CHRIS SAVASTANO Truth or Dare With a Madonna Impersonator

Chris Savastano is sitting on a mattress on the floor of his dorm room at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst talking about what seems to be his favorite subject: Madonna.

"Some people talk to me about her non-stop. You know what I mean, you know, I'm not like that... I can get sick of it, I can have a conversation and not bring her up," he says.

The walls and ceiling of his room are almost completely covered by posters and Madonna seems to look out from every corner. There is a life-size cardboard promotion standup from the movie Dick Tracy featuring Madonna. On his desk lies a Federal Express package from his mother in Manhattan: theatrical foundation and spirit gum remover to replace the products in his large make-up kit. A rack next to the television by the wall overflows with Madonna videos, CDs, and tapes. The singer's head in strung on a towel across the entrance to one of his closets, the one stuffed with his many Madonna costumes and stage outfits.

Savastano pauses for a split second to toss his long, white-blond hair back over his shoulder, then goes on. "There are certain people that you can talk to where the conversation will always come back around to her, but I have to say that she is just a part of my life, not all my life."

The distinction is evident as he walks across campus to class, a heavy bag over one shoulder, stuffed with biology and chemistry textbooks. Savastano is a professional Madonna impersonator and self-described "psycho-fan," but he is also a pre-med student.

Back in 1983, when Madonna first became popular, there was not a lot for Savastano to collect, but whatever there was, he bought or begged someone to buy for him.

At first it was just tapes, CDs, and videos, but soon he moved on to posters, 8" x 10" glossy publicity prints, articles, books, T-shirts, pins, and signed memorabilia. By the time he was 18, he decided it was time to make an even bigger leap: impersonation.

"I just watched so many of her concerts that I could always do the dances that she does, and people were always like, 'You should do Madonna,' so one Halloween I did it," Savastano says.

"It was, you know, like a really bad Madonna," he admits, describing the outfit he used to reproduce the pink corset from "Express Yourself." It was a bathing suit worn with cone breasts. To simulate the hair, Savastano sprayed his dark, Italian head with temporary gold hair coloring.

Savastano describes himself as a "quiet" and "low-key" high school student who grew up in Manhattan and never did much to attract attention to himself. He had been riding horses from a young age, but by the time he was a teenager, he was spending hours by himself among the horses.

Once he graduated in 1991 and to UMass, things began to change. He became more outgoing and had fun at fraternity parties and dances. He began to be more assertive. He became "one of the guys."

At the same time, he sensed that something was missing. That something was honesty. He was gay and had known this about himself for years, but he had never been able to resolve it and come out to people around him. By the second year of college, he had made friends in the gay, lesbian, and bisexual community. Soon he was feeling more at ease.

Savastano performed no more than five times a year, but gradually, his ambition to become a professional impersonator led him to go even farther. In the spring of 1993, he began to grow his hair, and as soon as he got back home to Manhattan that summer, he had his hair dyed platinum blond. He was about to attend a big Madonna fan convention and "didn't want to get laughed at" when he showed up in drag.

Savastano's mother was not pleased. She couldn't understand why her son would want to dye his hair and impersonate a female pop star. At the time, she was unaware that her son was gay, but according to him, that made little difference.

"I don't really feel comfortable just putting on a dress, just any old dress -- and going out," he says. "I say this to my mother... I was doing this long before I came out to her. I'm just a big fan of [Madonna's] and I'm paying homage to somebody that I'm a big fan of. The fact that she's female is just incidental. If I were a Prince fan or a George Michael fan, it'd be the same thing. It's not like I feel compelled to dress up as a woman, it's Madonna."

With his new hairstyle and a determination to do his own make-up, Savastano headed to Detroit for the convention. He planned to get his hair cut short when he returned to school so nobody would know what he had done.

"But when I got up there and everyone was so wowed, and were like, 'Oh, you should do this professionally,' I said, 'Maybe I'll keep it.' And I kept it," he says. "You know, I thought I would look terrible with this hair, but I don't look terrible, I just don't look as a good as I used to."

As Savastano walks down Main Street for the 1995 Northampton Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride March, people at the sidelines wave and scream out his name: "Madonna!" Savastano waves back and smiles; he has been recognized.

He has dressed especially for the occasion. His small frame is outlined in a tight black spandex body suit and knee-high black vinyl boots. His hair is brushed up to meet a long, false ponytail that sprouts out the top of his head. His face is disguised under a heavy layer of stage make-up, but the lips are curled in a smile.

"People always stare," he says. "Sometimes they laugh, but I've never had anybody come up to me and really harass me."

Savastano is fairly selective about making appearances in drag and tends to stick to places where he knows he will be welcome.

"I don't like to go places [where it won't be welcome] unless I'm with a lot of people," he says. "But I would never go by myself to, like, Whately Diner... just for a laugh."

During the course of a semester, the UMass Lesbian Bisexual Gay Alliance holds four or five dances, and unless there is schedule conflict, Savastano appears at all of them.

The dance floor clears as "Madonna" takes over, either alone or with the backing of male dancers. Strutting in the spotlight or wrestling a man to the ground, Madonna is the essence of theater and dominant sexuality. She is all business, all control, and everyone is looking at her and only her.

After the show, there is a roar of applause and screams of "We love you!" as Savastano leaves the dance floor to rest or change his clothes. He nods "thank you" and slips into the shadows.

Savastano has performed in many other arenas, including the Northstar [now the Grotto] in Northampton, Mass., television, and places in New York City like the Pyramid Club and the Limelight. Sometimes he goes just to have fun, and other times he performs for money.

At the Vault, a Manhattan sex club, Savastano finds his performances bringing in more than cash; they bring in men.

"I go to places like the Vault and I have guys like teaming and I can just like comb them out of my hair," he says. "That's fine, but I have to tell them 'You know, this isn't me.'"

Savastano has a special way of describing himself to people who seem attracted to him for the wrong reasons.

"I'm like a canvas, like I'm my own work of art," he says. "I make things and put them on me and I paint myself up. I totally change my appearance, so it's not me. I'm just like, 'You are looking at something that's not real.'"

Savastano's costumes -- and his obsession -- have taken him a long way. In fact, they've taken him away from a whole year of college.

After dying his hair in the summer of 1993 for a fan convention, he heard that Madonna was taking her tour "The Girlie Show" to England. Savastano decided he had to go, so he ordered tickets and reserved a plane and a hotel room. The trip was set for two weeks before the UMass opening.

Then the unexpected happened. Madison Square Garden announced that Madonna was going to appear at three shows in New York City. Soon Savastano received phone calls from friends in four other cities and confirmed what he could not have dreamed of: Madonna was taking "The Girlie Show" to America for an eight-concert tour.

As he canceled his UMass registration, room, and board, he told his mother that he needed a rest from school, but Savastano's real decision was much more dramatic: he was going to follow "The Girlie Show" across America.

He spent most the year at home in Manhattan making costumes, but he had a standard excuse to give his mother when he left to attend a concert. She thought he was visiting his friends at UMass.

"If she had found out the truth," he says, "she would have died."

Savastano crashed his car at the start of his trip, so he reached all the concerts by train and bus. Before each concert, he prepared himself in full Madonna drag.

"You do not know what fear is until you are putting on make-up in the men's room at a Greyhound bus station," he says.

With the help of his friends in other cities and lots of maneuvering, Savastano managed to get good seats at a total of eight concerts, three in New York, two in Toronto, and one each in Philadelphia, Detroit, and Montreal.

For a concert in Madison Square Garden, Savastano ended up living on the street for three days just to get tickets for all his friends. Building security guards told him that if he wanted a shot at getting a ticket, he would have to show up at least a day in advance. Suspicious, Savastano walked past the arena four times a day for four days. One day as he was walking by, he spotted two people waiting to get tickets. Ticket-selling was still three days away, but Savastano stopped then and there.

"I lived like a bum," he says.

Filled with faith that his suffering would pay off, Savastano spent three days and night learning the hard lessons of the street. One lesson was that concrete is "very, very hard."

"You think this wooden chair is hard -- well, forget it!" he exclaims. "We were sitting there and we got a piece of cardboard. Man, it was like a sofa."

He was pretty much alone until the third night, when he says more than a thousand people ended up waiting through the night to get a bracelet as part of the ticket lottery. The line stretched around the block.

When the bracelets were finally given out to the first 300 people, Savastano was devastated. He had drawn a high number, so he and his friends were unlikely to get good seats. The security guards rushed them out into the streets anyway.

"They told us to run -- they'll cut off your hands to get those bracelets!" he says.

Five hours later, Savastano returned from having coffee on Christopher Street only to find a security guard blocking the entrance and asking to see a stamp mark. Security was trying to weed out scalpers who might had paid some of the lucky 300 for their bracelets. The stamp was an extra security measure.

Savastano was aghast. The guards had forced him out of the building so fast that he didn't have a stamp, and the guard would not let him in. After showing the man pictures of himself performing and arguing at length, Savastano managed to get a stamp, go through the gates, and get his tickets. He did not get good seats.

It was at this point that Savastano's faith went into overdrive. He wrote letters to Madonna and several New York reporters describing his experience with Madison Square Garden. He sent pictures. He waited.

Finally, a week later, he arrived home to find a message on his answering machine from someone wanting to talk to him about his ticket problem. Figuring the call had been from a reporter, he dialed the number. It was the president of Madison Square Garden.

Savastano didn't know how the man had gotten the message, but he poured out his story anyway. In fact, he expanded on it, telling him that the security guard had refused to stamp his hand altogether.

"Isn't that discrimination?" he asked, pointing out that the guard had been much easier with the girls in front of him.

Finally, the man asked Savastano what he would like done about it.

"Better seats," he replied.

The president offered a few seats near the front and off to the side. Savastano promised to pay for the tickets and thanked him very much.

"The show was awesome," he says.

Last March Savastano used his maneuvering skills to see Madonna in a different venue, this time a private promotional party for her album Bedtime Stories.

Savastano is familiar with the way Madonna runs her life and credits this knowledge with granting him the chance to do something he had never dreamed possible: touch her hand and even get a compliment.

Savastano knows where Madonna lives, jogs, and hangs out at night, but he hardly ever goes out of his way to bother her.

"I don't really like to bother her, but if I wanted to I could be a real pest," he says. "Many people are, but if I wanted to I could sit outside her house every day, know where she jogs and whatnot."

Presented with the chance to attend a private party in her honor, however, Savastano could not resist.

His struggle began a week before the party when he was home in Manhattan one weekend with some friends. Local radio station Z100 announced that Madonna was having a party and the station was going to be giving away exclusive VIP passes.

Back at UMass, Savastano worked the telephone for a whole week trying to get one of the passes. He called Madonna's record company and the company that owns that company. He called Madonna's publicist and he even called MTV. Even though he couldn't hear Z100 from his dorm room, he called the station once every hour in hopes of getting a free ticket. He had no luck.

Finally he was home for spring break and it was the night of the party. Savastano spent two and a half hours getting dressed up and decided to go.

"I figured I may as well try and crash this thing after all this work," he says.

The whole block was cordoned off when he arrived, but once he flashed his ID, he was allowed to walk right in.

When he got to the security guard, he tried to convince the man that he was supposed to have a VIP pass but had been forgotten by an oversight.

"'Listen, I don't know... My agent made this [engagement] in LA through Maverick and so and so...'" Savastano says he told the guard. "Like all these names I had gotten came in handy. I was like, 'My agent made this through so and so at Maverick in LA, they were going to call so and so at Warner Music or so and so at Maverick in NY or so and so at MTV was going to put me on the list or so and so at Z100.' And the guy was understanding."

Savastano told the guard that he wasn't sure what name he was listed under. It could be under Savastano, he told him, but then it could be under his drag name Madiva or his stage name Robert Jonathan (two common names that had enough variations to confuse anyone looking at a list of names).

When the guard was still skeptical, Savastano hit him with the heavy artillery.

"I was wearing that, you know, pink thing with the fluffies and I was like, 'Don't tell me I flew all the way down here from LA and I have to run around in the freezing cold to every table.'" he says. "I said to him, 'Look at me. Do I look like a gatecrasher? I'm a performer!' And he was like, 'OK,' and handed me a VIP pass and that's how I got in."

The party itself was all Savastano had expected and more. Even though he had to fight for a spot by the stage, he was able to touch Madonna's hand.

"'You're cute,'" Savastano says she told him.

Outside of escapades like these, Savastano says his life is fairly normal. He studies for his degree and goes horseback riding in his spare time. On Tuesday nights he facilitates meetings of the Lesbian Bisexual Gay Alliance.

"I watch TV. I watch pornos. I masturbate. I hunt men down. I go to the bathroom. I order out. I throw shade... That's about it," he says.

He notices that people stare at him when he walks across campus and points out that just about everybody claims to have been in one of his classes. His hair is very recognizable.

"It seems like everybody's in my class," he says. "I guess it's true what they say about six degrees of separation, because everybody knows somebody who's in one of my classes."

In Savastano's case, however, everybody knows somebody who knows Madonna.