She’ll Wheel Through C&W; Circuit, Singing About Potholes in Life’s Road

Is America ready for a handicapped, sex-changed country-Western singer?

Bobbie Lea Montgomery is betting on it.

A decade ago, while living in San Diego, Montgomery made a splash by becoming the first handicapped person to undergo sex-change surgery (he to she). And to have it paid for by Medicare.

Later, there was a quickie romance and marriage to a long-haul trucker. And a son fathered by her husband and carried to term by her sister as a surrogate.

Then Montgomery and spouse left for Las Vegas, Houston, New Orleans and elsewhere and fell off the media radar.

Now she’s 43 and living in Nashville with her 9-year-old son, Scooter. She feels she has experienced more than enough tragedy and treachery to qualify for the country-Western charts:

Three divorces (one as a man, two as a woman), a degenerative bone disease that left her wheelchair-bound, years of scorn while living as a transsexual, a wife and unborn child killed in a traffic accident, political defeat (for mayor of Slidell, La.), an elevator accident, and a husband and marriage ruined by cocaine.

She pulled together $2,500 and hired studio musicians to cut “Heartbreak on I-10” on her own label, Sexy Wheels Publishing Co. It’s the mournful ballad of her failed marriage to the man she met and wooed over the CB radio.

Soon she’ll get into her specially equipped Oldsmobile and, like a latter-day Loretta Lynn, make the circuit of rural radio stations in the South.

She’s searching for a disc jockey ready for something entirely different. Sample lyric:

One day he told me

If I was in a hospital bed

With no arms and legs

He’d still love me.

That’s how much we loved one another,

But cocaine took it all.

Montgomery knows that the country-Western road is littered with potholes and heartaches. But she figures there’s nothing that she and Scooter can’t lick.

“Life is always changing,” she says in a soft Southern voice. “I’m proof of that.”

Have a Few Double-Takes

Sights and sites.

* Look-alike. Otherwise, different.

A woman in Marin County is such a ringer for Dianne Feinstein that she posed for ads as a Di-clone for Hastings, the chic clothing store, when Feinstein was mayor of San Francisco.

You might figure she’d be supporting Feinstein for governor. Wrong.

She’s Grace Bos, sister of San Diego’s Otto Bos, campaign director of Pete Wilson for governor. She’s a Wilsonite.

* Spotted at Cardiff on the Fourth of July:

A young surfer catching a dozen waves. Then dashing back to a group lounging under a beach umbrella. Then nursing her month-old baby.

* Another difference between Orange County and San Diego County.

In Costa Mesa, the council delays funding for the South Coast Repertory after the theater starts proselytizing patrons to write Congress to keep the National Endowment for the Arts free of Dread Political Influence.

In San Diego, the Old Globe Theatre does the same thing, and no one utters a peep. Peep.

Don’t Leap to Conclusions

Every croak is important.

A letter-writer to the Lakeside-based Animal Press was angry about “that grotesque photo and article (in a previous edition) about a frog strapped to a torture rack.”

The photo had shown a pet frog that had been taught to pedal a tiny tricycle.

In a response at the bottom of the letter, Animal Press editors said they suspect the frog “would prefer a three-wheeler and an easy life” to the more common uses for captured frogs: biology class dissection or French cooking.

Not seeking to offend the letter-writer, though, the editors added that “we do not encourage or endorse the use of frogs” for riding trikes.