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AE: Did the Feast of Fools brand originate with the live performance shows in Chicago or do they have roots in other places?
FF: My blue roots in show business go all the way back to being Suzuki-trained on violin and piano and performing for audiences semi-professionally as a kid in Puerto Rico. As an adult, I studied performance art with Linda Montano at the University of Texas, where she really encouraged us to pursue our art wherever it took us. It's there I learned that being an artist is a way of thinking more than anything else. I became part of the music/performance art scene in Austin, Texas, for many years and started Pe.A.Ch. [Performance Art Church]. In the mid 1990s, I had an award-winning cable access show in Austin where I interviewed musicians and local celebrities in drag. In many ways those years in Texas influenced what the Feast of Fools would become. An entertainment brand, a variety show, a rock 'n' roll band and a top-rated podcast.

AE: How did you come up with the name?
FF: Since 1991 I've been putting on these elaborate artist variety shows, and since 1998 I've been calling them the Feast of Fools after an essay that gay rights activist Harry Hay wrote about how he envisioned a future where people felt free to express themselves fully and honestly, and therefore “act foolish.” I know this sounds really cheesy, but I see the word “fool” to be politically charged. I mean in it in the very sense of the European tradition of the court jester — the only person who could speak the truth because it was encased in comedy — and in his role in the court. In many ways gays and drag queens are seen as a comic foil, but we're trying to embrace the diversity of the gay and lesbian experience on our show, especially the transgendered and HIV-positive experience on our programming, something LGBT television, radio and film seems to shy away from.

AE: The Feast of Fools shows featured a variety of performers — do you have a favorite act from that period?
FF: It all seems to be one gigantic rainbow glittery blur. [Laughs.] I loved Asimina Chremos' dance/puppet performances from that era. It was spoken word, hard-core ballet and fuzzy puppets all rolled into one sexy, skinny Greek woman beating herself up, dancing and singing onstage. Another moment was when my friend Bill Haddad, who looks like a gay Mr. McGoo with Thurston Howell's personality, came onstage and sang “Hip To Be Square”; anytime Bill Haddad raps is really hilarious. Abby Schachner was a funny woman. She tied a piece of raw steak to a string and swung it around her head over and over again, improvising a really funny song about “steak swinging” and then proceeded to frost it onstage. She was so wonderfully hilarious.

One of the most insane moments was at Big Chicks with Victoria Lamarr [a white guy living with AIDS who sang with a Vietnamese wedding band]. V-Marr had just finished performing some tacky Vietnamese cover song, and she was dressed up as Wonder Woman, and asked, “What should I do now, Fausto?” Someone in the audience said “Take off your clothes.” And so I ran up onstage and joined her, and we stripped down naked from being in full drag. It was insane and the audience loved it. There was a cake nearby — don't ask me why it was there — and so I shoved V-Marr's face into it, which got tons of laughs. I'm so much more conservative these days! [Laughs.]

AE: What about a least favorite?
FF: I would say that some of the most notorious moments include when Marsian DeLellis came out with over a dozen performers, some of them holding TV sets playing video footage of daytime talk shows. He hooks up a garden hose to the sink at the bar, and turns the hose on a packed room of 80 or so people. It was pandemonium. Luckily the owner of the bar never heard what happened.

One time we brought a posse to the annual Lesbian Community Cancer Project benefit. We sang covers of songs from Hair with a full Brazilian band. I was dressed up in a sari, looking like a Bollywood starlet. One angry lesbian in a tuxedo stood up and scowled at us, “How dare you appropriate someone else's culture?” She was pissed off that I looked hotter than her Indian girlfriend, who walked out of the room. Someone had videotaped that whole mess, and now it's an underground video hit.

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