Everything's coming up Varla!

New York opens its arms to a new drag sensation, the all-singing, all-quipping, all-cheese-eating Varla Jean Merman, "daughter" of Ethel

"My mother does not know that I do drag or that I'm gay," says Varla Jean Merman.

What, she never told Ethel?

Well, no, actually this is writer-performer Jeffery Roberson--Varla Jean's not-so-secret identity offstage--talking about his mom, not Miss Merman's. Billed as the love child of Ethel Merman and Ernest Borgnine, Roberson's Varla Jean has parlayed a cult following into the talk of off Broadway with Enough About Me: An Unauthorized Biography. But with The New York Times calling Varla Jean's show "gorgeous," "wonderful," and "hysterically funny," can it be long before Roberson's real-life mom finds out? "My mother doesn't even know who Madonna is," Roberson pooh-poohs, "so there's no way she's going to find out who I am."

Born in Arkadelphia, Ark., and reared in Baton Rouge, La., Roberson in 1995 packed up his pumps, sheet music, and a recently acquired business degree from Louisiana State University and headed for the Big Apple. Endowed with a disarmingly beautiful falsetto voice and whiplash comedic timing, Roberson concentrated not on his day job at an ad agency but on honing his celebrity-child drag persona Varla Jean soon went from wowing 'em in gay bars to selling out cabaret gigs at leading clubs Eighty-Eight's and Caroline's Comedy Club to singing at Carnegie Hall (in a 1997 Christmas show to benefit God's Love We Deliver).

Now with Enough About Me--playing an open-ended run at New York's Chelsea Playhouse--the 29-year-old Roberson says, "It's all about Varla's self-absorption." And for 75 breakneck minutes Roberson's satiric tongue remains planted firmly in cheek.

Clad in shimmering dresses and tossing her luscious red locks, the six-foot-plus Tina-Louise-ian looker gleefully navigates our culture's obsession with celebrity breakdowns and cathartic breakthroughs. With occasional recorded orchestral accompaniment as well as a pianist and drummer, Varla's trip inward includes a clarinet solo, several hysterically funny home videos--including her obsession with Hello Kitty products--half a dozen original tunes, and hilarious (and filthy) new lyrics for such standards as "Dream a Little Dream of Me." (For "The Windmills of Your Mind," however, Roberson left the song intact: "You really can't touch Michel Legrand.")

If it sounds a little cheesy, you ain't heard nothin' yet. "After all," Varla muses in the show, "self-absorption is like cholesterol: There are bad kinds and good kinds." Then to demonstrate she squirts a full can of Cheez Whiz down her throat while simultaneously delivering a seamless trill of scales that would give Joan Sutherland pause.

Roberson admits that he originated the singing-while-eating gag "for shock value." He recalls that "in the [gay] bars, people would just be disgusted. I'd take a two-pound block of Velveeta and eat the entire thing."

But while cheese remains in Varla's repertoire, it's off Roberson's diet.

Having grown up a "fat kid," Roberson says he went on a meat-and-coffee diet last year and lost 70 pounds. "As a gay man, it's changed everything," he observes. "'Cause without the weight, suddenly you're in the race with all the other girls."

With a sleek new waistline and a tight new show, Roberson is clearly poised for a busy future as both a gay man and a drag chanteuse. It's all intertwined, he notes, recalling a therapy breakthrough: "I started to realize how my life and Varla's were the same thing. Of course, that realization didn't occur to me," he adds, laughing, "until a few weeks ago." As for Varla Jean, well, she doesn't believe in therapy. "Rehashing every moment in your mundane life?" she scoffs in Enough About Me. "That's what cabaret is for!"

Drake is a writer and performer whose The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me will soon be a feature film.