“We take over downtown Sarasota every Friday
night,” says the now-renowned hostess Ms. Beneva Fruitville. Buxom, usually blonde, with long
eyelashes and girdled-tight rear, she’s the alter-ego of actor and singer Berry
Ayers. Slim but curvy brunette co-star Ms. Lindsay Carlton, self-styled First
Lady of Sarasota, would be the first to agree. S/he and Bingo-caller
Beneva, named after a city street that crosses guess-what-other street,
perked up the Golden Apple from a
moribund late summer season when huge construction projects surrounded and
obscured the theatre’s existence and cut off usual parking spaces. At about the
same time, a café that had hosted DQB sessions closed and Ayers became
production coordinator at the Golden Apple. As Sarasota granted free valet
parking in public lots to Apple owner Robert Ennis Turoff, head of its
producing organization, he
approved Ayers’s venture. “Drag Queen Bingo” is, after all, theatre more truly
than a game. The result: full houses for “Drag Queen Bingo” on Fridays and
increased audiences for Golden Apple’s main bill other days.
Although changes, notably in improvised
dialogue, are made for special
dates (Halloween with everyone in costume was especially memorable and
Christmas Eve featured an appearance by a Fruitville Mary and appropriate Baby doll with manger lined
in tinsel), “Drag Queen Bingo” follows a basic script. After intro of the
principals, caller Ms. Beneva cites rules of the game. These include the
sexiest parts of the evening: when
an O number is called, audience is to raise arms to simulate an O for “vagina
in the sky” and each player is to give a certain shout when needing only one
more number to win. The degree of
humor resulting depends on the novelty of each audience participation.
There are four regular Bingo games per evening, each preceded by patter, song, or skit
and followed by the drag queens, in turn, singing and working the audience for
tips. They generously indicate their pleasure with the queens’ performance. Ms.
Lindsay Carlton’s voice wasn’t as noticeable as her sequined figure when I
attended, a good thing since s/he hasn’t much dialogue and s/he doesn’t strain the laps she
sits on. Mostly, s/he lip syncs. Ms. Beneva, though, is the star of onstage
theatrics. Ms. Beneva also drops her (Bingo) balls when O-69 is called and must
get some courageous male up on stage to help her recoup in a possibly daring
way. Despite Ms.Beneva Fruitville’s generous size, s/he executes a smooth end-of-song split. I liked her
activity better than her potty mouth.