Ostensibly a portrait of “the oldest living drag queen in captivity,” I Remember Mother: A Beautiful Old Drag Queen ends up being more a portrait of the community that embraced her. When filmmaker Tim McMurtry moved to New Hope six years ago, he almost immediately encountered the spectacle of Mother (née Joseph) Cavellucci, a (probably) South Philly-born drag queen by then into her late 60s or early 70s. His first impression, he recalls in the film’s introduction, was discomfort:

“It was my first time in a gay bar since I’d finally accepted my homosexuality, and who, or should I say what, I saw sitting at the end of the bar made my head turn more than twice. I remember thinking, ‘Oh great, this is my gay peer, this silver-bouffanted half-man/woman thing in a gown? … This is what I’ve accepted to be a part of?’ (as if I had a choice.)”

Unsettled as he was, McMurtry was also intrigued. Having recently moved to New Hope, he was looking for a subject to make an independent documentary about, and it was obvious from the start that Mother’s story was worth looking into. McMurtry recalls from his office in New Hope, “I walked into this bar, and there he was sitting right below this caricature of himself. I knew he must be some kind of legend around here. It was intriguing already.”

McMurtry uses both masculine and feminine pronouns to describe Cavellucci, though most of the documentary’s subjects prefer the latter. The film includes a touching anecdote about Cavellucci’s funeral in 2000, where the priest, apparently unwilling to admit gender instability into the house of the Lord, used masculine pronouns during the church service, but then switched to feminine for graveside. The gravestone reads “Mother Cavellucci.”

McMurtry was never able to find out much about Mother’s past. One story, which seems more legend than fact, has it that she turned up for her WWII induction physical in full drag. (Remarks the storyteller, “She was Klinger before there was Klinger.”) And McMurtry’s encountered reports of her performing in Cherry Hill nightclubs at “the height of the ’50s.” It seems to be agreed that she came from South Philadelphia -- most refer to her simply as “Cavellucci,” dropping the “i,” Sou’filly style -- and that she’d lived in New Hope for at least the last 25 years. What’s undisputed is the extent to which the town adopted Mother Cavellucci as its unofficial matriarch. Part of the reason the film took so long to complete, McMurtry says, is that many of his subjects, including New Hope’s mayor, were too distraught over Mother’s death to talk for months afterward.

Unfortunately for McMurtry’s original plan for the documentary, the week he got his “full-time camera” was the week Mother fell ill, and though he filmed in her hospital room and conducted interviews in her nursing home, he ended up not using them. “It just wasn’t who she was,” he says. Cavellucci’s voice is heard just once, noting that on her most recent doctor’s visit she’d lost several pounds. “I don’t know where,” she quips, “not my ass.” Instead, though we see footage of Mother onstage (lip-synching to a reworded version of “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina”), what we see most is New Hope, its thriving drag community and its (at least as depicted here) all-embracing townsfolk. It is, McMurtry points out, a town where “the straight elected officials, so to speak” regularly dress in drag for the “Queen for a Day” fundraiser, where “the chief of police, the fire captain and so on are sponsored by a drag queen and a business, and the drag queen coaches them, does their whole act, their makeup, to the nines. It’s this whole community in action.” That interaction has, he says, also led to a statute in the works targeting discrimination based on sexual orientation. (The fundraiser and the ordinance are the subject of McMurtry’s next documentary-in-progress.)

McMurtry still laughs nervously when discussing the subject of drag -- “It’s not something that I was ever involved with, and I don’t really get why they like it,” he says. “But that’s why I wanted to tell the story, from somebody kind of on the outside, to help people understand a little bit more about it.” What impressed him most about Mother Cavellucci, he says, was “what a really really sincere person he was, that it wasn’t just camp. And no matter what he did, no matter how outrageous, people could see right through it, and see that it was just a great person that cared about them so much.” The town held several benefits to pay for Cavellucci’s hospitalization, but plans for a monument commemorating her life have stalled, McMurtry says, over a “little scandal” involving how much money is, or should be, left over. But the extra time may work in her favor. “They wanted to do a bench, but it really should be a statue. A bench, you know, isn’t really outrageous enough. I guess at least it would finally give her some time to sit down and rest.”

I Remember Mother screens as part of the Shorts Program “The Tranny Parade,” Sat., July 13 at 5:15 and 9:45 p.m., Prince Music Theater, 1412 Chestnut St.

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