All the peeps in the Palm Springs area should get out their calendars and mark the date December 15th, 2012. Lucky for you folks, the Ace Hotel Palm Springs has figured out what you should do once the quitting bell rings that day: get your luckiest troll and rainbow marker, and head out to Kings Highway to help celebrate the release of Linda Gerard’s (aka Linda Fabulous) new album Fabulous Selections—and play some kickass Sissy Bingo to boot.
For those who don’t know the majesty that is Linda Gerard, get ready to recognize. This sassy lady rubbed elbows with Babs and Mimi Hines as a standby in the sixties for the Broadway hit musical Funny Girl. She performed cabaret and eventually co-owned the illustrious Pied Piper (the premier lesbian bar on the east coast in the seventies & eighties). Then the lady from Jersey left the gray East for sunny California to spread the art of New York cabaret at her bar The Rose Tattoo. She has most recently been presiding over Sissy Bingo at the Ace Hotel Palm Springs’s restaurant Kings Highway, in Palm Springs.
Sissy Bingo is not your grandma’s game. Linda doesn’t just call numbers, she sings them. She croons her mash-up of songs from her fifty years in cabaret, in between the bingo goings-on. She has quite the following of guys and gals out for some campy bingo fun. The Ace (on 701 East Palm Canyon Drive) is hosting a special party on December 15th in its Amigo Room, to celebrate their collaboration with Linda—the release of a compilation of her favorite numbers. The album ranges from campy show tunes to jazz standards to women empowerment anthems like “Women Starting Out All Over Again.” My personal favorite is her gloriously sixties and coy “See the Cheetah.”
Seriously, if you can, check this out! The night is going to kick off at 8 PM with what is sure to be an epic game of Sissy Bingo hosted by Linda. She will then serenade those lucky S.O.B.s in attendance, and a D.J. will play songs off of the album. Afterwards, the dance party will surely go until the wee hours of the night. And the event gets even better: it’s 100% FREE. Not that I need an excuse to beat it out of the cold winter of NYC, but I have been spending all morning researching if I can get enough dough for a ticket and a night at the Ace Hotel Palm Springs, in exchange for one of my dried up ol’ kidneys. Probs not, but a girl can dream. It may be too late for me, but it’s not too late for you!
