Two women dressed in men's suits, bowler hats, and gloves pose together in this pair of cabinet cards, identified in handwritten inscription on the smaller card as "Taffy and Lie Bill" with the circus rallying cry "Hey Rube" written alongside, placing these performers firmly within the traveling circus or carnival world of the 1890s. "Hey Rube" was the traditional rallying call used by circus and carnival workers to summon fellow performers to aid in a fight with local townspeople, and its appearance here alongside two female performers in male dress suggests these women were carnival or circus workers using the phrase as an insider identity marker. The larger card bears a photographer's imprint partially legible at the lower left, and the smaller card carries a second photographer's imprint below the image.

Both women wear identical dark double-breasted frock coats, matching bowler hats, wire-rimmed spectacles, and gloves, with drawn-on mustaches and goatee beards added in ink on the smaller card to heighten the comic male impersonation. The larger portrait shows the pair in a conventional studio pose with a tall ladder-back chair between them, both smiling broadly. The smaller image, mounted on a plain card, shows the same women standing side by side with one holding a closed umbrella, the inscriptions "Taffy and Lie Bill" and "Hey Rube" written above them in red ink.

Female male impersonation was a staple of circus sideshow and variety entertainment in the 1880s and 1890s, and the affectionate nicknames, the insider slogan, and the deliberate comic costuming together suggest these were working performers who commissioned the portraits as personal keepsakes of their act and partnership.