As a New Yorker who recently settled in Baltimore, I spend a lot of time reflecting on and characterizing the city for old friends. There is one description in particular that resonates: "New Yorkers are weird and they know it," filmmaker John Waters is alleged to have said. "But Baltimoreans are weird—and they have no idea."

It's an assessment of the city that is, well, irrefutable sometimes —particularly if you happen to be quietly supping at Jason Bulkeley's Persian restaurant, the Orchard Market & Cafe, when Jason morphs from his professional, slightly balding self into the garrulous, garish, bumbling movie character Borat and then settles himself at your table to regale you with stories of his backward homeland.

Borat is, of course, the movie that swept the country in November 2006. Starring British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen as a fictional journalist from Kazakhstan who treks to the United States to report on the superpower, the satire mocks both the repressive government in the small, central-Asian country Kazakhstan as well as the homophobia, anti-Semitism, and misogyny alive and well in the "U.S. and A."

When Urbanite's own vast network of far-flung foreign correspondents discovered this Borat impersonator at an other-wise innocuous restaurant deep in the wilds of the county where it lay hidden in a thicket of strip malls (at 8815 Orchard Tree Lane in Towson), we were intrigued enough to invite him in for a photo shoot.


On a sunny day in May, photographer Sam Holden, Urbanite Creative Director Alex Castro, and I are shooting the breeze in a downtown photo studio as we await the arrival of our subject. The Eastern Avenue converted warehouse is spacious, cool, calm.

For a minute.

Suddenly, in bustles Jason, with a huge cardboard box in his arms. It is piled high with brass samovars, Persian rugs, pillows, a wig, four brass tea cups, an elaborately carved wooden cane, make-up, two fur hats, aviator-frame glasses, an empty can of RockStar Energy Drink—and the room shifts into hyperdrive.

Speaking in the rapid-fire diction of an auctioneer on coke, Jason grabs the reins of the photo shoot and runs. "If you want we can put this samovar in the background and I can wear this fur hat because you know Borat is always wearing things that are so out of season like this grey suit I bought from that shop in Towson—do you know it—called Ten Car Pile Up on York Road where the owner found me the most perfect '70s grey suit, don't you think?" he says, pausing only long enough to inhale and draw out his suit for us to admire. He dives back into his box of props and assumes the trademark bad accent. "Here, I have a nice-a flag from my country. Maybe I wear-a this around my shoulders? But don't hide-a my face? This-a my best feature, no?"

Before Alex or Sam can get a word in edgewise, Jason has arrayed all his Borat accoutrements on the floor around himself in a semicircle of glittering ephemera, monologuing all the while about how he might best use each of these items.

The average person usually sips the energy drink, RockStar, that Jason confesses being addicted to; he clearly mainlines the stuff.


Bustling in and out of the dressing room, in and out of costumes, and in and out of character, Jason talks energetically throughout the entire photo shoot. And somewhere in this monologue that has us flitting from Kazakhstan to Towson and back again, I am able to collect a few biographical details about Jason.

I learn that Jason, 42, used to be in the Air Force, that he was a Russian linguist, that he used to be in the National Security Agency but can't be anymore because he married an Iranian woman and no longer has clearance.

I discover that he has owned his Persian restaurant since 1997 and that sometimes, because it is tucked away in a strip mall behind a strip mall, attracting new customers is hard.

I learn that he has lots of loyal old customers, though, many of whom hail from Russia and Central Asia. When he first saw Borat, he laughed so hard, he tells me, he almost had a heart attack. "This guy was all the customers I had ever served rolled into one!" he says. "Of course, I had drunk four RockStar energy drinks before the show, which I don't advise." (RockStar is enhanced with "the potent herb milk thistle," I realize from reading Jason's can label while he is in the dressing room, and it is "scientifically formulated to speed the recovery time of those who lead active and exhausting lifestyles—from athletes to rock stars" and maybe even restaurant owners who impersonate stars.)

I'm told that everybody's gotta have a gimmick in the restaurant business these days to bring in new customers: "Being Borat on Wednesday nights after the belly dancer finishes her act has doubled my business!" Jason crows.

Finally, I'm told, it has been hundreds of years since the Puritans settled here, but Americans are still Puritans at heart. Jason watched Borat seven times in those first few weeks when it came out because he loved the message: "Hey, lighten up!" Jason, a big Monty Python fan (like, hmm, 99.9 percent of males his age), says he likes the way Baron Cohen combines broad slapstick that has you laughing at him, but also laughing at your own pent-up repression and anxiety.

Those are all the official reasons that drove Jason to dress up as Borat and ad-lib for his customers or to settle himself at a table of revelers to deliver his own heavily accented birthday wishes.

Unofficially?

"It's always an adventure to dress up and pretend to be somebody you're not."

As our photo shoot is winding down, the photographer asks Borat to turn, so he can get a last shot from the other side.

"Like-a this, you want?" Borat says, swinging all the way around to stick his butt out toward the camera. "I do anything for-a money! But do not touch-a!" A wiggle of his butt, a few clicks of the camera, and he's off for the dressing room to deconstruct himself, emerging moments later as a plain, slightly short man in khakis and a white shirt whom you'd pass a million times in the Towson Town Center mall and never even notice. "I guess I just like to do weird things that haven't been done," Jason says—a rare moment of understatement—as he puts the last of his props in the cardboard box and goes. 

—Karen Houppert is Urbanite's senior editor.