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The Ryerson Eyeopener - Ryerson Alumni Paddy Aldridge Feb 7, 2006
Get a grip on the world of cross-dressing
2006-02-07Sometimes life's a drag. Just ask Paddy Aldridge, the owner of Take a Walk on the Wildside, Toronto's original drag queen hotspot. A reformed party girl, Paddy's life has always been wild. She went from being a Catholic schoolgirl to a stripper, a Ryerson Theatre student, to coping with cravings. A firm believer that everything happens for a reason, Aldridge uses her life experiences to help men realize their feminine side. "I've helped a lot of people come out of the closet," Aldridge says. "I'm giving people an opportunity for personal growth."
Aldridge first became involved with the cross-dressing scene in the 1970s as a stripper when she travelled with The Great Imposters -- a famous group of professional female impersonators. It was breast forms and boas from then on. "I put an ad in Now Magazine and all I had were my old stripper outfits and two wigs. It was grassroots business," Aldridge says. It worked. Soon she was transforming dozens of melancholy males into fabulous females in her living room. Business was booming. And business keeps evolving.
Now Aldridge rents out one of the bed and breakfast rooms above Wildside to client Tammy. By day Tammy is a forklift operator who hangs out with the guys drowning beers at sports bars. By night she hangs out with "the girls" in Paddy's Playhouse weekly Karaoke night in the lounge above the store. So what does that make Tammy? Ask Aldridge in 1987 and she couldn't tell you. "When I started out I was smart enough to know that I didn't know the difference between transvestite and transsexual," she says. Transvestites are similar to cross-dressers like Tammy -- except they do it for kicks. Transsexuals are people who want to change their genetic sex, the sex they were born with, through sexual reassignment surgery and hormones.
Aldridge personally figured out the difference when she attended a forum on gender identity in Boston. There she met her first spouse, Veronica Brown -- a post-opt transsexual. At the time, Brown wasn't legally recognized as being female, making them the first "female" couple to legally wed in Canada. Together they would open the doors of Wildside's new home at 161 Gerrard St. E. The marriage fizzled and the day Brown moved out, Tom/Roxy moved in.
As a cross-dresser, Tom was perfect for a bisexual woman like Aldridge. She would tell people that she had the best of two worlds -- a submissive female and a handyman all rolled into one. But the stress of running a business, counselling customers and their wives while maintaining a relationship became too much for Aldridge. Alcohol became her escape. "You can never have a relationship with someone who has a relationship with alcohol.
At 50 years old, Aldridge has kicked her addictions. With three years of sobriety under her belt she's a statistical anomaly after 30 years of drinking. She now believes that for some of her customers, cross-dressing is their escape and, similarly, their addiction. Some have stopped, some haven't. For some of her customers, cross-dressing is a one-time experiment. For others it's a transition into a full-blown lifestyle. "People are at different levels. If you want to pass (for a woman) you've got to go all out," she says. Since checking into an expensive treatment facility in 2003, Aldridge has made her own transition -- scaling back her involvement in the store. She's hired someone else to run operations Tuesday through Saturday. That way she can spend most of her time upstairs in the lounge revisitng her passion to paint beautiful watercolours and acrylics which are for sale in her gallery.
After 18 years of looking after other people's needs, she's decided to have a life removed from Wildside. Browsing through an art book, Aldridge stops mid-sentence to stare out the window at couples walking through Allan Gardens. It seems like she's searching for something inside herself. "I look at myself as imperfect and that's a big stretch for me -- I was always a perfectionist," she says. "People always say they're fine. No one's ever fine...You should see my life."
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