Yes! Yes! The lady! The LEGEND! The one and only Dorian Corey! Of COURSE, you remember her from Paris Is Burning. Sitting backstage, slathering on layer after layer or makeup, dispensing her hard-earned wisdom to the children:
“I always had hopes of being a big star. But as you get older, you aim a little lower. Everybody wants to make an impression, some mark upon the world. Then you think, you’ve made a mark on the world if you just get through it, and a few people remember your name. Then you’ve left a mark. You don’t have to bend the whole world. I think it’s better just to enjoy it. Pay your dues, and just enjoy it. If you shoot an arrow and it goes real high, hooray for you.”
Heartbreaking and oh-so true.
Makes me GASP every time I hear it.
But there was more to her story. MUCH MORE.
Remember the whole bit about the mummy they found in her closet?
Yes, A MUMMY!
..several months after Dorian’s death, a few of her former children were going through her sewing room looking for Halloween costumes when they found a trunk that contained a mummified human body. It was wrapped in strips of leatherette and covered with baking soda. It proved to be the corpse of a black man in his thirties, who had died of gunshot wounds and who had been dead more than twenty years (which meant the body had been moved out of and into several different apartments). Pinned to the body was a note that said, “This poor soul broke into my apartment and I was forced to shoot him.”
Tragic, yes. But LEGENDARILY SO.
Anyway. Now there’s a musical based on her life!
Dorian’s Closet is a musical written by Los Angeles-based playwright Richard Mailman with music by Ryan Haase, the artistic director of Stillpointe Theatre in Baltimore. The production, directed by Joseph Ritsch, will run from April 26 to May 14, 2017 through Columbia, Maryland’s Rep Stage.
“It is not a musical version of the documentary,” Ritsch told The Baltimore Sun. “This really spans Dorian’s life, especially the incident after she passed away from AIDS, when they found a mummified body in her closet, the body of a man who had been dead 15 years. That part is really intriguing. There is a whole bunch of theories trying to explain it. [Mailman] is exploring his fantasies about what really happened and why.”
Let’s get this show up and running and TOURING THE COUNTRY! Take it all the way to BROADWAY, bitches!
I need some Dorian Corey musical numbers at next year’s Tony Awards!
