Whatever the Emmy-voters need!
Eat, Pray, Glove!
Growing up, whenever I saw people older than me who took up a weekly netball game, got really into F45 or discovered beginner jazz-funk-hip-hop, I would be confused. Have they run out of incomplete goals and now need distraction from the monotony, or are they maturing into carefree human beings recapturing the things that brought them joy back before they learned shame?
If I could impart one piece of wisdom to anyone under 30, it’s this-ly. You must pick one of the following paths upon entering your 30s: smoking meats, cycling, or letters to the council. I’ll let you decide for yourself which one I chose.
Like a biological clock ticking over its new leaf (I went to the Taylor Swift School of Tortured Metaphors University [Biff Tannen Wing]) I’ve got this innate desire to run away from it all. Do something surprising to shock my body. Maybe Dick Smith was onto something when he tried to secede into his sovereign state of Micro Dick Nation.
For now, my over-30s calling is writing this newsletter. It extracts far more joy than using my writing skills on telling the council where to build me a crossing.
Eat!
Consumables that don’t perish.
As a kid I was never outright banned from watching any TV other than Charmed due to its witchy overtones, not that I ever had any desire to watch it (Sabrina filled my witch-hole just fine). But whenever Jerry Springer came on the idiotbox, my mother would change the channel like it was the worst content imaginable for a child, as if I hadn’t already figured out how to delete our browser’s cookies. Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action is a juicy BTS doco of the show detailing how it rose to popularity and the cultural impact raising the bar for “what you can say on TV”. If it wasn’t for Jerry Springer, Donald Trump would never have become President.
The final episodes of Million Dollar Secret have just landed on Netflix. I’m not going to lie to you and say it’s a good show, but the last two episodes were the tensest, most politically-weaved games of wits I’ve seen on reality TV. I never got through much of The Traitors because I felt like the show thought it was my first day on Earth. Million Dollar Secret feels like if the creators of The Traitors sat down and learned a thing or two from The Mole.
For self-loathing reasons, I’m embarrassed to admit I recently read The Velvet Rage. If you’re unfamiliar, it’s a self-help book for the millennial gays trying to learn authenticity for the first time – a state of being I still don’t think I’ve fully grasped. They should hand out free copies of The Velvet Rage at uni orientation days to anyone with a limp wrist or a vocal fry. It would’ve shaved years off my gay age, which is your biological age cut in half plus seven.
Pray!
Wishful thinking with no follow-through. It’s called manifesting!
In the toilet cubicle of Hotel Harry’s at 1:30am on Sunday morning, I heard a strong and authoritative nasal voice enter the room outside my door. “Why is there such a wait?! Don’t you all know I was on Drag Race?!” It was Brisbane’s own Mandy Moobs, facetiously bringing levity to the tense awkwardness that is waiting for a toilet in a club bathroom. As I exited and passed her, I said “you were incredible in the show tonight, by the way.” Cementing her self-confidence once more, she replied, “I know.”
I’d been at the Drag Race Down Under tour earlier that night, an event my lower back and I only decided to go to after they changed the theatrical event from standing to seated.
It’s hard to pinpoint what drag is nowadays, because everyone’s opinion is different: if you only see the odd drag number at a club, you might think it’s just lip-syncing in glitter and occasionally miming dick sucking. If you watch every season of Drag Race, you might think it’s being an all-rounded entertainer and stirring drama. If you’re RuPaul, you might think it’s about whatever the Emmy-voters need right now, including overcoming your inner saboteur and having a dead dad.
Eclectic as the tour was, I found myself aligning to RuPaul’s perspective more than ever: drag can actually be anything. Mandy sex-botted to some Kylie Minogue ballads; Brenda Bressed donned her natural beard and sang live; Lazy Susan sold a performance art story about a straight man learning about drag and it changing his viewpoint of the world, comical “straight” costume and mask draped over her outfit.
Different performance styles aside, there’s one thing all drag queens have in common which is the confidence to just do all that. That’s what makes it drag and not, say, a concert, or a stand-up show, or an experimental art show. There’s a statement being made when it’s extra, directed at the people who are uncomfortable with drag, which I’ll paraphrase from the crux of Lazy Susan’s performance. It’s a message for all the straight traditionalists, the performers of masculinity, the people who fear and hate what looks different: the extra-ness of drag says, “if I’m allowed to look and act like this, it means you never had to look and act like that. You were lied to.”
After the show I walked up the dark and residential Riley St in Surry Hills having gotten off the tram with my friend Will. A group of ten or so 20-year-old boys got off too and followed us in the same direction. We both had our midriffs out, the gayest non-dick part of the body to display, and could hear commentary interchanged between things like “are we going to a straight bar or a gay bar?” and general staunch-like yells in our direction.
We walked faster, so they walked faster. Eventually they crossed the road with their group, then a few of them crossed back, despite their friends calling to them to return. It was clear they had a plan – luckily we arrived at the well-lit part of Surry Hills before they got close enough. I thought the sexless Gen Z were better than this nowadays, but I was wrong. I wonder if these boys would renege on this internal guarantee of what manhood looks like, if only they’d had a drag queen visit their school for storytime in their youth.
I’m adding “do drag” to my bucket list. Every drag queen is doing their part in changing someone’s mind and preventing some hate-crime down the road (“hate crime”? Umm, of course I do!). I’d like to do my part, too.
Drag makes a political statement first. It gives confidence to us queer onlookers second, and it entertains us third. Fourth, it big-dogs me in the club bathroom on a Sunday morning – and I’m so glad it does.
Glove!
A personal reality from a real person.
Somehow sitting in Section 40 of the Qudos Bank Arena still delivered on the good-seats-ROI when I saw Kylie Minogue live earlier this month. I’d like to take a moment to gush about Our Kylie, OAM (pending). I’m not going to be hyperbolic and say I’m her biggest fan on the planet – biggest in my electorate, certainly. I’m confident I’m the biggest fan of hers out of everyone I know.
I remember being 8 years old and listening to an audio recording of her concert that they played in full on commercial radio one night, while I laid on my high-rise bed and stared at the speaker I’d carefully hoisted to my mattress from the wall socket far below. Between classes in uni, I’d sit on the computers in the library’s secluded cubicles and watch Kylie Minogue video clips. To me, she is not just a singer, but an unrivalled, exemplary entertainer: if the Earth was near implosion and we had to send an expert of every vocation on a spaceship to colonise humanity’s new planet, Kylie would rightfully kick Madonna off the shuttle on her way to the seat labelled “Superstar”.
There’s a reason she’s so highly revered. Kylie Minogue is the output of high quality hard work. She forges on with whatever artistic endeavour she wants and does not rest until she produces a staple of the genre. If you named the top 5 songs of these subgenres, you’d name a Kylie song without fail: dance-pop (Spinning Around), new wave (Can’t Get You Out Of My Head), electro-pop (Padam Padam). She writes, she acts, she tours – she is CEO of the business of Her. Personally, I look forward to the day we all slaves for her, or are dead by her hand.
My regular seats must’ve been no match for the VIP seating, on paper. I could spy the corporate boxes in the distance: an improvement on the action by being mobile and having a dedicated fridge, even if you are further from Kylie Minogue than the rest of us, less infected by our passion due to lack of proximity. Influencers getting their Kylie Kontent that mostly consists of them looking hot in the foreground while Kylie is spinning around like a speck on the lens.
Is a VIP experience ever truly worth it? I went to the AFL recently (clench) in a corporate box (aaand release), which I don’t think made my experience worth it. The clientele swimming in a corporate box have a different agenda to the regular attendees. They’re there to network, post content, or if you’re me, microdose the Totti’s set menu and rack up free merch. I would have ingrained myself in the footy more if I were in the heartlands of passion in the bleachers below me, but let’s remember the old adage: if you gatekeep it, they will come.
VIP status is an illusion. Sure, pay for the early boarding access, you’re just going to sit bored on the plane for longer. Sure, pay for a sectioned-off area of the club to colonise with your friends, but you essentially just paid to attend a house party.
If I were in a VIP booth at a Kylie concert, I’d be furious at myself for being bamboozled. She’s further away, I’m not in the thick of the action with my community, and it cost triple the price? Every industry sells a service that strokes your ego first and provides you a tangible benefit second. A VIP ticket is music’s ego-service, like cocktails are to the bar industry, or the Rolls Royce is to the automobile industry.
I heard even Delta Goodrem was in the nosebleeds like the rest of us. Next time you consider a VIP ticket for an event, think to yourself: am I dumber than Delta Goodrem?
Before you go…
Could this election be our very first tie?! Yes, it is in the election-fuelled character comedy showcase Swing Voters which I’m hosting on Saturday May 3rd. We’re meeting a cavalcade of characters who are our country’s final undecided voters. Bring your bevvies to the election after-party and help decide the future of Australia, 9:30pm at Improv Theatre Sydney.
There’s a cock in the hen house on the Good Girls Comedy podcast. I’m definitely too comfortable around the hosts Freya & Tori and we all shared some cooked opinions – a fun listen for misandrists everywhere.
Abandon ship,
John.