When you interview New York cabaret star Nellie McKay, you seldom get straight answers. In fact, you often end up becoming a straight man for her shtick.
For example, we were talking about the new show that she's bringing to the Dakota Jazz Club in Minneapolis this week, "A Girl Named Bill." I asked how she prepared to portray Billy Tipton, a jazz pianist who lived as a man and had several wives but was discovered to be a woman when he died in 1989 in Spokane.
"I laced myself up like Billy did to make herself appear male," McKay said. "I couldn't last a night. It's not good for circulation."
She was alluding to how Tipton, who was an active jazz bandleader from the 1940s to the 1970s, bandaged his breasts, claiming he'd hurt his ribs in an auto accident.
McKay also did some academic and musical research, studying pianist Teddy Wilson, one of Tipton's chief influences. She also developed impressions of Jimmy Durante and Liberace because that's what Tipton did.
"He went by Lee," McKay said of Liberace. "But I like to call him Libby."
McKay discovered Tipton via the book "Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton," which McKay's mother, actress/manager Robin Pappas, found in a thrift shop many years ago. "It was so long ago," McKay, 34, said, "before Salvation Army was calling itself the Family Store."
Tipton's life was an act
The 1998 book was written by Stanford University professor Diane Middlebrook, who also wrote a biography of poet Anne Sexton. Tipton had five wives (or women who took his last name anyway) and three adopted sons; he served as a Boy Scout leader and a booking agent after retiring from performing. Only two female cousins who grew up with Tipton in Kansas City, Mo., knew of the gender flip that allowed Tipton to work full time as a jazz musician.
