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their pelvises to rap . All in all , it was the last thing I' d come to expect from sleepy, butt oned-down, church-going little Apia . "So this sort of thing goes on a lot here?" I asked a couple of Samoan women next to me who had been squealing approval. "Oh yes. Fa'afafine have been a part of our culture for thousands of "Thousands?" "Hundreds, maybe," she shrugged. "But we adore Cindy." Back at the bar, the men were no less into the show. Tusi was bellowing compliments I later learned included faipopolo ("hanging balls") and ga'au tele ("big tube ") . "I "Isn't she beautiful?" Tusi grinned. His girlfriend cried: to grow up to be just like Cindy!" Samoans may seem vague on the history of fa'afafine, but Western anthropologists hav interest-after all, ever since Margaret Mead wrote her 1920s tome Coming of Age i ies on the islands ' sexual habits have been an academic cottage industry. It seems that are tapping into a key island tradition. Before the arrival of missionaries in the 1830s, jokes about sex were part women performed nighttime shows in the villages, full of raucous, Benny Hill-styl e ga crude references. (Observed one appalled British consul : The flower-garlanded girls beha demons let loose from below.") These village shows allowed for erotic contact between helped educate young men about the mysteries of the flesh. But once the puritanical portcullis of Christianity fell on Western Samoa, women were to be demure and virginal in public. Banter died out. The elaborate courtliness of Samoan socie extended to cover sexual matters: Anyone who made an obscene joke in the presence of a man's sister, for example, could now expect a crack over the head. (In private, sexual mores were although hardly the orgiastic free-for-all Mead imagined.) Enter, in a roundabout way, the fa'afafine . Since the 1970s-with increasing Western culture exposure-transvestites have resurrected the exhibitionism of pre-Christian women. Th can pass obscene jokes between the sexes without offending anyone's honor. And spectacles such Cindy's might be seen as a revamp of the old village shows. Only these days, the fa'afafine often ta -the sexually expressive "feminine personae" of the Madonnas of the world-using Western brought in by TV, video and bikini-clad tourists, which are theoretically too risque for Samoan w "It's an ironic social commentary on modernity," '----- Jeannette Mageo, an anthropologist at Washingto University in the US. "Western cultural images obviously h attraction, but they are also potentially threatening. Samo playing with what they see-accepting a part of one im age, ing another. It's not really a return to the past, but a historic process: cultures are always going some place new." And having a good time on the way, she adds. Sitting there beneath the stars, watching Cindy's gals bump and grind in golden tutus, all the heady social theorizing did seem a bit remote. Between sets, I dropped back to meet the star herself. Cindy had a sculpted figure, almond eyes, and the throaty voice of a Polynesian Tallulah Bankhead. Like many in this peripatetic island nation, she was raised in New Zealand, where she participated in cross-dressing shows more high-tech than Western Samoans could then dream of. Three years ago, she brought the bright lights to Apia. She's delighted that she has become an institution so q uick- !,Y. "They adore me," she said, batting ner long lashes. 'And why not? Aren't I fabulous?" II wan my so t