Nightlife / Clubs

Quad-City nightclub puts on 10 high-energy shows each week

By Stephanie De Pasquale | Wednesday, June 11, 2008 | () comments

Amber Andrews (Contributed PHOTO)

VIDEO: Club Fusion: More than a Woman
Club Fusion in Davenport puts on 10 female impersonation shows each week. H…
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Amber Andrews begins to apply her makeup two hours before the 10 p.m. Monday show. It’s the first and busiest of 10 performances per week at Club Fusion in Davenport.

As stage director, Andrews gets her own dressing room, and she needs it to store all of her costumes. A veritable rainbow of feathered, sequined, sparkling and beaded costumes is packed so tightly into the clothing rack filling most of the wall that it would be difficult to fit in even one more. Andrews has more at home. She’s made most of them herself because it’s the only way to keep from going in debt.

Wigs in all shades, lengths and styles of brown, blonde and highlighted hair hang on every available hook and nail. Open-toe, pointy-toe, red patent, clear, black lace and green crocodile print pumps, all in size 12, are falling out of a shoe rack next to the costumes.

Andrews’ makeup routine begins with Max Factor pan stick, followed by a liquid cover and a loose powder for foundation. She empties each container of the products in two to three weeks. She leans closer to the lighted, magnifying mirror, which was white before makeup powder settled on it, to carefully draw on thin, high-arching eyebrows.

“Sometimes I’ll sit down and I’ll know what I want to do, and sometimes I’ll sit down and I don’t know what I’m gonna do until I do it,” Andrews says.

The latter is the case today. She uses a handful of makeup brushes to apply five different shades of powder in an intricate design from the arches in her eyebrows to the bottom of her eyelids.

Just outside Andrews’ dressing room is a brightly lit main dressing area where four other performers are putting on layers of makeup. Ginger Snapps uses a handful of bobby pins to secure a wig that has been turned upside-down over her ponytail and then pins a jet-black hairpiece extending to her waist over the wig.

“It’s how I can spin my hair without it ever flying off,” Snapps says. She reaches for an aerosol can, shakes it and carefully sprays from just above her ear, up and across the forehead and back down, filling in a receding hairline. “It’s my insta-hairline.”

All five performers are creating an illusion, one that is necessary for female impersonation shows. The makeup is heavy, the hair is big, women’s shapewear is stuffed with hip pads and bras with shoulder pads, sea sponges and inserts.

“It’s theater,” Andrews said. “No one wants to see somebody up on stage that you could see walking around the mall.”

Andrews has been doing female impersonation since RIBCO was Club Mardi Gras in 1976. Back then, female impersonation was done in a gay bar and 99 percent of the audience was gay. Then, about 10 years ago, bachelorettes began coming in to watch the shows, and the attitudes, perceptions and audiences started to change.

“I don’t know if more acceptable is the right term, but it just became more commonplace and more mainstream. So nowadays it’s very mainstream,” Andrews said. “This is probably the most multicultural mix in the Quad-Cities you’re going to find, especially on a Monday night. You’re going to see black, white, gay, straight, young, old. I mean, just the whole nine yards you are going to see, and they all come here to see the show.”

Most of Fusion’s regular performers have won local female impersonation pageants and competed in Miss Gay Iowa, the state competition in the Miss Gay US of A pageant system. Iowa has the second-largest preliminary competition in the system, which is one of three major pageants for female impersonation. Fusion guest performers have won state titles and competed at a national level.

The performers emotionally lip-sync popular and classic hits in elaborate custom-made costumes that match the song lyrics. Regular Fusion performers Akosha Nephonix and Lady Naima, both of whom have qualified to compete in Miss Gay Iowa, incorporate complicated footwork and flips into their dances. Andrews involves the crowds in an impromptu stand-up comedy routine, excerpts of which are too PG-13 to print here.

“There are some people who don’t want to do comedy because they think they’re too pretty for all that. I think I’m one of the most beautiful people when I’m painted, but I’m still not afraid to black out a tooth and put on a silly frumpy costume and go out there and do a comedy,” Andrews said. “To me, it’s just whatever is going to make the audience laugh, clap, scream. It’s the reaction I’m looking for, so it’s whatever I have to do to do that.”

Jamie Summers, a regular guest performer at Fusion, won Miss Gay Iowa in 2003 and is one of a few Fusion performers who lives as a woman. Fourteen years ago, when Summers’ mother found out she was planning to live her life as a woman, do female impersonation and compete in pageants, she did not understand what female impersonation was about and did not want to see her child compete.

“So my whole family got together, it was five brothers and sisters and my mom and dad, and they came together, sat down and watched a show one time and they were simply amazed,” Summers said. “Since then, my mom has been at every pageant I’ve ever competed in and is wholeheartedly behind me and supports me in every way, just because of that first show.

“She’s seen that it wasn’t just a game, or it had the reputation of being a freak show for years. It’s not. It’s pure entertainment.”

Stephanie De Pasquale can be contacted at (563) 333-2639 or sdepasquale@qctimes.com.

If you go

What: Female impersonation shows

When: 10 p.m. and midnight on Mondays and Wednesdays, 8 and 10 p.m. and midnight on Fridays and Saturdays

Where: Club Fusion, 813 W. 2nd St., Davenport

How much: $5 ($8 for 19- and 20-year olds) on Mondays, $3 ($5 for 19- and 20-year-olds) on Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays

Information: Call (563) 326-3452