The Lady Bunny hops into town

April 6, 10:21 AMSF Showbiz ExaminerRobert Sokol

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The Lady Bunny brings her late-night Easter show to The Rrazz Room

With a honey drawl that would fit in right between Dixie Carter and Delta Burke on Designing Women, the Lady Bunny (aka Jon Ingle) greets you warmly. “How y’all doin?” is just one of many indicators, enhanced or not, of the New York drag artiste’s synthetic-blonde Chattanooga roots.

The singer, DJ, columnist, Wigstock empress-sario and all-round good time gal makes her debut tonight at The Rrazz Room with a late-night extravaganza that also runs Friday and Saturday. Just arrived from Los Angeles, the question of the moment is how Bunny’s out-sized personality will play in the intimate nightclub. More pressingly, will she be able to navigate the room and keep her trademark mile-high coiffure intact?

“The crowd’s just gonna have to watch out for me!” she says, noting a possible wardrobe benefit. “Lady Bunion has been hopping on the Easter trail from Boston to Dallas to and back. So if my hair’s too high for the room I may just have to take my heels off!” The hair, an amalgam of wigs – the record is sixteen at once – has never come tumbling down. “I pin it on pretty intricately and sometimes use spirit gum. Even crazy glue in a pinch! For about a year I had a reverse widow’s peak where my own hair came off with the wig.”

Hair-raising experiences are Bunny’s stock in trade and none greater than the two decades she helmed Wigstock, the world’s biggest drag extravaganza. Born of a late-night, off-hand comment amongst a group of after-hours revelers, Bunny hopped to it and made the idea a reality that grew into one of the biggest parties in Manhattan. A 1995 feature documentary about the event featured Bunny and her warren of drag divas like Lypsinka, a pre-op, pre-Dirty Sexy Money Candis Cayne, and longtime Bunny friend and former roommate RuPaul.

The last official Wigstock took place in 2005 and there are no current plans to revive it. “ There were tw years in a row where it rained and my co-organizer and I really lost our shirts – and our wigs! We just looked at each other and said, ‘We’re in our 40s! Did we really work for the last three years just to break even?’ After the movie came out the expectations kept getting bigger and bigger and it just got so expensive to produce,” says La Bunny. “Still, a twenty-year run in New York City is nothing to sneeze at. We’re not saying never again, but for now the party is over.”

Having more free time has allowed Bunny to expand her media reach with personal appearances, a “Worst of The Week” column in Star Magazine and music videos that feature the Blond One doing parodies of pop songs that skewer celebrities. In something of a double-drag tradition, Bunny’s live act features her lip-syncing to her own vocal tracks, between dance moves and wicked-sharp commentary.