Girl on Girl: Katy Perry

Even in the parking lot of a Six Flags in New Jersey, glamour never sleeps. Katy Perry is here today to rock the theme-park crowd as part of an MTV package tour. The boys in her band pile out of the bus one by one, in the usual rock-band way: rubbing their eyes, shaking their heads at the sun, staggering to their trailer. Katy Perry is on the bus, too, because, as her album title puts it, she is One of the Boys. However, there is one way in which she is not much like one of the boys: She does not want anyone to see her without makeup. To ensure this, she walks the hundred yards from the tour bus to the dressing room with her hands over her face, clutching a pink Victoria’s Secret bag.

Is she wearing heels? It’s a Six Flags parking lot. In New Jersey. On a Wednesday afternoon. Of course, she’s wearing heels.

Katy Perry likes makeup, likes clothes, likes having everyone’s attention. The stylists hunch over her, working on her eyelashes, her hair, her skin. It takes two hours. Perry sings an assortment of Queen songs to herself in the chair. Even when she’s supposed to be resting her voice, she is what your grandmother might call a “loudmouth”; it’s one of the reasons she’s delightful company.

A stylist mentions that she’s big news on the AOL home page today. Katy’s preacher mom was quoted in a U.K. tabloid calling her daughter’s music “disgusting.” Perry, whose mom came to three of her shows in California last week, dismisses the story as a lie. “Fine,” she says in exasperation. “I’ll just stop singing, if that makes everybody happy. Let the gangstas keep talking about raping and ganging and banging and let them have the airwaves. I’ll go away and never sing again, and then there will be world peace.”

She interrupts her own rant to check herself out in the mirror. She smiles: “Two degrees from a drag queen!”

Perry has always loved big displays of sequins and color. When she was a teenager, she would sneak into Universal Studios in Los Angeles, posing as a stylist. “I’d try on all the clothes, all these vintage gowns, and hope nobody would bust me,” she says rapid-fire, which is her usual pace.  “I was a glamour ninja.”

These days, she’s the 23-year-old pop starlet behind “I Kissed a Girl,” the song that spent most of the summer at No. 1. She grew up born-again in Santa Barbara, California, with two pastors for parents. She began her musical career as Katy Hudson (her original surname) when she was just 17. Her first album, in 2001, had a song called “Growing Pains”: “I’m grateful to be part of the family tree/While the Man upstairs does his work on me.” One of the Boys is most famous for a song that goes, “I kissed a girl/And I liked it.” Sunrise, sunset.

Perry traveled this summer on the Warped Tour and was queen bee of a festival full of sweaty rock dudes, eating Kraft Easy Mac for dinner every day on the bus. Her boyfriend, Travis McCoy of Gym Class Heroes, was also on the Warped Tour and would often carry her onstage for her set; she claims proudly, “I was voted ‘laziest’ by everybody on the tour.” She wore a different outfit for every show, which defines the term thankless task. “When you see a YouTube clip, you can date the show by what I’m wearing,” she notes. “Like a real-life calendar girl!”

Along the way, she topped the singles charts, so there’s no time to rest now. It’s back on the road for another tour, in the dog-day afternoon heat. Yesterday, in Maryland, her Candies melted onto her feet while she was singing. You get the idea that the daily ordeal in the makeup chair is, perhaps, the best part of the day.