Wayland Flowers

Wayland Flowers was best known for the puppet act he created with his puppet Madame. His performances as “Wayland Flowers and Madame” were a major national success on stage and on screen in the 1970s and 1980s. Wayland was a ‘blue comic’ and Madame’s opening line – “Wayland is no ventriloquist and I’m no f—ing dummy” – set the tone for the raucous humor to follow. I thought of him the other day when someone sent me a you YouTube of their performance. I met him on the side of US 81 rear Roanoke Virginia in the early 1980’s. He and his friend (I recall he did porn) were next to a van that had broken down on the side of the interstate. I stopped because of the pretty boy in the daisy dukes and then sort of recognized Wayland. After I stopped I saw the famous madam! I ended up giving them a ride (all three) to the bar in Roanoke so they would be there for their performance. To thank me they got me drunk and I ended up crashing with them for the night. The next day I took them back to the van where they were meeting a tow driver. It was a fun night from what I remember. Madame made many jokes at my expense. As I recall, she was a screamer in bed! (And she was not even in the bed with us.) When he died in 1988, the New York Times obituary did not use the word “gay” or “AIDS”. on cancer.
A couple of years later I met Margo. Margo was the manager of Trio’s restaurant near DuPont Circle in Washington DC. It was a regular haunt of the gay community for years in the 70s- today even. Cheep food served with a foul attitude. When I was there it was as if people actually came to see how abusive they could get the waiter to act. Margo herself was an institution. She was the inspiration for Madame. Wayland I was told, had gone to school in DC and frequented Trio. Her hair, always in a bun sat elegantly on her head like a crown. She had that very square jaw with the beauty make. She was also a chain smoker with cigarette holder always in use.
Publicly she hated people recognizing her but it always made her smile. Don’t know why I thought of her. She was a tower of a woman. I wish I had stayed in touch. So often people come into a life for short periods and we let them go. Always assuming that we would meet them again. Sometimes you just got to make the effort to keep it alive. In a computer age I have taken to sending a handwritten note to people out of the blue just to say hi.