The Art of Being A Drama Queen

In Washington Workshops, Divas are Made, Not Born

For two hours and five dollars, you can live a modest fairy tale in downtown Washington.

No glass slippers and no prince, but for the duration of rush hour and the cost of a cab ride, you can be a diva: a woman who wouldn't stand for a numbingly workaday life in the District, the sort of lady you see looking glossy and dramatic in Vogue centerfolds, having electric-blue cocktails in Carrie Bradshaw's New York.

Here, at a diva-training workshop on a Thursday in June, you can learn to be extraordinary.

Here, everyone is welcome, for a nominal fee.

Here, the tiaras are so shiny you can't tell they're plastic, and there's so much gold-colored pixie dust in the air you could sneeze -- but you don't. Because a diva wouldn't. It's just not done, at least, not here, where a woman who calls herself "Cupcake" is methodically instructing half a dozen paying customers in the art of being glossy and dramatic, if only on the inside.

To the uncalibrated eye, the whole thing may seem like an illusion -- regular women gathered in an apartment building rec room making a studied effort at being spectacular. Cupcake is really just Courtney Lebedeff, 23, by day the publisher of a government newsletter that lists federal job opportunities. The six women are training to join the Urban Divas, a 500-member group that has hosted kickball games and happy hours since Lebedeff founded the group last August. The pixie dust is glitter from CVS, and the workshop is delivered, pretty much verbatim, from a book.

But if you trust Lebedeff, which you must if you're going to accomplish anything tonight, this is far from an activity for women whose very participation in it disqualifies them from being divas. To think that, for one evening, anyone can feel as glamorous and glorious and uncommon as a diva, can wrap a black boa around her polyblend pantsuit and see herself as Cinderella, all for the price of a mop . . .

It is a beautiful thought.

Perhaps, not so deep down, it is every American woman's thought.

The participants -- software company employees, office workers, graduate students chewing softly on barbecued potato chips -- look at Lebedeff expectantly and wait to be transformed.

Contemporary Divadom

The word "diva" used to mean opera singer. A diva wore sequined dresses, had a killer voice and an even more deadly sense of entitlement. Being one meant you were allowed to throw tantrums. It meant you could legitimately demand whatever brand of spring water you wanted and someone would have to run and get it for you because, or so it seemed, the whole world hinged on your every expression -- of talent, hysteria, thirst.

In more recent times, the word came to mean not much more than scandal-prone celebrity -- the likes of Paris Hilton and Courtney Love, women who became known as divas not because of musical ability but because they are bottle blondes whose peroxide seems to have sunk in too deep. (Love, in a more lucid moment, once told a reporter: "I don't mean to be a diva, but some days you wake up and you're Barbra Streisand.")

Today, "diva" is a noun roughly equivalent to "female."

These days, anyone can sit in an apartment building rec room with glitter caught in her hair, talking quietly with a handful of other mild-mannered women, and call herself a diva -- and no one will argue.