Pam Teflon, Queen of Tupperware

This is not your mother’s Tupperware party.

First of all, the gathering is here, in the shadow of NBC, Disney and the other studios where most of the dozen or so guests work. The hostess is Yoli Poropat, a production supervisor at Fox whose latest project is the new Jack Lemmon / Walter Matthau movie “Lost at Sea.”

This group of thirtysomething women, who will be joined by a handful of men as the evening progresses, are the sort we associate with hip choices in chilled coffee drinks. They are not the kind of people we think of as willing to take three hours out of their busy lives to consider pasta-storage options or recent advances in rolling pin technology.

But the person that makes this Tupperware party different, what makes it so unmistakably L.A., is Tupperware consultant Pam Teflon.

Named, she proudly announces, “after two nonstick surfaces,” Pam Teflon is the self-described “Ru Paul of the Tupperware world.”

From her blond bouffant worthy of Doris Day in her hairspray-helmet prime, to her size-11 stiletto heels, Auntie Pam is an inspired marriage of camp and commerce, proof that you can make a living as an actor in L.A., but that you’ve got to have a gimmick to do it.

When Pam isn’t preaching the gospel of airtight plastic bowls, she is Jeff Sumner, a 31-year-old actor and writer (“Oh, what a surprise in L.A.!” he quips). All actors have the same problem: They have to put food on the table while remaining free to go on auditions and take acting jobs of uncertain duration.

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Sumner did a well-received one-man show a few years ago, “The Eccentric Buffet,” but his career never took off. What followed was “one ridiculous survival job after another.” (He recalls brewing a lot of cappuccino in the homes of celebrities).

“No matter how you look at it, it was slinging hash,” he says. So Sumner was primed when a friend, who had been to a Tupperware party at his office, suggested that Sumner try selling the stuff in drag, adopting one of the over-the-top female personas he had developed for the stage.

Jeff’s mother loved the idea. “Why don’t you sell Tupperware as Joan Crawford?” she encouraged. Thus was Pammy Dearest born.

When Sumner is setting up for one of the many Tupperware parties he does each week, he’s a cordial, conventional-looking guy with thinning hair. Pam is another matter. With false lashes the size of hummingbirds, mother-of-the-bride electric-blue lace and a skirt and vest right out of the steno pool, Pam is what would have happened if Ethel Merman had given birth to Betty Crocker. Pam is the Avon Lady on steroids.

The character has already attracted coast-to-coast media coverage, including a segment on National Public Radio and a blurb in U.S. News and World Report. Recently, he had a run at a Westside theater playing Pam in “My Life in Plastic,” the first show where you could order Tupperware colanders and cake servers. But more importantly, Pam Teflon has made Sumner, in just over a year, the most successful consultant among the 8,000 representatives in the company’s Pacific region.

“No. 1!” Auntie Pam exults, with characteristic immodesty. “You want to know why? I sell a lot of plastic, that’s why!”

As Pam tells Yoli’s friends, who sit there mesmerized, most Tupperware consultants move $250 to $300 worth of merchandise per party. Pam averages $600 (“and I often have $1,000 parties”), 35% of which goes into Pam’s own pocket.

Sumner suffers from no gender confusion as he works this room. “I’m not a drag queen,” he says. “I’m an actor who happens to play a female role.” Indeed, he doesn’t make the supreme sacrifice in order to play Pam. Instead of shaving those shapely legs, he wears opaque stockings topped with subtly patterned support hose.

What Sumner seems most proud of is what he calls his “product knowledge.” Like Pam herself, Tupperware is kitchenware with a gimmick, like lettuce savers whose lids are burped to remove excess air, the mortal enemy of freshness. Pam is a fast-talking evangelist for the T-word. She ticks off the virtues of her favorite forms of plastic like a demonic cheerleader. She makes stackability sound better than good sex, the firm’s lifetime guarantee the one sure beacon in an uncertain world.

“Any Tupperware virgins?” she asks. Two men raise their hands. “Oh, we have a few lids to burp!” she promises. “How do I look? Am I smearing?” she asks, alluding to her “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” approach to makeup and skillfully reminding the audience that they are being roundly entertained--as she separates them from their money.

“Ever had hard-brown-sugar problems?” Pam probes, as if that domestic nuisance were the stuff of nightmares. Don’t you just hate it, she inquires, when the carrots you forgot in your refrigerator’s crisper drawer “begin to look like a hairy cat?” She stacks different sizes of the company’s Fridge Stackables into a neatly squared-off storage system that can be re-created in your own cabinets, pacifying for all time your deepest fears about disheveled staples. When the pricey containers are properly arranged, Pam points out, “everything is the same height, maximizing space and making it all nicely anal-retentive.”

Not surprisingly, the success of Pam Teflon has inspired other hungry actors to slip on those pantyhose and get into the act. “There are other people trying to do what I do,” Pam warns the group, with the same mock horror she earlier brought to the subject of fuzzy ice cubes--no problem for owners of the company’s covered ice-cube trays. “Beware of cheap imitators,” she intones.

You’ll know the real thing when you see it. “Pam Teflon!” she crows, flinging her arms and strutting her stuff. “Nothing sticks to me, baby!”

Except money. When the orders are tallied up, our Pam has done it again--$856 worth of plastic in just over two hours.