News

Meet Jacqie, whose karaoke night brings crowds to Manalapan

John Justice Parker, 28, of Royal Palm Beach sings with Jackson.

 By Ron Hayes

    One evening last December, an older gentleman appeared at Manalapan Pizza & Italian Cuisine in the Plaza del Mar to ask for a job.
    He was wearing high heels, a shiny turquoise bustier, a woman’s wig, makeup and earrings. He was sporting large floral tattoos on both shoulder blades.
    The restaurant’s owner, Earl Bass, was not immediately sure he should hire him.
    “I don’t know how this will go over with a pizza crowd,” he thought. “In Manalapan.”
    On the other hand, Tuesday nights were slow.
    “Let me think about it a couple days,” Bass said.
    The next night, the man who dressed as a woman was back.
    “How many customers can you bring in?” Bass asked.
    “I can fill the courtyard,” the man said.
    Now here we are on this Tuesday night in February, and the courtyard is full. Seating for 80 — all filled, some standing. A hundred customers at least. Waiters and waitresses rushing around. Pizza, pasta, beer, wine and “Do you have a reservation?”
    And right there in front of the fountain, regal beneath her party tent, behind the karaoke keyboards and speakers, “Jacqieoke” reigns.
    She teases, she coaxes, she dares. If a karaoke customer’s heartfelt warbling wobbles, Jacqie may grab her microphone and sing along to ease the pain. If the singer’s a pro, she shuts up.
    Sometimes she marches out amid the dancers, spreads those long legs beneath the short, pink-and-blue leopard-skin skirt and shimmies like your sister Kate. Sometimes she slithers among the diners, growling out a gritty rendition of James Taylor’s Steamroller.
    “I’m a steamroller, baby,
    Bound to roll all over you.”
    From 6 p.m., when she opens most shows with Jacqie’s Back In Town, until 10:30’s Got My Mojo Workin’, Jacqie Jackson is the second most astonishing sight at Manalapan Pizza.
    The first is the audience.
    On this night, Jacqie has brought in whole families, grandparents and grandkids, dating couples, a Delray Beach firefighter, a former minor league ballplayer who’s pushing 90, a devoted fan celebrating her 100th birthday.
    Clearly, this is not your gay uncle’s drag show.
    Jacqie Jackson doesn’t lip-sync to Barbra Streisand records. She doesn’t tell raunchy jokes. She doesn’t insult the audience for a cheap laugh. And nobody anywhere would ever  — ever — mistake her for a woman.

Jackson sings with Julia Farese, 15, Alexandra Codella, 16, and Gabriella Bastianelli, 15, of New Jersey, who were visiting Alexandra’s grandmother in South Palm Beach. Photos by Tim Stepien/The Coastal Star

•

    “Basically, I’m Ward Cleaver in a dress,” he will tell you. “I’m a heterosexual male cross-dresser.”
    On the driver’s license, he is still William Jackson, born in Missouri 67 years ago.
    “I knew from the age of 8, 10, 12 years old I wanted to wear women’s clothes,” he says. “But why, I don’t know.”
    Bill graduated from Cape Girardeau Central High School, Class of 1966, earned a master’s degree from Southeast Missouri State and taught science classes for 25 years, including six in Juneau, Alaska.
    He married. He fathered three children. He drank. And he drank.
    Finally, he saw a psychiatrist.
    “I hate my job,” he confessed. “I’m good at it, but it doesn’t really fulfill me anymore. I need to quit drinking, and I need to find out how much Jacqie there is in me.”
    The psychiatrist said, “Do you have the balls to be a woman?”
    He did. She did.
    In 2007, Bill separated from his wife. A year later, he retired from teaching and Jacqie started doing karaoke in St. Louis waterfront bars. Everyone mistakenly assumed he was gay. Everyone still does.
    “I knew I liked women’s clothes all my life,” he says, “but I also knew I liked women. And I don’t want the surgery.
    “Now I have three adult children, and they’re all fine with the cross-dressing because they know I’m not drinking anymore.”
    In 2012, after visiting high school friends in West Palm Beach, Bill moved here permanently and Jacqie started hosting karaoke nights at The Tides Bar & Grille in South Palm Beach, the South Shores Tavern in Lake Worth and Benny’s On The Beach at the Lake Worth Pier.
    When The Tides closed last year, she took her act across A1A to Manalapan Pizza and brought enough fans along to fill the courtyard.

Jacqie Jackson sings Happy Birthday to Myrna Billian, celebrating her 100th birthday at Manalapan Pizza & Italian Cuisine.

•

    “And more … much more than this, I did it …”
    Michael Colombo was born in the Bronx 90 years ago next October.
    As a young man, he played minor league ball with the N.Y. Giants and Cleveland Indians.
    As an old man, he retired to South Palm Beach and played Jacqieoke.
    “Myyyyyy … wayyyyyyy …!”
    “I used to see him at The Tides and the South Shore Tavern all the time,” Colombo says, taking a breather between tunes. “Listen, I ain’t no … what do they call ’em? Potato couch? Couch potato? He’s just a great entertainer. He gets everybody going.”
    But he’s also a man dressed as a woman.
    “Yeah, well, I feel to each his own,” Colombo says. “I don’t expect anybody to be any different than what they want to be.”
    Two tables away, Myrna Billian has come down from Stuart to celebrate her 100th birthday with family and friends. She has bright red nails and a youthful twinkle in her eye that isn’t all from the candles on the cake.
    “I dance with my hands,” she explains, dancing her palms back and forth. “It’s the only way I can dance because I have to use a cane.”
    Billian has been coming to hear Jacqie ever since a daughter’s friend brought her by in December.
    “I think he’s a very nice gentleman, and I give him a lot of credit for wearing those costumes.”
    But he’s a man dressing —
    “You have to be open-minded,” Billian says. “He has a wonderful personality. To each his own.”
    As the evening winds on, Jacqie leads the crowd in singing Happy Birthday to Billian, and then again to another woman named Joanne.
    Midway through, a friend named Ed Willey shows up to add his electric guitar to the sound. A black man toasts the crowd with his beer and tackles Bob Marley’s One Love. A white woman offers Liza Minnelli’s Cabaret. Monica the waitress interrupts waitressing to do her standard, Pat Benatar’s Hit Me With Your Best Shot.
    No, they are not all great singers. This is not America’s Got Talent. It’s Manalapan Has Fun.
    John Justice Parker, 28, who drives in from Royal Palm Beach, is a great singer.
    Tonight, Parker does Billy Joel’s New York State of Mind and nails it. Later, he does Dion’s Runaround Sue and nails it. And when you ask about Jacqie’s appeal, Parker nails that, too.
    “Oh,” he says, as if it were totally obvious, “the appeal is his fearlessness.”
    And fearlessness can be contagious. After all, if a man in a pink-and-blue leopard-skin skirt is telling you to have a good time, how foolish could you look? The next thing you know, you’ve come out of the karaoke closet and started belting your country-and-western heart out in front of strangers. At 9:30, Mike Colombo is back up front, standing between his grandchildren, Nick Hammel, 11, and Viktoria Hammel, 12.
    The music starts and the family trio breaks into that most irresistible of singalong songs, Neil Diamond’s Sweet Caroline.
    “Hands, touchin’ hands …”
    The audience joins in on the chorus.
    “Sweet Caroline,
    “Good times never seemed so good.”  
    Some shriek. Some croak. Some couldn’t carry a tune in a sack. But they all make a joyful noise.
    “So good! So good! So good!”
    Under her party tent, behind her keyboards, the heterosexual, male, cross-dressing karaoke host at a pizza parlor looks pleased.
    “I’m a 67-year-old man in a dress who’s making more money than I ever made in my life,” he will tell you. “And I’m at peace for the first time in my life.”

The crowd dances to Jacqie Jackson’s karaoke at Manalapan Pizza & Italian Cuisine.  Tim Stepien/The Coastal Star

Jacqie Jackson appears at Manalapan Pizza & Italian Cuisine 6-10:30 p.m. Tuesdays and 5:30-10 p.m. Thursdays. Reservations are suggested.