Penny Arcade was featured in 1988 "Vogue Magazine"'s "People Are Talking About" issue, the first mention of performance art in a national fashion magazine. In the late 1980s, she created a character named Margo Howard-Howard, a 50-year-old drag queen with a scandalous past, for her performances. The "New York Times" refers to the character as "patently unbelievable", but in a later article acknowledges that her monologue was "based on real Lower East Side residents." Howard-Howard received an obituary in "The Village Voice".