Sybil Bruncheon's “My Merry Memoirs”… LGBTQ Pride Parades of the Past – 1987…

Here's Mummie walking down the entire route of the parade with her theatre pal Ron Coombs lending her moral support. My ride that year in a vintage convertible Mercedes had stood me up at the last minute right before the parade started (he had a hangover… or a date!), and there I was in my tiara by Larry Vrba and my coronation ball gown by Matthew Lombardi for NYC's first Night Of A Thousand Gowns. I’d been crowned the first Empress of NY by the Imperial Court System of America… Sybil the First - The Atlas Empress!... and the ball had been held in the newly renovated and restored Waldorf Astoria in their grand ballrooms… for the then unheard of sum of $250.00 a ticket! Can you imagine?

This was the old parade route too; starting at Central Park West at 70th Street, winding down to 59th, across to 5th Avenue, then straight all the way down to Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village, across to Christopher Street, past the historic Stonewall Inn and Sheridan Square, and then all the way down to the festival on the Hudson River. Mummy's feet bled for two days… yep! BLED!… and I limped for a week!

“But the show MUST GO ON!”, right? (I WAS the first Empress of NY after all) ... ah, good times!… good times...

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Sybil Bruncheon’s “My Merry Memoirs”… LGBTQ Pride Parades of the Past – 1996…

Here we have the Sybil Bruncheon Repertory Company (including Bob Gutowski & Jay Boehm, Jeffrey Wallach, and Marty Santoro all seen here, along with Jay Rogers, Thomas Stoehr, Douglas Huston, and James Takos) did a tribute to the 200th anniversary of the French revolution and the beheading of Marie Antoinette called "Those Naughty, Naughty Queens!". We built a working tumbril, and the entire company dressed as Revolutionaries and Sans Culottes selling toy-guillotines and headless gingerbread men to the crowds! And guess who got to be the Queen being dragged to the scaffold! Type-casting, I guess you could say!... and here I tried so hard and so often to treat my staff and supporting cast with so much kindness, generosity, and understanding… oh well. (Who would have thought that 25 years later with Washington DC in so much turmoil, our little caprice would be so very pertinent!) Ah, good times!... good times!

(photo by Matthew Kiernan, Sybil’s gown by Gefil Tefish of the Hefty Highness Hideaway)

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Sybil Bruncheon's “My Merry Memoirs”…LGBTQ Pride Parades of the Past - 1986.

Here's the cover of The NY Daily News from Monday, June 30th, 1986. At the time of the LGBTQ Pride Parade in 1986, even as I was headlining at the major clubs in NYC and around the country, I also happened to have been going through some serious misadventures involving a stock broker, the (now defunct!) brokerage house Thompson/McKinnon, a taxi cab accident, back due rent, and a major rent strike at the Ansonia! (talk about material for a memoir!)... and in the middle of all that drama there was the centennial of the Statue of Liberty with all the Tall Ships coming to town along with the President and foreign dignitaries to see it unveiled, newly refurbished and restored and with a brand new 24kt torch flame gleaming over the city. In the Pride Parade just days before the huge celebration on the 4th, I celebrated the centennial in my own way with my own "Liberty" outfit of gold lamé (by Cliff Boone and Morrie Breyer at A.Q.U.A.) and a custom-made torch (that actually lit up!). It was all great fun, and another triumphant parade for the LGBTQ community. But that's not the end of the story...  

The gloriously beautiful Monday morning after the parade, I had to face all the challenges of the rent strike, being broke, dealing with being swindled along with several other gullible guys, bills, deadlines, threats of eviction, blah, blah, blah, etc, etc. I knew I had to eat a good breakfast or I'd be nauseated the rest of the day with cramps, so I headed to the diner by my corner news stand!... and the nice Moroccan man behind the counter suddenly screamed gleefully at me pointing and waving a copy of the Daily News in front of a sidewalk full of staring commuters, "Derr! I tell you! I TELL YOU!! Derr is da lady! Derr is da LADY!!! You, meester! You ARE DA LADEEEE! Ha! HA! HAAA! YOU ARE DA LADEEEE!"...

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