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All this before she was old enough to drive.
The land Down Under didn't offer much in the way of outre entertainment in the mid-'70s -- the Bee Gees, Olivia Newton-John, and a group of pint-sloppy boys in little shorts who would call themselves AC/DC were the dominant influences -- but there was a weird new scene growing in Sydney's three gay clubs, a drag performance group years ahead of Ru Paul or the Priscilla, Queen of the Desert crowd. Fronted by the transsexual Jacqueline Hyde, a square-jawed queen named Doris Fish, and a 6-foot-6 Lebanese apparition with size-15 shoes who called herself Miss Abood, Sylvia & the Synthetics took the traditional drag concept of realistic female imitation and gave it a savage, openly gay twist. No more of that old-school, Shirley Bassey, lip-sync bullshit. They wore 1940s dresses with open backs to show their asses. They pelted audiences with garfish. They got naked; they had sex. The stage was left littered not with boa feathers, but with stinky fish guts, piss, and blood. The moment Carmel saw Sylvia & the Synthetics, she thought, "Now that is fashion!" She followed them around the city. As did the vice squad.
"She was totally bizarre at that point," remembers Miss Abood. "She used to knit sweaters with extra arms, and put extra arms in them .... We were destined to be friends."
The Synthetics soon incorporated Carmel into their lives, and she accompanied them on their rounds. Whether it was getting into drag, getting out of drag, performing in drag, or shopping for drag, the teen-age Carmel was getting a swift education in the drag aesthetic -- how to exaggerate wigs and makeup, how to accessorize to stop traffic, how to deliver the perfectly timed bitchy putdown.
One memorable night, Carmel brought the Synthetics into her world.
She had been invited to do a hair show for a beauty conference held in conjunction with a display of expensive furs; some were said to be worth as much as $50,000. Carmel was scheduled to conduct a hairstyling demonstration at a swanky Sydney hotel, in front of 1,500 of the stuffiest and most conservative hairstylists in Australia.
Her choice of models was not conservative.
The crowd gasped as the Synthetics strutted out in their multicolored drag ensembles. "Carmel wearing a garbage bag, and dying my hair green, and dry-fucking my leg ... we totally wrecked the place," recalls Miss Abood dryly. "They were freaking out because the furs were so expensive. I think we destroyed a couple of them."
As an act, the Synthetics lasted only a few years, before getting shut down by the police. Doris Fish high-tailed it to San Francisco. Abood and Hyde also temporarily fled the country, leaving Carmel in Sydney. Not feeling well one day, she went to the doctor and discovered she was seven months pregnant; her boyfriend was the father. A mother? She wasn't even 21. She put the baby up for adoption. It was time to get the hell out of there. After the Synthetics, what was left in Australia? She drove to the Sydney airport with Miss Abood, who was back for a visit. The two well-coiffed travelers turned and waved goodbye to Carmel's sisters and her mother, and boarded the fat jet for San Francisco.
Shortly after the blond man left the Pink Tarantula, a Hispanic male entered the salon, wearing a blue bandanna on his head, a black leather jacket, and leather chaps. His eyebrows were shaved. Witnesses described him as jumpy, impatient. He approached the counter, and even though she was standing right in front of him, he asked, "Can I make an appointment with Carmel?"
In the late 1970s, Doris Fish flourished in the Bay Area underground performance scene. She did shows with the raunchy avant-garde band the Tubes; admission was free if you showed up nude. She helped publish a fashion mag called Where It's At, and wrote a memorable column for the San Francisco Sentinel. Fish seemed on a mission, dashing about town doing events, obsessed with taking drag to the next level and leaving the tired Finocchio's crowd in the dust. One day, Fish opened the door of her apartment and was greeted by a tattooed, 20-year-old Carmel Strelein. Carmel was whisked inside, and immediately complimented on her wild shoes, each of which resembled a bright yellow-and-black jester hat with a French heel.
Carmel became a charter member of a household on Market at Sanchez that would be known as Slut Central and would revolutionize the way San Francisco thought about drag queens. Fish and her showgirl roommates -- Tippi, Miss X, and their friend Timmy Spence -- would do their drag shows, often at the Hotel Utah. Carmel didn't perform onstage, but was present behind the scenes, contributing ideas for hair and loaning out her clothing and thigh-high boots. She went on wig-shopping expeditions with her housemates. She set up a sewing machine in the living room, and taught everyone to crochet, with varying degrees of success. On slow afternoons, she'd observe the queens lounging on sofas, watching Tennessee Williams movies, and trying on gloves. This wasn't the gender-fuck drag-with-beards that was fashionable at the time. Slut Central's strange, feminine, hybrid sort of drag was something brand-new, courtesy of Doris Fish, whom the Australian press had called "a travesty of womanhood."
"It was more the act of putting on makeup," says Miss X, now married and living in Portland. "People used to say, 'What is it about you that's different than the other drag queens?' And we'd say, 'They want to look like women. We want to look like drag queens.' We weren't trying to look like women. That was why it was so funny."
