Get ready to be entertained and enlightened when “Varla Jean Merman” makes her San Diego debut in Anatomically Incorrect at Martinis Above Fourth this Sunday.

“Anatomically Incorrect is really a show where Varla just explores the body,” said Jeffery Roberson, the vision (literally) behind the brassy Varla.

“Every single song has something to do with a different part of the body. She’s hoping by the end of the show that you’ll be able to answer the question, ‘Is your hole greater than your parts?’ Because Varla knows her hole is great, but I guess the audience will have to find that out for themselves,” Roberson said.

Roberson recanted his love affair with drag and how Varla came to be. “I … found this giant wig, and it was huge and I’d never seen a wig like that before,” he recalls. Roberson then drove across country back to college, “with a big, giant wig on my lap.”

But the wig wasn’t the only passenger in Roberson’s car. His new love interest was also along for the ride. “By the time we had gotten to Dallas we had broken up,” Roberson laughs. “[H]e was not treating the wig with respect!

I realized then that I was married to Varla.

“I met this guy who had a video camera and he videotaped everything, it was sort of like one of those bad ’80s movies. We started making these John Waters inspired little movies. … I could make a Princess Leia hairdo out of a towel in 90 seconds flat. So we would film these videos, very Divine inspired I suppose, and we’d give them to the bars,” Roberson reminisces.

Wigged bliss? Not quite. “I used to enter the drag pageants and they hated me because they thought I was making fun of them. Because Southern drag, you don’t mess with that! I entered a pageant and came in dead last in evening wear.”

But he was first in talent. And he parlayed Varla into big screen success with the uproarious 2003 drag queen opus Girls Will Be Girls, for which he received the 2003 OutFest Film Festival “Best Actor” Award and The Aspen HBO Film Festival “Best Actress” Award.

Rumors about a Girls reunion show airing on LOGO have been swirling for a while now, and Roberson makes this impassioned plea: “They’ve been trying and unfortunately I think [LOGO] is really paranoid about the drag. I think all the gay networks are very paranoid about it. They think that maybe it’s not politically correct, that it’s not what the world wants, and they are offending a bunch of viewers by doing it. Let’s face it: It’s not going anywhere, and it’s been around for years. I just don’t understand: Who needs another ‘Queer as Folk’? How many more little gay soap operas with gay men living in a certain town are they going to do? I just find it funny that no one has gone for the drag, and really, they are avoiding it. They are trying to appeal to the entire gay audience, which is basically saying we are going to appeal to all straight people – there is no way to do that. I think that all of the gay networks in general, instead of playing it so safe, should take a risk and hire a sweet little red-haired lady.”

Roberson has conquered many aspects of the entertainment field, including a recurring role as lady of the evening Rosemary Chicken on “All My Children,” and a slew of one-woman shows and other theater productions, including Girl With a Pearl Necklace, Varla Jean Merman’s Under a Big Top and The Mystery of Irma Vep. However, there is one more role he’d love to get his hooks into.

“Oh, I’d like to do the live action film of Strawberry Shortcake,” he laughs.

Until that sweet confection comes his way, we can all enjoy Roberson as Varla Jean Merman in Anatomically Incorrect. The show plays at Martinis Above Fourth on Sunday, Feb.18, at 7:00 and 9:00 p.m.

For information and reservations, please call (619) 400-4500 or visit www.martinisabovefourth.com