live in isn’t as cut and dry as a feather boa and a fierce lyp-sync at the club. I myself was born with a very complex persona, but my rich theatrical background has spawned many a side character I play with and bring out of the armoire every now and again.
Let’s see, there’s Christy Yummycochie, who’s my Asian porn persona, Corvette Summers, a coke whore madam, Rotunda Bunsagger, the obese shut-in, Mozilla Foxfire, an afro-sporting cyber crime detective, Fawn Vonblondenberg, my wild socialite heiress, and Viola Ated, a 16-year-old polygamist compound child bride.
This isn’t stuff that’s just born off the rhinestone cuff. To help delve into the complex richness of character development, I spent an afternoon with the co-creators of Salt Lake City’s very own theater darling and major gay rights activist, Sister Dottie Dixon. If you’ve grown up in Salt Lake, Dottie Dixon is someone that you’ve met before––a mother, aunt or maybe a neighbor. I sat with actor Charles Frost and activist Troy Williams, who explained why it took two men to create such a powerful matriarch.
Three years ago, Williams (who is the Public Affairs Director and RadioActive Producer for KRCL) was doing the now defunct half hour program Now Queer This. Williams felt that the program could use a little light heartedness to invert the heavy narrative of the show’s material––bashings, suicides and drug addictions that sometimes run rampantly through the gay community. Sounds like most of my mornings.
To achieve this goal, Williams approached Frost, a decade long friend and respected thespian, to help head up this relief society. Frost felt overwhelmed with the prospect of writing, recording and editing a weekly satire, but eventually rose to the challenge and Sister Dottie was born. A housewife from Spanish Fork (Spaneesh Fark), Dottie is in her 50s with a gay son, Donny and husband Don, who is a laid-off steel worker from Geneva. Frost pulled many of the best mormantics for Dottie from his Spanish Fork born and bred mother and her besties.
READ THE REST OF THE INTERVIEW HERE
Charles Lynn Frost, who plays Sister Dottie in The Passion of Dottie S. Dixon: Second Helpings, has been released from the hospital following his illness with pneumonia caused by complications from two forms of flu (including that pesky H1N1!). He is recuperating, and expects to be fully recovered long before he appears on stage for the January performances.
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