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Just Plain Strange de Jim, courtesy of hundreds of mentions by San Francisco Chronicle columnists, is San Francisco's Official Town Fool. Strange first saw Dame Edna on the old Tonight Show, advising Joan Collins, George Hamilton and Joan Rivers never to try plastic surgery—and then claiming her husband Norm was in an iron prostate back in Moonee Ponds, Australia. "Norm's prostate has been hanging over my head for years," Dame Edna confided. Strange laughed so hard he had to spend ten minutes apologizing to his date's cat. Strange's admiration was boundless for this woman the Pope calls "Saint Edna," and who has her own shelf in the Buckingham Palace fridge. In 1991, when Dame Edna came to San Francisco promoting My Gorgeous Life, her frank and caring autobiography, Strange was right there slipping his heroine his number.

Early in 1998, an elderly woman named Fifi claimed she was Dame Edna's real mother, and Strange was Dame Edna's son. According to Fifi, when Andy Warhol was a high school art student, a wealthy collector treated him to a little tour Down Under. One afternoon, having escaped his elderly benefactress, Andy was looking for girls in Melbourne's nicely floral-scented Botanical Gardens. Suddenly he found quite a bit more woman than he'd bargained for.

That day Puberty had gingerly approached strapping young six-foot-something, purple-haired Edna Beazley in her morning bath. Intrigued by delicious new tinglings, Edna had given the Beazley bannister a slide that had turned it from sturdy oak to quivering aspen, and then hopped the bus to Melbourne, where she literally picked up young Andy, and carried him into the bushes for precisely fifteen minutes of no-holes-barred carnal wrestling. Andy turned gay, but still never dared have sex again. Edna went in rather the opposite direction. The point, however, is that during this quarter-hour union, fertilized eggs flew across time and space into very special wombs, resulting in several progeny born years apart—among them Robin Williams, Yahoo Serious, Madonna, Cher, Drew Barrymore and a Just Plain Strange boy-child, whom the Beazleys donated to an accountant and his wife from Charleston, WV. Is the story true?

One complication is that Dame Edna may actually be an Australian actor named Barry Humphries (as no less an authority than the New Yorker's drama critic John Lahr claims in Dame Edna Everage and the Rise of Western Civilization: Backstage with Barry Humphries). That would mean Andy Warhol, history's most famous gay male celibate, was really a woman. Can life be that Strange?

DNA experts scraped dried Andy Warhol sweat from some pitiful silver/gray wigs in a case in the Warhol museum in Pittsburgh, PA. They compared them to a generous stain on a towel being treasured by Hollywood's Hottest Hunk. The tests showed that Andy Warhol and Dame Edna Everage were Strange's biological parents. Strange publicly pooh-poohed the idea in the Spring 1998 issue of Working the Room, the lively house organ of Moose's Restaurant. Still, you can imagine his dread and excitement when Dame Edna announced she'd be making her North American Theatrical Debut October 7, 1998, at San Francisco's little tucked-away Theatre on the Square. Imagine his amazement that the Chronicle columnists weren't entertaining their readers with outrageous Dame Edna zingers. There was none of the buzz there'd have been if columnist Herb Caen had still been alive. Strange tried to do his own feeble best to fill the breach.