For bandleader Doc Scantlin and wife Chou Chou, a life inspired by the 1930s

She wears a red tulle dress with a tight bustier with sequins that frame her impressive decolletage, a plume of tulle flowing down the back of her legs. A red-feathered headdress shivers upon her blond updo, above a pale face with striking red lipstick. She’s Chou Chou Scantlin, a songstress built like a Barbie doll, crooning “As Time Goes By.” Behind her, Doc Scantlin, her husband, leads his Imperial Palms Orchestra , a 15-piece, 1930s-themed band that has been a fixture in the Washington area for more than 20 years.

Tonight their audience is members of the Scottish Rite Freemasons, a mostly over-50 group slowly filling the massive Washington Hilton ballroom. As the tempo picks up, couples self-consciously take to the edges of the dance floor, while Doc — dapper with a pencil mustache and white tails and spats — tells corny jokes and sings standards such as “Night and Day” and “Minnie the Moocher.” Chou Chou (pronounced “shoo-shoo”), 58, flirts with the men in the audience, rubbing one man’s bald head and exclaiming, to his tablemates’ delight, “More skin to kiss!” When Doc starts playing “Paper Moon,” she pulls two men in suits onstage and says, “This is Lou and Bill! They’re going to blow bubbles for me!”

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Bandleader Doc Scantlin and singer Chou Chou have found a way to live in a different era — when swing was king and romance was everything. (Jan. 13)

“It’s great,” says Bill, who is giddy afterward. “She’s doing the Marilyn Monroe thing.” But with her wide eyes and girly voice, she doesn’t seem saucy enough to be Monroe. It’s more like Monroe channeling Judy Garland in “The Wizard of Oz.”

In truth, there’s little separation between the two personas onstage or off. Stop in at their bayside Calvert County home unannounced, and you’ll find Doc, who’s 65, in a bow tie, pressed pants and shirt. It’s how he has dressed his whole adult life. He also wears garters to hold up his old-fashioned nylon socks, drives a 1937 black Buick Limited, and sometimes pulls out a monocle to read menus when he goes out for “luncheon.” Transfixed by pre-World War II-era America, Doc recalls how his grandparents in Arkansas would talk about life in the ’30s, “and they kind of got this faraway look in their eyes, and they’d say: ‘You know, we didn’t have much. We didn’t have anything. But, you know, people really seemed to be happier.’ ”

With a perfect figure, Chou Chou looks years younger than her age, a youthfulness exaggerated by a breathy, sweet-as-pie voice that always sounds as if it’s on the verge of a giggle. But her disposition is particularly striking, considering the tragedy she has dealt with and her lifelong struggle with autism.

“I’ve had lots of depression and lots of challenges, lots of misery,” she says. “I was not always this happy, but I’m grateful that I am, and most of it because of Doc. We make each other feel normal, incredibly normal and well adjusted, and we do not feel that way with the rest of the world.”

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On a fall Saturday, the band has a gig on Long Island — a swanky wedding in Southampton — and gathers in a Columbia, Md., commuter parking lot in darkness at 6 a.m. Doc and Chou Chou show up groggy-looking, but Chou Chou warmly greets band members as they arrive. Today she wears a soft-jersey cream-colored dress, covered with small brown butterflies that match her red-brown nails. This is one of her own creations; she designs and sews all her own clothes and the four singers’ (“the girlfriends”) sequin-heavy costumes. Doc wears his customary bow tie, white shirt and gray suit.