On Thursday night I decided to take my Michelle out on an early birthday date. It was both planned months in advance and totally last minute.

In November, I found out that our Little Queer Station That Could had picked up an ad client for the Toronto performances of Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, more affectionately known as the Trocks. I was thrilled. I had heard of the Trocks through Michelle, who had seen them back when she still lived in New York and has been hoping for them to come to Toronto ever since.

Now here’s the thing about Michelle: she loves drag queens. I mean loves them. With a passion. Lots of italics. Once we went out to Crews and Tango on a Wednesday night after leaving halfway through a rather unfortunate advanced viewing of some avant-garde queer performance at Buddies in Bad Times. There was a drag queen in the back room who refused to perform until the crowd had thickened to her desired quantity, and Michelle could barely contain her adoration. When the righteously imperious queen finally began her performance, Michelle kept tipping her for requests. With my money, I might add. She was in love.

So as soon as I knew the Trocks were coming to Toronto in February, I knew what Michelle’s birthday gift was going to be. The problem, of course, is that with the lowest priced seats running at 80 bucks a pop, Trocks tickets are a bit out of range for a no-account girl like me.

The sales rep who secured the account reassured me that there would be tickets for me at the station, however. She had planned a big promo night with Miss Conception, voluptuous drag queen extraordinaire and also our station’s own midday host. I was very excited at the prospect.

But then the sales rep left the company for better-paying shores and the account was sort of up in the air, and the next thing you know, there were no tickets and no promo and I was what we trash girls like to call S.O.L. I made phone calls, I spoke to reps and promo people, I did everything I could, and the best answer I could get was “We’ll see.”

So I made other plans.

But then! Here is my testament to how lovely my on-air hosts are: on Tuesday I was in the studio, when Mike Chalut asked Acey Rowe if she was going to see “that ballet thing” on Thursday. I was like, wait just a second, mister. I have been trying for three months to hook myself up with tickets, you don’t even know who the Trocks are, so how did you get an invite? Of course, on-air hosts get everything.

Okay, so I was a bit bitter for a moment.

But there is no way to stay bitter with Mikey, because his first and only reaction was to send his invite to me, so I could RSVP for the tickets. Sweet boy! This is why he’s my best boyfriend. I don’t think the woman at the PR company had any idea who I was, but she graciously responded with my confirmation, so I was set.

And then the next morning, Miss C called me into her studio, saying, “Don’t tell anyone this, but I pulled a few strings for you.” And she produced from her pocket two more tickets. And this is why she is everyone’s best girlfriend in the office. Not only was I set for a date with Michelle, but I could bring friends!

Don’t let anyone tell you that the radio jocks at the Little Queer Station That Could are divas. Their creative director may be a bit embittered and cranky sometimes, but those hosts are truly first rate people. I love the heck out of all of them.

So I got to surprise Michelle with tickets to her favourite thing on the planet after all. I called her up and told her not to make any plans for Thursday evening, and I dressed up all handsome-like for the show. I took her out to dinner beforehand—okay, I took her to Chipotle, but it was her choice, and if my lady wants burritos, dammit, my lady is gonna get burritos!

And the handy thing about Chipotle is that it is just steps away from the Winter Garden Theatre, where the performance would take place. What a bizarre little theatre! You walk in and go up about seven floors of escalators because it is stacked on top of the larger Elgin Theatre on the ground floor. Then you walk into the Winter Garden and there are fabric leaves and garden lanterns hanging from the ceiling, beech branches hand-woven into the ceiling grid, sculpted tree trunks supporting the balconies, and painted foliage frescos on the walls. Michelle felt like she had wandered into Middle Earth.

There are a few really cool things about the Elgin and the Winter Garden. The complex, originally called the Loew’s Yonge Street Theatre, was one of only a few double-decker theatres designed by architect Thomas W. Lamb in the early 20th century, primarily used for vaudeville performances. All other double-decker theatres have since been demolished—the Elgin and Winter Garden are the last operating stacked theatres in the world, and so the complex is now a National Historic Site. The Elgin is a gilded jewel box, while the Winter Garden is a vaudevillian hobbit’s den. Both are gorgeous.

The Winter Garden actually came as quite a surprise to developers restoring the old Elgin. Vaudeville’s appeal declined near the end of the 1920s, with the growing popularity of the motion picture. By 1928, the Winter Garden was shuttered entirely, used as a storage facility for old vaudevillian props and sets. The Elgin was transformed into a movie theatre. The building fell into disrepair, and by the 1970s was used to screen mostly B movies and porn flicks.

In 1981 the Ontario Heritage Trust bought the theatre and began a painstaking restoration of the Elgin. It was during the restoration that developers discovered the Winter Garden upstairs, and the treasure trove of vaudevillian sets and props that had been left inside, which now comprises the world’s largest collection of vaudevillian scenery—posters, hand-painted backdrops and flats that date back to the early 20th century. Amazing! I’m going to have to go back to the theatre for a tour.

And that concludes today’s history lesson, class. Back to our scheduled theatre review. It does relate, though; I cannot think of a better venue in which to see the Trocks perform. The Trocks are a drag troupe of the classic order, bringing a real vaudeville humour to the modern audience. They aren’t doing the kind of bar drag I’ve become accustomed to seeing, all camp and fabulousness and jokes about being on the rag. There’s a long tradition from which they are drawing, a theatrical lineage that dates back to Shakespeare, and even further. Xtra Magazine published a great article about it that gets to the crux of what I am trying to express.

The show was funny as all get-out. The facial expressions alone of some of the dancers were enough to get the crowd roaring. And let me tell you, these boys girls could dance. My ballet-loving friend was not as impressed as I was, although she wasn’t entirely unimpressed, either. Neither of us had ever seen men en pointe before. That’s some serious business.

In one number, Toronto-raised Joshua Grant, dancing as Katerina Bychkova, did the Death of the Swan entirely en pointe and it was incredible. Not only the dancing, but the costume—it was a testament to engineering, with feathers falling consistently and continuously from it as the dancer’s feet moved, finally covering the entire stage. The visual effect was rapturous. I don’t envy the stagehand who has to sweep up those feathers and cram them back into that tutu.

Michelle appreciated her early birthday date. Shameless Girlfriend Plug: she wrote about the Trocks afterward on the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives blog. Check it out.

In sum, it was a fantastic show with some excellent performers—athletic dancers and brilliant humourists. I was well pleased. I got to treat Michelle to an exciting pre-birthday treat, and I got to experience the vaudevillian flair of ballet en travesti. Fan-freakin’-tastic.