RUMOR HAS IT that after sitting, mesmerized, through 1999's Dina Martina--Live!, the Tony Award-winning playwright Tony Kushner exclaimed, "WHAT is she doing in Seattle? WHY isn't she in New York?" I often wonder that myself. But I get down and thank the Gods of Fringe Theater that Dina has, for at least another season, forsaken the sure super-stardom that a larger, hipper city could offer her and remained true to her Seattle fans.

Dina is difficult to describe. Like an acid trip or profound spiritual experience, words fail to capture her essence. One must resort to pale, watered-down comparisons. Her makeup? Paint applied with a shotgun. Her coiffure? A mat of horsehair shaped like a wedding cake. Her figure? A fuzzy potato. Her voice? A mosquito buzzing in your ear. She is everybody's Aunt Clara: a mess, a dimwit, and an embarrassment, but so heartbreakingly sweet and good-natured, you simply love her all the more for it. And like an acid trip, afterward you're never really the same.

This year's Dina is more distilled (even her droning, rag-doll daughter Phoebe made only two cameos, suffering as she is from a "touch of the polio"), focusing less on grand production than on her ability to butcher language, skewer pop culture, charm her audience, and turn buttrock classics into holiday classics (à la Billy Idol, singing, "It's a nice day for a...White Christmas!"). The trouble is that Dina (who, as everyone knows now, is played brilliantly by Grady West) will forever be competing with herself. This show was fun, funny, and inarguably entertaining, yet I couldn't help but reflect on earlier Dina triumphs. And was it my imagination, or did this show just fly by? When the lights went up for intermission, I thought it must have been a fire drill or something. But all things considered, if the strongest criticism I can offer is that I wanted the show to be longer... well, that's no criticism at all.