“Sometimes you just have to follow the signs.” “I hopped on the elevator with some Russian Red on my lips, went to the top floor, and faked it,” Totten says.
When she saw a news clip about a celebrity impersonator show that was in town, she called for an audition and found out it was taking place in her apartment building. “But we have both changed.”Īs a marketing student in Chicago in the early ’90s, Totten was one class shy of graduating from Columbia College, when one of her professors suggested an unorthodox project to help complete her degree – marketing herself as a Madonna impersonator. “I think I used to, quite naturally,” she says of the resemblance, punched up for shows with makeup, costumes and a painted-on gap in her teeth. But despite her professed lack of likeness to the pop queen, the Virginia native has been striking a pose in Madge’s image all over the world for nearly 20 years. “I may be able to capture a moment, but no one can touch her.” “There’s nobody like Madonna,” Melissa Totten says.
