For our money, the family drag challenge is the best part of every season of Drag Race, demonstrating how the art of drag can be universal, can cross barriers, and can open people up to revealing their own truths or getting in touch with some difficult-to-reach part of themselves. It’s RuPaul’s entire philosophy of drag summed up.
RuPaul’s other entire philosophy is to get his coin any way he can, so we had to sit through a short commercial for the latest Drag Race merch before continuing. This struck us as a little lazy. Devising a mini-challenge around Monopoly is a no-brainer.
We suppose they wanted to get to this part all the quicker.
We can’t say we blame them.
Part of the fun of this challenge is watching the queens try to teach some of the mechanics of drag to their new sisters. All credit in the world must go to Nymphia for providing such an effect visual aid to teach the art of tucking.
Maybe we’re shallow because the charges were all hot guys, but we never get tired of the walk-offs, the shaving conversations, the questions regarding eyebrows or biceps. Unlike most of the challenges, this is the one that is only about the techniques of drag and how well the queens are at applying them. There’s a part of us that wouldn’t mind seeing a whole show like this, but the few times it’s been tried, it never quite worked.
We suspect it only works best when you have two elements in place: overwhelming queerness in the group, and people who are legitimately uncomfortable (but game) opening themselves up to drag. Doing things like, we don’t know… giving moms makeovers isn’t quite as interesting or illuminating. It helped very much that all of these guys were trained performers already. They had stage and movement experience so shyness wasn’t an issue.
The dance element was a fun twist on the idea, even if it did send Sapphira scrambling for a new costume. It’s interesting how each of the groupings showed different approaches and had different issues.
We really wish SOMEONE would just come right out and say that Q’s drag is getting uglier as the competition goes on. We certainly don’t mind clown drag, but we honestly don’t think she does it very well. These costumes are just big and ugly. It’s pretty easy to mimic a family resemblance when you just paint two matching clown faces on yourselves and it’s a hell of a lot easier to do drag for the first time if you just have to wear a blanket. We weren’t impressed at all.
Morphine and La Tina looked like sisters, and it’s to her credit that she painted her face as a near match to her own. The problem with the dresses wasn’t just that they were too basic, but that the looks as a whole were on the dowdy side. Morphine has turned out much better main stage looks than this fusty old gown. And La Tina’s version is downright unflattering on her, as is the hair.
This effort came down entirely to two really cute, hard-to-miss costumes. Yes, they look alike, but any two people would look alike in those costumes and wigs. Granted, that’s the point of the challenge, but we think Plane’s effort overshadowed this one easily.
Sapphira would have been so much better off whipping up something for herself to match Shakira’s costume. We know she’s got the skills and the speed. But the costumes were only part of the problem here. We think she got the partner best suited to drag, simply because he has gorgeous bone structure, but the makeup and wig look legitimately terrible. The jewelry doesn’t even match or coordinate. We can’t blame her for doing it, but when Ru suggested the name Shakira and she immediately snatched it up, we kinda wished she’d fought for her own idea a little more. We get that the point is to win, and we want our hometown girl to bring that crown to Philly, but sometimes the naked strategizing and gameplay is less interesting to us.
Look, we’re sorry, but this was a clear win to us. Yes, the costumes are incredibly basic, and yes, she really needs to be read for filth for sending out another bodysuit, but she was the only one who took a person without any real resemblance to her and turned out a clone in both looks and attitude. Everyone else looked like two drag queens in matching costumes, but these two actually looked like sisters. It helped that Susan was so game and so willing to play the character Jane had handed to her. While Ru’s reaction to it was a bit much “Lazy Susan” really is a spectacular drag name and a perfect match to “Plane Jane.” We suspect she came to the competition with that one in her back pocket already.
We wouldn’t go so far as to call this an epic lip sync (those don’t seem to happen anymore), but it was interesting to watch. We don’t think anyone doubted the outcome, not even Morphine, but it was fun to see each of them approach the task differently.
Morphine worked the hell out of that stage, pulling every trick she had out of her bag. In a different week, she’d have shantayed. But Ru was almost certainly never going to send Sapphira home. To her credit, she gave Ru what she needed to keep her in the game: confidence and a trained singer’s understanding as to how to interpret and act their way through a song.
She’s a much better drag queen than we assumed at the start of the competition and a much less bitchy competitor than she first came across. She didn’t leave with any wins under her belt, but she acquitted herself nicely. Top five is no joke. She’ll make a great All-Star competitor. We look forward to her coming back with an even bigger ass.
Legendary Children: The First Decade of RuPaul’s Drag Race and the Last Century of Queer Life, a New York Times “New and Notable” pick, praised by The Washington Post “because the world needs authenticity in its stories,” and chosen as one of the Best Books of The Year by NPR is on sale wherever fine books are sold! It’s also available in Italian and Spanish language editions, darlings! Because we’re fabulous on an INTERNATIONAL level.
ALSO: We will be doing a talk and Q&A at the National Arts Club in New York during Pride, where the topic will be drag queens, Drag Race, and queer cultural heroes of history. The details are here. See you there!
[Photo Credit: MTV via Tom and Lorenzo]
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