After 86-year-old Barbara “Barb” Steinberg was moved to hospice in fall 2024, her daughter-in-law planned to spend an afternoon collecting Barb’s costume jewelry, preserving anything valuable, sharing some with her niece, and donating the rest.

Planning to finish the task in an hour, Lisa Weinberger arrived at Barb’s Atlantic City home. She first cleared the top of the bedroom dresser.

Then she opened a drawer.

“I just saw layers and layers and layers of boxes of jewelry,” said Weinberger, who lives in the Fitler Square section of Center City. “It was just endless. It was in all of her drawers. It was behind the mirrors. It was under her bed. It was in the closets.”

Stuffed into every corner of Barb’s house, Weinberger found brooches and bangles, clip-ons and collars, rhinestones, sequins, pearls — thousands of pieces in all, she estimates. Most were still in bags and boxes, sometimes with price tags attached or notes from shopkeepers, “Save for Barb.”

A therapist who kept working well into her 80s, Barb came to family dinner in knee-high white patent leather boots and sparkly leggings, her white hair tipped purple and blue. She wore elaborate nail sets and, always, a complementary plating of jewelry on her hands, neck, and ears.

Barb, Weinberger says, never wore the same piece of jewelry twice.

She was a shopper, an “excessive collector,” in the words of her son and Weinberger’s husband, Eric Cantor. As her wardrobe expanded, it overtook her house, rendering parts of it unusable. Though she loved spending time with family, 15 years ago Barb asked them to stop visiting her at home.

So the sheer scale of Barb’s jewelry compulsion came as a surprise to Weinberger. She was overwhelmed and called a friend and client of her design business: Nick Stuccio, founder of FringeArts.

“ I just said, I wish I knew a drag queen that I could give this to because it’s just so amazing and so fabulous,” Weinberger said.

“And Nick said, ‘Call Jarbeaux.’”

The day after Barb’s funeral in November 2024, Weinberger texted Jarbeaux, aka Rose Jarboe — the creator of the Bearded Ladies Cabaret and one of Philadelphia’s leading nightlife performers.

Weinberger was a fan. She laid out Barb’s vast stockpile and invited Jarboe to peruse, expecting her to choose a few pieces to wear onstage.

Jarboe said: “I’ll take it all.”

Now Jarboe’s basement in West Philadelphia is filled with Barb’s jewelry. Brooches are pinned up in her hallway and necklaces spill out of the drawers in her “drag room.” Barb owned some higher-end fare — a Betsey Johnson, a Cartier — but most of the collection is cheap, even flimsy, but its incredible volume and diversity are impressive.

To a drag queen, said Jarboe, “It’s like a dragon’s hoard.”

“Jewelry is armor, and queer and trans people need a lot of armor right now,” she said. “I don’t know what Barb was protecting with her mounds of things, but she had plenty of armor to share.”

Jarboe began distributing the jewelry among Philadelphia’s drag queens and nightlife performers, one piece of bling at a time.

Jewelry is armor, and queer and trans people need a lot of armor right now. I don’t know what Barb was protecting with her mounds of things, but she had plenty of armor to share.

Jarboe

Martha Graham Cracker, Lili St. Queer, and Cookie Diorio have all made appearances bedecked in Barb’s bling. At the Bearded Ladies’ run of Christmas-themed performances at the Wanamaker Building last year, the performers wore Barb’s baubles, and the audience was invited to take some home.

“Everyone’s kind of wearing Barb this season,” Jarboe said.

Weinberger also donated boxes of jewels to the Norwalk Conservatory of the Arts’ theater and drag programs. But still, there are mountains left.

The Bearded Ladies will try to give the rest away.

On Monday’s Sing-Along — sorry, “Bling-Along” — at Broad Street Love, jewelry will be on display for the audience to take: free for members ofthe queer, drag, and performance communities and by donation for everyone else.

There will also be an option to “sponsor a bag” and buy jewelry for a drag queen, with all the proceeds split between the Bearded Ladies and Broad Street Love.

“It’s a time of scarcity. Many people have limited imagination around the value of queer people in our lives and trans people specifically,” Jarboe said. She wants to spread the abundance, and she really wants anyone who receives Barb’s jewelry to appreciate it.

“My rule is you have to know it’s [from] Barb,” she said, “And you kind of have to thank Barb.”

‘This woman is a riot’

To know Barb wasn’t always easy, said Weinberger, who met her mother-in-law for the first time in the mid-1990s at a greasy-spoon diner in the Northeast.

“There was Barb, wearing this full-length gown that was see-through, and made out of lace,” Weinberger said. “And I was like, wow, this woman is a riot.”

Born in West Philadelphia, Barb moved to Rawnhurst with her first husband, where she had two sons: Glenn and Eric. When Eric Cantor was 4, his parents divorced and Barb remarried.

She was always a collector, Eric Cantor said, who dragged him to flea markets in search of Nippon salt shakers and porcelain figurines. Barb had new closets built in their house to accommodate her ever-growing clothing collection.

“She was always fahpitzed,” said Cantor, using a Yiddish term for “dressed to the nines.”

Barb was a social worker, then earned her master’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania and became an individual and family therapist. Sometime in the late 1990s (either 1997 or 1998, Cantor said), her Rawnhurst house burned down in a dryer fire, one that may have spread quickly because of the clothing stored in her basement.

She moved to Atlantic City with her third husband, where she started collecting anew.

She adored Atlantic City: the shows, the boardwalk, the beach. After her husband died, she met Alvin Rothkopf, whom she never married but considered a husband, too. Toward the end of her life, Barb began to clean out the clutter in her home with the help of a friend, but the task was enormous.

They had barely scratched the surface when she got sick and died of an infection at age 86.

At the shiva, Weinberger encouraged attendees to take home a piece of Barb’s jewelry. She had sorted every piece into boxes and bags, puzzling over why Barb chose this turtle pendant necklace or that green-and-purple fabric flower. She never could have worn it all.

“She was a private person and I think she had an inner world that was hard to articulate,” Weinberger said. “I think it was hard for everyone around her to understand what made her tick.”

Going through her jewelry was the closest Weinberger got to understanding her mother-in-law.

“She gave herself permission to be whoever she wanted to be on every day of the week without asking someone else if it was OK,” Weinberger said. “She had tremendous confidence.”

How would she feel about her jewelry being scattered around the city?

“ I don’t think she would appreciate us going through her things,” Weinberger said. She later clarified by email: “She’d kill me.”

But Weinberger and Cantor hope that she would have appreciated her jewelry fostering self-expression and that Philly’s drag performers will find in Barb’s collection a little encouragement from a fellow free spirit.

“My mother kind of lived her life in an unapologetic way,” Cantor said. “She didn’t really care what other people thought. Heads would turn when she walked into a room, and that never bothered her.”

“AAAHH!!! Bling-along,” Monday at Broad Street Love, 315 S. Broad St. Barb’s Bling BYOB Happy Hour is at 6:30 p.m., PMSing-Along begins at 7:30 p.m. Information: beardedladiescabaret.com.