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Best Drag Queen

Daisy DeadPetals

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Published on May 11, 2000

With drag queens a dime a dozen these days, it's increasingly difficult for cross-dressers to stay fabulous and original at the same time. How many more impersonations of Madonna and Cher can we take? Well, kids, if you're looking for originality, check out Daisy DeadPetals, née Ken Calabria. Daisy is the proud holder of state and national titles in gender-bending pageants, and she's also a fixture on the South Florida drag circuit. Many female impersonators strive to create the illusion of real womanhood, and some can do it with jaw-dropping realism. But it's also important to win over your audience, and this is where Daisy shines. On any given Sunday, you can find her in the "Life's a Drag" show at the Voodoo Lounge in downtown Fort Lauderdale (formerly Independence Brewery). Not only does she strut her petite frame across the stage in impossibly short skirts and hot pants, she's quite the entertainer, too. She performs energetic and comedic "mixes," which are sound bites painstakingly spliced together from movies and/or songs to create a mini-musical. Not surprisingly, these mixes are on the bawdy side, but they're definitely funny. And while Daisy does her share of lip-synching, it's not to the typical drag-show standards, which in recent years have come to be anything by Celine Dion.