Goodbye Miss Ellie

In November 2001 Elliot Castillo, a 70-year-old, four-times-married, father, grandfather, and former Baptist minister, moved to Provincetown, Massachusetts, donned a blonde wig, mini-skirt, and heels, picked up a microphone, and became a showgirl. Miss Ellie, as she now called herself, died last week, after almost ten years as the town’s quintessential icon, an inspiration of a sort for all pre-Boomers yearning to reinvent themselves.

Eventually, Ellie gave up the wig. Although she took hormones and grew small breasts, she never had a sex-change operation. Her elderly male body clad in sexy little outfits, her handsome bony face framed in flowing bleached blonde hair, was a familiar sight outside Town Hall, winter and summer. The expressions on the faces of tourists encountering her for the first time ranged from horror, dismay, and disdain to curiosity, amusement, and, perhaps, envy.  Propped beside a small red wagon holding her karaoke machine, was a hand-lettered sign, updated each year: “79 Years Old and Living My Dream.” She sang the standards, like Sinatra’s, “I Did It My Way.” She sang at clubs, special events, made a video.  She even had her own YouTube channel.

All his life Elliot Castillo had struggled to suppress the feeling that he was meant to be a woman. Married four times, he left his first wife and four children to take up with another woman. None of the marriages lasted, partly because he was such a philanderer. He loved beautiful women. If he couldn’t be one, he could at least marry them. The feeling grew until one day Jesus said, “It’s okay. Be a woman.”

Some of Miss Ellie’s children didn’t take kindly to her lifestyle change. A daughter turned her back; a son refused access to grandchildren. But others came around. Several winters ago, I saw her in a pew of the Unitarian Universalist Church, companionably sharing a hymnal with a middle-aged, conservatively dressed son. When she lay in a Cape Cod hospital dying of pancreatic cancer, all but one of her children were there.

I’d also seen her,  dressed in a knee-length skirt and a subdued page boy, singing in the church’s choir. When I went to the after-service coffee hour, she was the first to greet me and make me feel at home. Among Miss Ellie’s other lavishly praised qualities—her courage, her cheerfulness—she was above all an extremely nice person.

Asked what she considered herself—transvestite, transgendered person, homosexual, etc.—she’d say, “a human being.” For the record, under sex on her Facebook profile she wrote male. Under About Ellie she wrote: "Life or love is the one reality. Death or hate is the one unreality. Therefore, it's only common sense to choose life. Why die? Death is so unnecessary! Be like Ellie—sexy, gorgeous—25 forever! It's more fun that way!”


Asked in a writing class to write a poem about a butterfly, I came up with the following:

                    Painted Lady
In Provincetown on summer Saturdays
before benches bearing tired tourists
resting their fluid-filled legs, she performs;
her gaunt legs, bowed like a butterfly’s wings,
blond wig, hands too wide, jaw too big to be
what something deep inside her says she is.
Sundays, sans wig, legs covered to the knee,
she’s often found—drab bird in a sad skirt—
in the choir of the Unitarian church.
Seeking surcease from quiddity within
the sanctum of this motley flock, she lifts
her throat in commonality and sings. 
What are any of us—
pale larks warbling within the fold 
or butterflies with gaudy wings?

Goodbye, Miss Ellie. Rest in peace.

A public "Celebration of Life for Ellie" will be held at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Provincetown on Saturday, May 14 at 11 a.m., and Ellie’s children are hosting an "Ellie-palooza" tribute party on Father’s Day, June 19, at 1 p.m. at the Crown & Anchor.