Drag Show belated update

On the 2 year anniversary of the house fire the celebration was a nontraditional one. Some spirited friends set out on a pre-Christmas night adventure to take in a drag show. Nothing puts me in the holiday mood more than a drag show. Glitter, lip gloss, Santa dresses, Christmas music, clunky shoes, chocolate martini's combined with being ruthlessly heckled at these events really washes away any thought of any winter blues. The night was chilly, but the spirits flowed, and the performers were hot and the laughs were rolling.



At one point in the night a woman friend from work and a long time gay man friend from were on stage in some sort of dance competition - I can't recall the details, just the gyrating. This was a strange mixing of worlds! In total our tribe for the night had about nine in all. Half of us lied and said we were from Salina. The other half said they were from Lawrence. (Because what rhymes with Salina?)

We were harassed to the point of hilarity and gave away more dollars to the dancers than I can remember. Not one person, including myself mentioned the house fire in the long, late night of cheering, whooting, clapping, drinking, then later, dancing. The fire is long part of the things in the past, even though we still run into gaps while looking for things and realize - oh, that burned up in the fire - and stop looking for said whatever it was.

One of the drag queens wore an off-the-shoulder shimmery red short Santa-ish dress with a large black Santa-ish belt and got the whole crowd going. It was in the midst of that song while watching one of my long time pals get loved up by this performer while a friend next to me laughed her famous stripper laugh, and the rowdy boys with us hooted and yelled for more, that I realized how much humans can stretch themselves. That beautiful drag queen was transformed from her/his usual man self into a sleek sexy femme performer. All of the friends along for the ride that night have their own spectacular journey of love and loss to share and in that hour were having so much fun the posse glowed with excitement. One woman, a friend who rarely goes out, and I ended up dancing in a sandwich with some hot gay men near the end of the night. She has lived a couple of lives all by her tiny self and was bubbling over with her one night of freedom from the hard work that normally defines her life.

The destination night to the drag show was a perfect way to ensure that no matter what else happened with family interactions or possible present disappointments, I had celebrated my Christmas in a completely perfect way in advance of the day and left a little bit of flaming history in my past while flaming it up on the dance floor with Britney Spears as a backdrop to the whole wonderful scene.