AIDA LIBIDO AIN'T NO LADY!!!

A faux autobiography focuses on Hollywood’s queen of crass—Aida Libido, the salacious star of song, stage, and screen.

Aida was born with platinum blond hair; her first words were “Hello Sailor”; and puberty hit when she was only 4 years old. The “hyper-flexible, over-developed pre-adolescent with no gag reflex” became a dancer, contortionist, and prolific sword swallower who would quickly abandon the sideshow and board a Greyhound for Hollywood. The Tinseltown waiting for her was not quite the one that most readers know—sure, the money trench was just as shallow and casting couches abounded, but this Los Angeles was the once-thought-impossible love child of John Waters and Anna Nicole Smith, a place where Aida’s bountiful assets opened doors wide. After a short detour sharing an apartment with a lascivious, underwear-stealing hustler named Meryl Streep, Aida landed the lead in Steven Spielberg’s “tour de force” Beach Blanket Bimbo and won an Oscar. What followed was everything she could have ever wanted—two Grammys, a Tony, a relaxing stint in White slavery, and true love with her third husband, a dashing Latin count. But when he turned murderous—and worse, willing to ally himself with Streep to destroy her—Aida found herself at a fantastical rock bottom in LA’s secret, orgiastic, mildly Satanic celebrity theme park of perversion known as Jizzneyland. Easton, who performs the role of Aida on stage, brings the outrageous yet conversational conventions of drag onto the printed page, not just spilling the tea, but also its vodka chaser. Real-life torrid tales of the rich and famous blur together with Aida’s own experiences, with the garrulous narrator sometimes having to work quite hard to make sure the truth isn’t stranger than the fiction. But the book suffers from the law of diminishing returns—Aida’s charm is in the constantly shocking things she says, but these observations come so hard and fast that after constant zingers about racial stereotypes and Streep’s inhuman promiscuity and more blowjob jokes than most readers can stomach, the audience will find that it’s easy to become numb. As the biting wit and political incorrectness begin to lose their impact, the tale reveals itself as mostly a long setup for recurring punchlines.

While this Hollywood account delivers plenty of raucous debauchery, the humor sometimes overwhelms the story.