BY MICHAEL KEARNS

The Cost of Beauty

“Beauty,” the proverb states, “is only skin deep.” After celebrating my 59th birthday at Hooters on Hollywood Boulevard and experiencing Ken Roht's 99 Cents Only Calendar Girl Competition in dizzying succession, I began to ponder that bit of ageless wisdom.

“I'd like to dispel the myth that all Hooters girls are well-endowed, brazen gold diggers who pander to the whims and fancies of lecherous men. I've been working part time at Hooters for three years now, earning just enough to get through university and I've learned that the essential trait of being a Hooters girl is to have a personality.”

This could be a monologue, delivered by one of the coy contestants from Roht's sumptuous 99 Cents Only show (that looks, by the way, like a zillion bucks). But it ain't; it's a statement made by Juliana Loh, a Hooters girl who shares her pithy insights on a blog. Take that, Gloria Steinem.

Actually, it was feminist guru Steinem who said that “women have been female impersonators for a long time.” In truth, the Hooters girls I recently met did not fit the female impersonator stereotype that I have been guilty of stamping on them. Wendy, our actress-waitress, was not particularly busty or overly made up or, for that matter, overtly sexual.

Yet Hooters has a meter that gauges female pulchritude and a standard of attractiveness that caters to a rather mainstream male clientele (read: horny and ready to tip). When a man from Corpus Christi, Tex. tried to get a job as a waiter at Hooters, he was denied.

Nikolai Grushevski filed a lawsuit: "Hooters tries to circumvent the law by referring to its waiters as 'Hooters girls.' Hooters is wrong," claimed the lawsuit. "Just as Southwest Airlines attempted nearly three decades ago with stewardesses, the waiter's position addressed herein is being limited to females by an employer '...who merely wishes to exploit female sexuality as a marketing tool to attract customers and insure profitability.'"

While Ms. Loh opts to refer to herself as “a modern-day courtesan,” there are myriad words to describe her beauty-for-bucks trade; in the world of gay males, we call it hustling. In restaurants, bars, on the streets and online, there is a 24/7 flow of male contestants on a virtual runway, where botoxed, pec-implanted, ass-lifted and steroided gay men are often financially remunerated for their particular brand of “beauty.”

“The random objectification and qualifying of value of an individual, in this case into categories of beauty, has elevated to a traditional ritual,” says Roht, the maestro who created the provocative beauty pageant that parades a dozen creatures—each representing a month of the year—for the audience to judge.

Let's take the case of Miss June, brought spectacularly to life by actor Tad Coughenour who made a choice “from the beginning” to play his character as a real woman, not as a man in drag. “In the old tradition of female impersonation,” he says, “as much as I can—with a huge Adam's apple.”

Not all of the calendar “girls” are men and Coughenour's Miss June remains deliberately ambiguous throughout the first act. The performer fashioned—and I mean fashioned, with the help of designer Ann Closs-Farley—his character after “Scarlett O'Hara and Sarah Palin,” he says. The underpinning of choosing Palin, a lapsed beauty queen, is inescapable when audience members are asked to cast their vote for one of the lovelies during intermission.

Miss June's back story brims with gratitude and, although audience members don't know it, Roht subtly weaves Coghenour's real-life winning battle with cancer into Miss June's confessional. (I must reveal that I voted for her, partly because he reminded me of early Kim Basinger.)

“In the second act, we're transformed,” Coughenour says. “I go from being a good girl trying to get votes to a wild girl. Even Miss June's costume is adjusted, removing a shoulder piece, so that he can show off his tattooed bicep—a “warrior/power tattoo,” he says—evolving from Basinger to Mickey Rourke.

“I contend that once dissected, we're all made of the same matter and all ignited by the same spirit,” Roht says. “The individual's essence remains.”

Maybe that Hooters girl is right.