Karyl Norman, real name George Paduzzi, made a very successful New York debut as a female impersonator in May 1919. He especially enjoyed singing Southern songs and billed himself as the “Creole Fashion Plate”. Behind his back his fellow vaudevillians described him as “The Queer Old Fashion Plate”, a homophobic response to widespread suspicions about his sexual orientation.

Norman starred in the Greenwich Village Follies of 1924 and in 1930 at the beginning of New York’s brief ‘Pansy Craze’, or infatuation with gay clubs and performers, he headlined at the Palace Theatre in an act called “Glorifying the American Boy-Girl”. Beside vaudeville tours he performed in many stage plays and musical comedies in New York.

Norman was known for his fabulous gowns, many made by his mother, his fine voice, and his quick changes of clothes and gender on stage. According to one critic “Not only does this impersonator wear his feminine toggery in tiptop shape, but has a voice that fools’em at the start.”

Norman wrote the lyrics of many of his featured songs including “Nobody Lied (When They Said That I Cried Over You)”, “Beside a Babbling Brook”, and “I’m Through (Shedding Tears Over You)”.