Stochastic Musings — The dishes she ate, the people she dished

Kalina talks about her newest projects, her trip up to NYC, and restaurant meals with friends. There are plenty of lessons to be learned here.
I’m working on two books right now, one called How to do Glamour Makeup and another called Passable. How to do Glamour Makeup is meant to augment and even replace Secrets to an Awesome Makeover, my best-selling glamour makeup guide. In it, I will delve into more makeup techniques than most makeup guides will give you and you will learn how to conquer the male face and make it look female through the power of makeup. Passable is an ambitious work meant to help transgender girls learn about and develop one of the keys to their success in their transgender lives. I will draw from many, many examples in my life and others, go into various do’s and don’t’s, citing specific examples, and help girls understand that passability requires more than just having confidence.

Only recently have I begun to realize why some full-time trannies want to just disappear from “the scene” and abandon all of their friends. It’s because they’re hiding from the mistakes they’ve made, the dorks they’ve met, and the people who stay looking and acting the same for years. It bores the crap out of me when I hear the same stories from the same people over and over again. After awhile, doing the same damn thing every week gets kind of boring and hearing someone in your past tell others, “Oh, she used to take three hours to get ready to go out and I only took ten minutes!,” when it’s clear that that person clearly could’ve used a lot more time herself can be upsetting. This is why I choose to avoid associating with people who don’t help me grow as a person, as a transsexual. The new generation of girls all want to tell me, or prove to me that they’re passable, but sometimes I believe all they want is an attentive ear because, deep down inside, they know they’re really not that passable, so they cling onto every little morsel of hope they can get and tell the same “success stories” over and over again. I’d rather see a tranny move forward and achieve real success than cling to the past like that.

On Friday, March 13, 2009, my friend Chris and I had a fabulous dinner at Supper. It was supposed to be a birthday dinner for me, but our schedules clashed in the past few weeks. We had a really nice see-and-be-seen table and ordered some really excellent dishes, including Pot Pie Dumplings, Duck Confit Toast, Smoked Butternut Squash Soup with cinnamon marshmallow and sage, Slow Roasted Pork Belly with spiced yams, greens, and pineapple mustard, Smoked Duck Breast with tuscan kale, farro, and raisin jam, and Apple Cranberry Tart with cinnamon streusel and buttermilk ice cream. Dinner is always a nice prelude to the Jaded Lounge show at 12th Air Command. I’m thankful I’m fortunate enough to be able to experience dinners with friends who like treating me to nice places.

I’m always curious about the type of tranny who tries to do the impossible. At the Jaded Lounge, I returned from the restroom to find an older, hard-faced tranny trying to smooth talk Chris. If a girl has the cojones to jump in and steal a guy’s attention from Kalina Isato, she’s gonna’ need a hell of a lot more pizzazz than that! For one thing, she’ll need real hair, not a $29 wig! I think I’ll call her Mop-Head. And you wonder why these trannies get cat-called in the streets? It’s because they wear cheap wigs! They need to go out and buy a great one. Mop-Head hung around for a while and I couldn’t really hear her through the loud music, but I believe she mentioned something about an ASIAC event, I said I didn’t know anything about it, and then she looked at me in an untrusting way, like I was withholding information from her or something. She was weird and there are few people in the world I honestly say that about. We were happy when she left.

“Apparently, she saw that you left for the bathroom and took it as her opportunity to talk to me,” Chris said. We couldn’t quite remember her name, but she looked like a Thelma. My friends and I watched fabulous performances by Miss Sassy, Diamond Dunhill (yes, the Diamond Dunhill from Boston and Miami!) and Eric Zonk. Diamond is one of my favorite performance artists because she does all the songs I would lipsync to if I were to perform on stage. Zonk is one of those unique performers who specializes in flame and flag juggling and has served as a choreographer for many ASIAC events over the years.

Chris and I had a drink at Valanni after the show and he drove me home. Chris is always a class act.

On Saturday, March 21, 2009, Kristin and I trekked up to New York this weekend courtesy of our friend Peter. We were treated to business class seats on Amtrak, a room at the Marriott Marquis, dinner at The View, tickets to the Night of a Thousand Gowns charity event, and more! In return, we were the perfect dinner and show companions – beautiful, smart, and funny. Some girls have trouble being one let alone all three! The View was awesome. We enjoyed a gorgeous 360-degree panoramic view of the city at night while we dined. We each had the five-course tasting menu with wine pairings. I loved the Rieslings and Ice Wine and my favorite courses were the Seared Foie Gras and Seared Sea Scallops with roasted cauliflower risotto. The Night of a Thousand Gowns was moderately amusing, although attendance was low this year at 600 versus the usual two to three thousand.

We met my friend, Nadya Lee, at The Atrium lounge after the charity event. I hadn’t spoken to Nadya in a while, so we caught up on what was happening in our lives. We delved into discussions on passability and what women wear. “Girls don’t dress like Kristin and they don’t dress like you, either,” Nadya said. “Girls actually dress like me.” I nodded my head and smiled because I didn’t want to start an argument. After all, this was the girl who got so upset a few years back when a genetic woman annointed me as passable and her not. Looking at her attire, I wanted to say, “So girls are supposed to dress like Audrey Hepburn from Breakfast at Tiffany’s and wear cherry red nails?” Plus that lesbian bracelet went out of style four years ago. Give Wonder Woman back her bracelet!

I happen to let a lot of people talk and vent because it makes them feel good to do so. It’s therapeutic for them and if they feel good using me as a punching bag, so be it. I wasn’t about to justify my XOXO and Caché attire to her because it’s not worth the trouble. At the end of the day, you have to realize two facts: it’s just clothes and if more girls had my body, you can bet they’d be dressing like me, too. Besides, it’s never a good idea to criticize me, a tranny who is single-handedly redefining what a tranny can and should look like instead of being just another clichéd-looking showgirl tranny.

Kristin and I changed to our casual clothes and headed over to Ina’s tgirl party at Hamachi. I met several interesting people there, including Nadia Lim, Ashley, Kristian, Kieu, Father Jerry, and fetish photographer Efrain Gonzalez of Hellfire Press. I liked the fact that lots of girls recognized me. Nadya pointed out the Asian “working girls” in the bar and I simply laughed at them because I had them beat by a mile. The prettiest of that group had beautiful long black hair, but had a big face, a big head, and big arms. Her arms were girl-soft, but twice the circumference of mine! Her friend looked like a big beefy Samoan; big Asians scare me. Another girl whose face and body resembled a wiry male gymnast’s was trying to lure guys with the promise of a lap dance. Ewww! I think they saw me laughing at them. Hee hee.

The next day we enjoyed breakfast at the Marquis’ Encore restaurant, viewed fine paintings and photography at MOMA, and had lunch at Virgil’s BBQ. For breakfast, I had the Breakfast Mixed Grill with two eggs, three jumbo strips of maple bacon, a petite filet mignon, two sausage links, and three grilled beefsteak tomatoes. The item was curiously listed under the carb-conscious “Fit For You” section of the menu. For lunch, I had the Two-Meat Combo and chose Carolina pulled pork and Memphis Pork Ribs as my meat selections and Georgia Pecan Rice and Cheese Grits as my sides. Peter was amazed at the amount of food I could consume. “Where do you put it all?” he asked. “My leg,” I said, smiling. The pulled pork was absolutely delicious. I saw Paul Graham’s gallery at MOMA and wasn’t very impressed. A few of the paintings more than made up for it. None of them elicited the Stendhal Syndrome in me and so far only three events actually caused Stendhal to creep into my tear ducts: seeing Van Gogh’s Starry Night in person, seeing my son in my arms for the first time, and, to a much smaller degree, seeing the dining room at Le Bec Fin.

Speaking of Le Bec Fin, on March 24, 2009, I had lunch there with a male companion. I wore a black mock turtleneck, black jeans, and black leather Skechers — all guy clothes — and yet something about my look convinced our waiter, a short, young Latino man, that I was a woman even though I wore absolutely no makeup. My hair probably had a lot to do with it. I didn’t style it. It naturally curls up at the ends and almost touches my shoulders. My bangs were long and thick and parted to show my tweezed eyebrows. My lunch companion was convinced that my eyebrows had a lot to do with my passability. Our waiter called me “madam” a number of times. The first time I heard him say it I wasn’t 100% sure until I was called “madam” again and again. I ordered an extra course and the waiter asked my companion, “Would you like to order another course to go with her course?” Both of us heard the pronouns.

At one point, I thought the waiter looked at me a little spooked and I feared that perhaps my luck had run out and the cat was out of the bag, but he still called me madam afterward. It was awesome. I kept thinking doesn’t he hear my voice? but apparently not or it didn’t matter. I would surmise that if you’re with a man who dresses like a gentleman and you’re in plain clothes, waiters are trained to see you as a woman. By the way, Le Bec Fin’s crab cake is to die for! If you have the good fortune to go, be sure to get the large one.

Are you ready to learn the secrets to becoming super glamorous and super passable? Just order copies of my videos, Secrets to an Awesome Makeover, Natural Makeup Techniques, and Totally Natural, available here.

Category: Transgender Fun & Entertainment, Transgender Opinion