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My So-CATS Life

I'm listening to The Rocky Horror Picture Show soundtrack as I type this. The Rocky Horror Picture Show is one of my favorite movie musicals of all time. It is the perfect cocktail of punk, drag, mid-century nostalgia and rock 'n' roll. I type this because I have feelings about CATS , the musical film extravaganza garbage-fire-of-horror. I listen to The Rocky Horror Picture Show to remind myself it's not the genre's fault. I had an aunt once. A Cool Aunt Who Lives in NYC and Does Television News. She would come up to Rochester on visits, and when it was appropriate, give us cool gifts. I remember receiving the album CATS, probably in 1982, right after it opened in NYC. I remember Aunt Ellen telling me, this is the new thing. This is going to be huge. And so, I spent hours on the family room couch with the double-album cover in my lap, studying its glossy blackness and the few, far-away pictures of the show it featured. I stared with wonder at the lycra bodysui...
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Drag Queens Are My Sports

I had to start a Pop Culture blog because I absorb and think about pop culture way too much to not blog about it. We're starting with drag queens. Rupaul's Drag Race is the best thing to happen to gender, fashion and maybe even comedy in an Insert-Hyperbolic-Amount-of-Time-Here.  The show itself has gone downhill over the years, unavoidably. It's too aware of itself now, the queens are too polished and moneyed and famous before they even get on, it's just less fun than it used to be. But I still watch it like it's my job. Because it kinda is. Why do I love RPDR so much? I love it because it has provided a platform to cutting-edge artists working in between the genders. Drag elevates women, queers, clowns, fashionistas, and, incredibly, has given real income potential to heretofore "outsider" artists who would never have previously hoped to achieve the coin they can garner now—coin that they can put right back into their art and push that shit f...
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