Two Stories

From Dan Barry. (Is anybody as consistently readable?)

The Boy Who Became Judy Garland

DOWN some dark stairs, past cases of empty beer bottles, in the brick warren beneath the Off Off Broadway cabaret called Don't Tell Mama, a middle-aged man helps his middle-aged brother adjust the blue sequined top that complements his black sequined skirt. Fifteen minutes to showtime.

"Grab it from here," says Tommy Femia, 52, who is also wearing pantyhose, three-inch heels and a dark-brown wig that belts out Carnegie Hall, 1961. "There's just the one button."

"No zipper?" asks his brother Bobby Femia, 58, who fumbles about Tommy's back like a safecracker searching in vain for the combination. He is wearing a black golf shirt, black pants, white sneakers and a porkpie hat that grunts Philadelphia, 1976.

And The Butcher And Joe Frazier

OMAHA

The ex-fighter known around here as the Butcher, affectionately, has a signed photograph of Joe Frazier that he keeps like a laminated Mass card in his wallet. He has other personalized mementos, too, including a couple of scars on his fist-dented face, the handiwork of Smokin' Joe.

The Butcher knew Frazier as well as anyone can in the public intimacy of a boxing match, where exhausted men hold each other in sweaty, slow-dance clinches. But he did not go to Frazier's funeral in Philadelphia on Monday, attended by boxing's elite. Among other reasons, the Butcher drives a school bus now; he had to make his rounds.