Sewing! It’s a skill that is supposed to magically supply you with clothes that fit, in the color of your choosing, with just a few hard-won skills. I know this because I took Miss McGee’s sewing class in 3rd grade as part of my school’s extended day program, which was an optional extra hour of school your parents could pay for so that they would have one more precious hour free of your snotty brat self.

Intro to Keyboard was the most popular extended day class. I got stuck with sewing. We did not have sewing machines; that kind of equipment was too expensive. We had fabric scraps that were donated by parents who, I presume, gave up sewing once they saw how fucking difficult it can be. We brought our own needles and thread and pins. Our first project was a pincushion which we’d use for the rest of the year to hold our many pins. Looking back, I wonder if they’d allow 3rd graders to play with needles and pins these days, because we certainly stuck ourselves quite a bit. There was a box of bandaids next to the fabric pile, if I remember.

Anyway, I was not a great sewer as a child. I lacked focus. I made my stitches either too big or too small. I had trouble keeping my seams straight. I was not altogether gifted at selecting fabrics. Embroidery was right out; that project, where I was supposed to outline a rooster on tufted fabric, lasted about four minutes before I gave up in a huff. However, I was able to produce, in addition to my pincushion, a heart-shaped, lace-edged pillow for Valentine’s Day, a stuffed rabbit with button eyes, and a slightly larger lace-edged pillow in the appropriately early-’90s swirly green and blue colors. (Lace, McGee felt, was a very important part of our education.) And besides sewing up rips or tears in my shirts, that was the end of my sewing career.

Then, last year, I got it into my head that I should learn to use a sewing machine. I bullied my aunt into giving me one of her reserves: a Singer Model 501A, circa 1950. It’s completely mechanical, which is something you can’t say about today’s computerized machines. It’s also about 85 pounds. I took a sewing class at Purl in Soho, where I learned to make a reversible tote bag and then promptly forgot all about sewing for a long time.

Good ol' Ironsides

This project reminded me that most drag queens have at least some skill with sewing, since they often need strange, oddly sized costumes for their performances. Maybe some are lucky enough to have a friend to sew for them, and maybe more are successful enough to pay for tailored fits, but the rest of us must slog through. If you have never sewn, I will tell you now the process is frustrating, tedious, and really really breakdown-inducing. Last week I sewed these curtains, which are literally just big rectangles! Four straight seams! Nothing more! And yet I still suffered several tearful huffs and pinsticks.

You better be fucking impressed.

But now I have beautiful curtains hanging in the sitting room! Just don’t look at them too closely or you’ll see their flaws. An ALLEGORY, perhaps???

I hope for their sanity that queens buy most of their drag off the rack. Sewing is for the birds, if birds can even thread a needle.

I guess once you add Kinky Boots to your Netflix queue, Netflix begins suggesting every single other movie where a male actor puts on a dress. That–and a few Cillian Murphy fans–alerted me to the existence of the 2005 film Breakfast on Pluto.

Our hero Patrick/Kitten, played by Cillian, grows up in Ireland in the 1970s and embarks on a search for the mother who abandoned Kitten as a baby. Kitten (her preferred name) begins dressing in her stepmother’s clothes and makeup at an early age, and when she finally leaves her small Irish town, she dresses and lives as a woman. Her adventures take her through a series of relationships ranging from abusive to strange, and in the end she finds her birth mother but chooses not to reveal herself as her child, instead seemingly content to help her best friend raise her own baby and maintain a healthy (ish?) relationship with her once-estranged birth father, also her childhood priest, played by Liam Neeson. Breakfast on Pluto left me often confused; how did the best friend find Kitten when she was working as a magician’s assistant? Why did the best friend insist Kitten leave the magician, who seemed like a strange but harmless and loving old man? Why didn’t Kitten protest or comment on that situation?

That’s what’s so frustrating about this movie, I think. Kitten sort of floats from one crazy or dangerous situation to another and seems to have very little agency. One scene looked like it was going to turn around for her–she discovers her boyfriend’s stash of IRA weapons and throws them in a pond after her childhood friend is killed in an IRA-related explosion. But then, despite knowing that this action will cause the IRA to come after her, she stays in the trailer where the weapons were hidden and waits for the IRA to arrive and nearly kill her. Like, why? She’s picked up by a man in London who thinks she’s a prostitute, and after he nearly strangles her to death, Kitten decides months later she’ll become a prostitute without any comment or apparent fear of the danger she faced in her first encounter. Like, how come? There’s a recurring theme in the movie of people telling Kitten to take things more seriously while she rolls her eyes, frustrated, but I found myself huffing along with her detractors when shit like this went down.

Kitten calls herself a transvestite and alludes to wanting a sex change only once (and only then to get a rise out of the grumpy old priests who run her school, I assume), but as she lives and dresses as a woman (sleeping in a nightgown, for example), it seems pretty clear that she’s transsexual. Maybe “transvestite” was the term most people used in the ’70s?

All in all, I would not recommend it. At least the film doesn’t try to classify Kitten as a drag queen, the way To Wong Foo did for its cast of 24-7-ladieswear ladies.

Our small but feisty band of bachelorette-partygoers had a lovely time at the Sunday brunch show at Lips in midtown east. The food (required with seat) is a bit overpriced, but the drinks are unlimited and the waitresses are the same ladies who give you a great drag performance once you’re done nomming, so all in all, a good time!

The theme of the show is Broadway numbers, and a few classics are sent-up, some more successfully than others. To me, the most interesting part of the performance is the audience participation segment. It’s pretty standard: who’s celebrating a birthday, etc.? Come up on stage for some good-natured ribbing. It’s the part I would be most anxious about as a performer because anything can happen when you drag a boozed-up guy or gal in front of the room. I imagine it takes some practice before the performers can wrangle the audience and shoot off jokes as quickly as they need to.

The space was amazing, definitely the highlight. Glitter and sparkles and chandeliers and mirror balls–can one ever have enough mirror balls? I say thee nay. Red velvet and Warhol send-ups and everything you could possibly want for an unclassy gathering. Unfortunately, none of my pictures came out; the lights are very dark during the show. I will be going back, I’m sure. Maybe for a dinner show next time.

Before I forget, congrats to our bachelorette Izzy, who is marrying the kind and deserving Chris this Friday! I hope your marriage will not be a DRAG, hur hur.

In The Project news, I have started writing! Yes, it’s all very exciting. I don’t want this blog to be about My Process because I think that’s rather boring and there are plenty of people out there willing to expound on that topic (well, Their Process, I guess) but I do want to assure you I’m moving along at a clip, by which I mean, some words have been written. I am hoping to write 500 words a day every weekday, but we’ll see. Maybe there will be more some days, maybe there will be less.

In other Research news, I have downloaded onto my tablet every book I could find with the search term “drag queen” and let me tell you, dear muffins, it is disheartening. My current read is a murder mystery wherein a serial killer is going after queens, and it’s really very awful. Drag queens are the victims in lots of TV shows and books, but the special way in which this book’s hero looks down on them is pretty stomach-churning. I don’t think I will review it here; I would hate to be forced into rudeness.

Can you believe I’ve never seen Victor/Victoria? I am aghast at myself. If you’ve never heard of it, it’s the quintessential “woman pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman” film.

Set in ’30s Paris, the film follows down-and-out singer Victoria, played by Julie Andrews. Victoria runs into Toddy, a gay middle-aged singer who is also down on his luck. After fleeing a restaurant where they don’t pay their bill, the two end up at Toddy’s apartment, where Victoria is forced to wear some men’s clothes left in Toddy’s closet by his erstwhile lover. She looks pretty mannish, Toddy thinks, and they hatch a scheme whereby Victoria pretends to be Victor, a famous female impersonator from Poland, in order to book some very lucrative gigs on the drag scene.

The plan works and Victoria ends up headlining at a very fancy club, where his show is seen by a fancy club-owner from Chicago, King, his bodyguard, Squash, and ditzy girlfriend, Norma. The Americans do not know when the show starts that it is a drag show, despite the illustrated programs that point it out pretty clearly. Americans! Am I right? King is entranced by Victoria in drag and is shocked at the end of the show when the wig comes off and it’s “revealed” that the performer is a man. King is adamant that Victoria cannot be a man because King found her attractive.

This would all be very offensive. Except that he’s right. Victoria bemoans this back at the hotel room she shares with Toddy, under the guise that they are lovers.

A series of slapsticky shenanigans ends with Victoria revealing her secret to King. They begin sleeping together, but King is worried about being seen in public with Victor and being construed as a homosexual. Victoria admits this is troublesome, but she likes living as a man (because she gets more money and a lot less problems!) and she is enjoying her career, so she tells King either he sucks it up and lets people think he’s gay, or they can’t see each other.

Go girl! Oh my god. Yay! At this point, I am bouncing on the couch with arms akimbo, praising Netflix for sending this gem my way.

King suffers a crisis of faith and identity. His macho bodyguard reveals that he, Squash, is gay. Surprise! Everyone’s gay! Except for maybe King’s ex-girlfriend, Norma.

Norma is problematic, as the kids say. Besides Victoria, she’s the only female character, and she’s everything Victoria is not: sexually promiscuous, erratic, violent, air-headed, and mean. She tries to sleep with Toddy and Victor and pretty much every man in the film, and when she performs her own song-and-dance number, it’s clear we’re supposed to find it raunchy and gauche compared to Victoria’s lavish productions. I know Norma is supposed to be a caricature of Those Kinds of Women, just as Toddy is a caricature sometimes of the aging homosexual, but it still smacks of the kind of sexism Victoria complains of when asserting she’d rather live as a man.

Victoria discovers that King is being blackmailed by his business partner for appearing to be a homosexual. Rather than throw Victoria under the bus and reveal her secret, King decides to just be blackmailed. Victoria swoops in for the rescue, takes Norma aside, and begins to undress. Norma is confused; she still believes Victoria is a man. But she is ready to have sex with him anyway, as that’s what she interprets the undressing to mean. When she sees Victoria is a woman, she announces the truth to everyone and King is saved.

Victoria, though, has to give up her drag career, which she hands off to Toddy. Well, that sucks. But I guess that’s True Love? Ugh.

Although it rubs me the wrong way that Victoria had to give up her career for King and not the other way around, this movie is pretty much perfect. The crux of the movie, really, is that a man’s performance is worth more than a woman’s. If Victoria’s singing and dancing talents had been taken at face value, none of these crazy things would have happened.

Even when that man is dressed as a woman, we the audience give it more heft, more weight. You see it time and again on Drag Race: the transformation from the male to female is what the show wants to present. That’s why they make the contestants “dress down” in men’s clothes between performances, when some, I’m sure, would prefer to wear women’s clothes around the clock. (At least, that’s what one contestant said, when another noticed he was wearing a woman’s shirt while they worked.) These are things I will need to keep in mind, I suppose.

While the rest of the city hunkered down last Friday night and waited for the blizzard to pass, I decided to head down to Times Square where a cast of four drag queens were putting on a Disney-inspired show. Distorted Diznee is performed every Friday night at an indie theatre housed in the basement of the West Bank Cafe on 42nd St, although this spring the show will be changed to a Broadway parody.

This show was more structured than the last, obviously. The performers dressed as Disney princesses and villains and either lip-synched to parody versions of famous Disney songs, or lip-synched the songs themselves interspersed with snippets of dialog from other movies or TV shows. Some were hilarious, like Ariel’s opening number about wanting to have lady-parts. Some were not as successful, such as Mulan’s transformation into a snippy nail technician.

The crowd was what I found most interesting, though! Besides our party, there were 7 other tables, not a terrible showing for a night where most people were snowed in. Several of these tables were pairs of friends, one or two were large parties hell-bent on celebrating a 50th birthday or something, and one was a lone man at the very front. I wondered if he was dating one of the performers, but it seemed rude to ask after the show was over and everyone was preparing to brave the snow again.

The Disney theme was especially fun for attendees of a certain age. My age, I mean. We knew all the songs, if not all the movie and TV references, and every character was recognizable. None of the drag was very elaborate, but then again, with 12 or 15 costume changes in one show, it would be unfair to expect that. I would recommend this show to those with very short attention spans, because it does give you a lot of acts for your buck! But at $15 admission plus a minimum $15 drink/food order per person, it’s a little pricey.