"Well, you think you know somebody filthier?" Violet Chachki, Miss Fame & Pearl in Poo! She drowned out Trixie who was competent but was left playing second fiddle to Ginger’s performance which so carefully balanced the biting sweetness of Massey’s Edie. Ginger, never one to let a laugh get away from her, totally slayed. In Pink Flamingos, the scene has remained fascinating these many years later for the matter-of-fact tone with which it presents its bizarre setup (Edie is Divine’s mother, sleeps in a pen and yearns for eggs “sunny side up because it’s sunny outside”). You gotta hand it to Ginger & Trixie, they both had the look down (a bit glittery in Trixie’s case, but that’s to be expected by now). Sure, costume-wise she read more like Motormouth Maybelle than Divine, but the frantic rawness of Divine’s Dawn was there. And props to Kennedy for turning Dawn Davenport into an angry mash-potato dancer. Finding new ways of contorting her body for a laugh, Katya took, as Michelle noted, this “nothing role” and turned it into something “meaty and substantial.” Never have choreographed flailing legs made me laugh so hard. This scene from Female Trouble (1974) which pit Divine’s increasingly deranged anger (“I said I wanted black cha cha heels!”!) against the measured calls for calm of her parents turned into a madcap escalation on Drag Race and the energy almost burst from the screen. Kennedy Davenport & Katya in Cha Cha Heels “Violet Chachki, you keep training those corsets, girl, pretty soon your waist size will be lower than your IQ.”īut let’s look at how the queens did this week: We’ll skip the Library though not before sharing my favorite read of the night: Asking her queens to dive headfirst into this hysterically sullied territory (“And remember: fuck it up!”) was a stroke of genius for it not only paid great homage to a type of drag that Ru and the producers have seldom prized, but it put in stark relief (as John Waters himself put it in Untucked when saying hello to the girls) how insane it is to see a television show nonchalantly riff on those old movies that scandalized and titillated select audiences so many decades ago. In an episode wholly dedicated to the highs of low of drag, the queens were tasked with creating screen tests for musical reinventions of famed John Waters/Divine scenes.
It’s not for nothing Ru has coined the term Glamazon to refer to her queens. Now in its seventh season, RuPaul’s Drag Race has, for better or for worse, created a seemingly new kind of drag, one that insists on glamor above all else (or in addition to everything else): how many times have we heard Santino, Michelle Visage, Ru herself or any of the rotating cast of guest judges complaining that a certain girl’s look wasn’t “couture enough," "not high fashion" or that “it didn’t look polished enough”? Even when challenges call for camp, humor, and/or stylized aesthetics, glamor has remained the requirement on the runway. Even when she camps it up (look at that dress!) she is glamor incarnate. RuPaul, the drag superstar par excellence is glamor (or, her latest incarnation is, as “ No RuPaulogies” taught us back in season 5). RuPaul: You were looking at me when you said that! A lot of drag queens I know, they’re afraid to do that. John Waters: She was not afraid to play not glamorous.
How does she manage to look this AMAZING every week? Manuel here to talk about that wonderful Drag Race episode this week which was dedicated to, as Ru called him, “the Sultan of Sleaze, the Baron of Bad Taste,” Mr John Waters! Seeing RuPaul and legendary auteur John Waters together judging drag queens on their “ugly dresses” was many a gay cinephile’s wet dream.
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