For Michele Mahoney, spring 2001 was “a really festive time.” A filmmaker and film professor originally from Saint Louis, she was playing with several ideas for future projects, including one about a scientist who sees jackalopes flying into Chicago. (“I like mythical creatures,” she says, “and I have a whole postcard collection of jackalopes.”) She’d also just begun performing as “Joe Chicago” with the newly formed Chicago Kings drag troupe, and the planning for Ladyfest Midwest–for which she was a film and video committee member and a panelist on feminist perspectives in pornography–had clicked into high gear. She was thinking of casting fellow drag king and Ladyfest organizer Sam Stalling as the geeky scientist in the jackalope film, and one balmy day they set out for Navy Pier to shoot some footage. While looking through the viewfinder at Stalling in horn-rims, a pink oxford, and a bow tie, she suddenly realized she’d found her Ben–as in Ben Braddock, the protagonist of The Graduate.
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Mahoney remembers seeing The Graduate in the theater as a kid and finding it titillating, but also identifying with the characters’ awkwardness. “It had quite an impact on me. I was Ben. Everybody was awkward, everybody was kind of lost then. And like Ben, I wanted something different, too. I didn’t want to be like my family. I think we all felt like that.”
