Dina Martina in "Can't Touch This. Check it. Check it."

In the few years that Dina Martina has been doing what no one else does, here, in Provincetown, she has quickly become a star. A spangled star, a gold star, something you were given for being good, or excelling at a particular discipline. And what is Dina Martina's discipline? Oh, that's an easy one: Advanced Hilarity with a minor in What-The-Ding-Dong-Is-This?

Seeing Dina enter the stage is quite the eyecatching eye-candy: that is candy that's been in a plastic bag on the dashboard of a car on 100-degree day, kind of candy. If her mere appearance and aura hasn't sent the message to your brain that perhaps you weren't entirely prepared for what's shimmying before you, a little singing will confirm that you are indeed in the presence of something special. Prince's "When Doves Cry" segued into MC Hammer's "Can't Touch This," will confirm that the thing making that noise is the same thing that's causing your belly to ache and your sides to split. What Dina Martina can do to R & B is take it from Rhythm and Blues to No-Rhythm and Bemused. And that's just for starters.

In the course of her madcap show Dina will endear, you, the audience with her special brand of hardluck. She's happy, you see, yet there's tragedy waiting around every corner. She's lucky, "I'm here at Vixen. It's God's country! It's just like Cheers." And she has a song in her heart, as long as you can bear to listen, and a shard of glass in her foot. She will win you over, engendering the kind of colossal amounts of sympathy we all feel for the underdog. An underdog with a hairy back, matted hair, irregular application of lipstick and a figure that is as honest as a sack of potatoes. And that's when you know that anything that's about to come out of Dina Martina's mouth will have you in fits of guffawria. She's got ya!

`Guffawria. It's not a word. Dina makes up and alters many words throughout her show as she launches into her Ebonics-induced spiel of "axing" her "peeps" that she being a "sho bid-man" is a situation "dat don't fly." But it does. It most certainly does. Her linguistic acrobatics go so far as to make the letter G into such a confusing sound, switching between its "soft" pronunciation and its normal "hard" pronunciation that makes the dictionary become a thing of gobbledy-gook, or is that jobbledy-jook?

What is most startling is that you forget that what you're watching is drag. Dina Martina transcends that tag since the character is so convincing. He is not a she. She is Mary Poppins. Yes, light of heart, eager to please and always ready to put silver linings where they're least wanted. By juggling plastic bags, giving out prizes of chocolate-filled diapers, or gummy steak candy to anyone who has the good manners not to ask for them, Dina Martina will take you up, far away to the deep recesses of your comprehension and send you plummeting back down to earth as her Mary Poppins umbrella gives out under the weight of that sack of potatoes. It was a full house in God's country and what was clear was that Dina Martina had created a cabaret of cathartic comedy that left you gasping for breath and smiling at the little sadnesses that touch us all and touch Dina Martina everywhere. Can't touch this...