Sheer fabulousness

There's no telling what Dallas's J.R. Ewing would have made of Texas party-planner extraordinaire Steve Kemble. Sporting a well-manicured goatee and wearing a vintage black-velvet jacket with exquisite brocade lapels and a matching vest--a little number he picked up in Paris--Kemble is not the kind of guy you would have expected to glide through the front door at South Fork. But just think about how much more interesting the show would have been if he had. That's part of the thinking behind TLC's new six-part reality series Sheer Dallas, premiering April 15, which strives to prove that Texas's size-queen mentality still applies to the larger-than-life characters who populate its most famous city.Kemble, who gives the series most of its requisite queer quotient, says he would have had no problem going boot to stylish loafer with the intimidating J.R. "The majority of my clients are corporate CEOs, and they have no problem dealing with me whatsoever," says Kemble, 46, who calls himself "America's sassiest style guru" and has been running his fabulously successful company, Steve Kemble Event Planning, for nearly two decades. "Now, maybe when I leave, they're like, 'Whoa.' But the bottom line is that they want their party fabulous. And if they want it fabulous, then they need to entrust a gay person to make that happen."Besides, not only did Kemble work for the Big D Chamber of Commerce at the height of the nighttime soap's "Who shot J.R.?" mania, but the man himself, Larry Hagman, serves as the TLC series narrator.Like the other featured characters on Sheer Dallas, Kemble is a regular at the city's Salon Pompeo, an upscale coiffure palace. The rest of the cast includes a flamboyant real estate agent, a society bride and her overbearing mother, a pair of club owners, a plastic surgeon, and the salon staff, including stylist Lance Hooper, the show's other touch of pink.Kemble is no stranger to the world of reality TV after stints on the Style Network's Whose Wedding Is It Anyway? and ABC's My Life is a Sitcom and The Great Domestic Showdown, but he insists that Sheer Dallas is a cut above. "Some of these other shows seem to put you into a role that isn't who you really are, but here I think these people really knew who I was,'' Kemble says. "It's going to show a lot of the fabulous of Dallas, and there is a lot of fabulous here.''