I can’t believe I don’t have a photo of Christopher and me dressed in Hall & Oates drag – what was I thinking?? The crowd was enthusiastic and responsive, and the rest of the performers were awesome. Wow, it went great! It was so fun!
(Thank you, Sherman Alexie, Christopher Frizzelle, Sean Nelson and [I don’t know the name of his accompanist, but he was very nice], and the West Marginals. And everyone at the Bagley Wright Theater, and the 500 Bumbershoot volunteers they kept referring to in all their announcements.)
I photoshopped together the image below, with the two pink, puckered… roses… to go on the screen behind us for the “Hall & Oates” section of the evening. Really doing my best to exploit the CRAZY HOMOEROTICISM of these two supposedly straight performers, jeez.
I made two videos (with no art!). I suppose I’m officially (professionally!) into the video-making right now. There’s actually a lot of overlap with comics – combining words and visuals, a focus on timing, storytelling. (Etc.)
Video #1: I came out and gave a short introduction:
“Hall and Oates? I mostly just knew ‘Rich Girl’ – I had no idea how many millions of albums they put out. So as you can imagine, they have a MILLION GAZILLION songs. I was looking over this long list of song titles and, you know how bands have a tradition of hiding secret messages in their music? Beatles, Black Sabbath… It seemed to me that in their song titles, Hall and Oates were telling us something: something about themselves… something about love… perhaps, something about all of us.”
Then I cued the video and left the stage. Please note that every frame is a real Hall & Oates song:
Video #2: I went onstage in Oates drag – curly wig, moustache, little cowboy boots – my first drag king performance, and it went over super well, thank you very much. Answering the rumors that Daryl and I were gay lovers, I finally owned up to it, and described how we met, accompanied by a slide show of our album covers. At the end of my bittersweet reverie, Christopher came out as Hall and tapped me on the shoulder, and we touched each others’ faces and kissed, and he carried me off stage. (The pressure on me: Christopher hadn’t kissed a girl since high school! At least I had a moustache on, maybe that helped.) It was hilarious and we were both laughing and had lost our wigs by the time we made it to the wings.
To make this post-able, I added a soundtrack of my narration (a new iMovie skill!):
