About Me
Treidler and his companion, a small woman in a tattered tutu and striped stockings, purchase a couple of boxes of candy at the concessions counter and disappear behind the double doors of the Victoria Theatre like two missing extras from A Nightmare Before Christmas. They are not alone in their sketch-gothic finery. The crowd gathered in the long-faded opulence of the 95-year-old theater for Vinsantos' holiday spectacle, Counterfeit, is awash in high style and black lace."It's December," purrs Jill Tracy from behind a piano on the lip of the stage, "and, if you're like me, you're teetering on the edge somewhere between sentimental and suicidal."The crowd titters appreciatively, clearly at home in the dim, ruddy wash of light that just illumes the stage."I told Vinsantos the only [holiday song] I know is about a suicide that took place on Christmas Eve in 1941," says Tracy in a voice that is like the inhalation of clove cigarettes. "He said, 'That'll be perfect.'"The ivories tumble, and Tracy creeps through a Christmas requiem about a man found in a hotel room with nothing but a sextant by his side. It seems that even at the end, he was trying to find his way by the stars.A grainy, black-and-white "home movie" flickers to life on a screen overhead: Happy young parents sit on a couch bouncing their infant in the air. Cut to the smiling face of the swaddled child. The child falls to the ground.Vinsantos -- the child grown -- enters the stage in a sequined dress and characteristically macabre clown face. He sets one nightmarishly tall stiletto heel on top of the piano and begins to play, accompanied by his violin-laden sextet, the Sixthe Toe."I should've been a dancer," he sighs and rumbles, "but I didn't have no steps."The dark, languid ballad is followed by others, interspersed with surrealistic, often darkly funny, cinematic chapters in a life riddled by misfortune and circus-performing parents: the misguided attempts at tightrope walking, a doomed love affair, a high-heeled shoe stuck in trolley car tracks, a wig blown off in gale-force winds on the deck of the Golden Gate Bridge.Suzanne Ramsey does a brilliant turn as Vinsantos' stage mother -- all satin stripes, ruffles, and fishnets -- while the star's own son, Christian Seamus DeFonte, portrays a young Vinsantos and Fauxnique appears as an impressionistic twin, waltzing across a tear-stained stage. Flowers are given to the audience and taken back again. Hearts are broken. Dreams are smashed. And, in the end, Vinsantos rises on his 4-1/2-foot-tall black stiletto heels to ask the audience members what is real in their lives. The music swells, and, in the crowd, a small blond girl crawls off her mother's lap and begins to twirl through the aisle.
