Drag Teen (12 page)

THE NEXT MORNING WAS THE first day of the pageant. I woke up extremely early, due in part to Tash’s I’m-
sure
-totally-unplanned decision to sing the entire Mariah Carey song catalog in the shower beginning at seven a.m. I hadn’t slept great, seeing as all three of us had been crammed onto the futon like a tube of raw Pillsbury Cinnamon Rolls. I was sleeping in the middle, and around the time that Tash had reached Mariah’s “Always Be My Baby” Seth pinched my arm, which was wrapped around him.

“You awake?” he whispered into the sheets.

“What do you think?” Tash had just reached a long belting high note that was almost impressively off-key. Seth laughed.

“How are you feeling?” he asked. I could feel his gross, warm morning breath on my arm but it didn’t gross me out because it was him. “About today?”

“Nervous, I guess. But also excited. Yeah, excited.”

I still hadn’t been able to shake my feelings about Seth’s secret and how long it had taken him to open up to me when all that time I thought I was dealing with an open book. I wanted to just let it go, but I simply couldn’t. And it wasn’t just the secret part.
If he was so good at reinventing himself one time
, a voice inside my head said,
then what’s he going to do when he goes off to college and leaves you behind?

“Hey. You’re going to be great, babe. Don’t be scared.”

“I didn’t say I was scared! Don’t put words in my mouth—especially weak ones. I have enough to worry about without you piling on.” My words came out blunt and weighted. I sounded like a wife who’d stayed silent around her overly critical husband for one too many decades. It was a bit dramatic, especially for this early in the morning, but well, what else was new?

“Okay,” Seth said, a little taken aback. “It’s going to be a great day.”

I wanted that to fix my feelings, but it didn’t. I figured the stuff we wanted to fix stuff never fixed stuff; it was the surprises when we were really not expecting them that did. Before I could muster up the nerve to ask Seth why he’d never told me everything about his past, when I’d told him so much, we were interrupted by the sound of chanting from Pip’s room, some hippie-dippie-sounding guided meditation. I’d always respected people who could actually meditate and not feel like idiots while they did it. A lot of people pretended to be all Zen and groovy, like our school art teacher, who demanded we call her
Madame
Goldberg. Pip, on the other hand, wasn’t putting it on.

“Namaste, dudes and lady!” he announced as he burst out of his room in a floor-length kimono. “Today is the start of a beautiful journey!”

Heather, who had been sleeping, abruptly sat up.

“Is something on fire?” she asked sleepily.

“No, dudes, I’m just burning some sage.” Pip held above his head the burning bundle of sage, which was filling the room with smoke and the smell of those expensive candles that don’t actually smell
that
good. “This is the perfect chance for us to cleanse our minds before the intense and exciting two days that await us. Are you feeling ready, JT?”

I wasn’t sure how to respond. A small, ambitious part of me felt ready, but the main part of me felt completely and totally out of my element.

The bathroom door opened, emitting a cloud of steam into the room. Tash emerged from the fog in a towel, showing off an enormous tattooed rendering of Rihanna across his chest.

“What the hell is that awful smell? Is it one of you?” he shouted, pointing at Heather.

“It’s all good, dude. It’s just sage. I’m cleansing the energy before we begin the pageant.”

“Well, cleanse your own damn energy. That shit smells nasty.” Tash slammed his bedroom door as Heather shook her head, staring down at her iPhone.

“You’re going to need a lot more than that sage to cleanse the negative energy out of him, Pip,” I said.

“Have no fear,” Pip advised. “The pageant sees and knows all.”

Pip, Tash, and I shared a cab over to the pageant orientation meeting, which was in the lobby of the historic theater in the West Village where the pageant would be taking place. Heather and Seth had wished me luck as they made plans for a day of New York adventuring. I couldn’t help but sorta wish I was doing that instead of beginning the next two days of competition.

The lobby was already packed with guys around my age. None of them in drag, but many of them didn’t need a wig to display their inner diva. This room was a powder keg of relentless personality and sass.

A circle of chairs was set up in the middle of the room, and as Daryl made his way through the crowd, everyone took a seat and began to quiet down. Or, at least, the noise level was reduced to the
roomful of teenage drag queens
version of quiet, which was more a subtle roar.

“Okay, okay, guys. Let’s get started,” Daryl projected over the crowd of energetic sass. “Everyone, please have a seat. Welcome! Welcome to the Sixth Annual Miss Drag Teen Pageant orientation.” The room cheered. Daryl smiled and waved for everyone to settle down. “As most of you know, I’m Daryl Hart, the executive director of the John Denton Foundation, and I’ll be your go-to for any questions or concerns during the next two days. I’m going to pass around a schedule for today and tomorrow.” A stack of papers was sent around the circle. “As you’ll see, this morning we’ll be following our meet and greet with a staging and music rehearsal for this year’s opening number. As with every previous year, this opening number is to show the talent each of you inhabit in a group setting, and also for each of you to introduce yourselves to the audience and state something that tells the audience a little about you. Please keep this introduction to a maximum of two sentences. As you can imagine, we’ve had some past contestants who, let’s just say, weren’t shy when it came their turn. That did
not
reflect well in their score.”

Everyone laughed. I couldn’t help but glare over at Tash from the corner of my eye. Luckily he didn’t notice.

“After the opening number, we make the very difficult decision of cutting half of you. Which, yes, does mean those people will not get to present their speech or talent.”

Everyone moaned.

“I know. I know. But today is a good chance to understand the judging criteria. In fact, later, one of this year’s judges will be coming by to tell you what he and his colleagues will be looking for from your ‘Why I Drag’ speech.”

A kid with pink dreadlocks raised his hand.

After being called on, he asked, “Who are the judges this year?”

Daryl smiled proudly. “Well, I am happy to be the first to tell you that along with writer Quentin Brock and Broadway legend Nathan Leary, our esteemed judges from years past, this year we are happy to welcome our newest board member, the
extremely
talented actor Samuel Deckman.”

A lot of the guys let out gasps at the name. A small guy who looked like he could have been a ten-year-old girl raised his hand and asked with the deepest voice I’d ever heard, “Is that
the
Samuel Deckman?!”

Daryl smiled and nodded. “Yes. Many of you might know that Mr. Deckman recently came out as a gay man, making him the first gay actor in history to play Aqua Man. In his first public appearance as an out gay man, he’ll be helping us select this year’s Miss Drag Teen USA!”

Everyone clapped and cheered. Samuel Deckman had recently come out in one of those very public “Yep, I’m Gay” interviews in one of those entertainment magazines that ask newly out celebrities vaguely offensive and incredibly outdated questions like “When did you know?” and “How difficult has it been?” and “Why now?” It was a huge deal he had come out, not just because he was an extremely famous actor but because he was an extremely famous actor who was also extremely attractive.

“At this time, I’d like to turn the floor over to our pageant director and choreographer, Eric Waters, and our musical director, Linda Lambert, who any Broadway fans here will know as the Tony Award–winning writer of
The Lady Isn’t Waiting
.”

Two adults stood up in the back of the room and made their way up to join Daryl.

“Good morning, guys!” Eric Waters was a handsome, muscular man in his fifties with perfectly coiffed silver hair. He had a very cheery voice. “I’m Eric Waters and this is Linda Lambert.” Linda waved. “I’ve directed and choreographed this pageant since year one. John Denton was a huge inspiration to me when I was around your age; he wrote some of the first gay characters I’d ever read in a book or seen onstage. I couldn’t be more excited to continue his legacy with the queer community—and if there’s one legacy I think Mr. Denton would’ve loved the most, it’s an original opening number written by a Tony winner, my dear friend Linda Lambert. Not all of you are singers, not all of you are dancers, and I don’t expect anyone here to do anything they don’t want to do … but I think with the talent we’ve got in this room, we can make this number one of the best we’ve ever had. How about it? Who in here wants to kick every other year’s butt?”

The excitement was infectious. Even
I
was cheering … and I hated cheering.

“All right, everybody, follow me to the stage and bring your shoes!”

Pip looked over at me as we headed for the theater.

“Party!”

The opening number was really catchy. They’d only played it a few times and it was already stuck in my head. The first couple of times hearing it we were all crowded around the piano as Linda Lambert sang it along with us, each of us a couple inches taller in the heels we were now wearing. This wasn’t a full dress rehearsal, but the director understandably wanted to see if we could make the moves in the proper footwear.

Eric Waters spaced us out onstage into three rows. I was in the middle, directly behind Tash, who absolutely loved that he was blocking me. Pip was somewhere on the other side of the stage and in the back because he was so tall. As with most things, Pip didn’t mind this placement one bit.

I was a terrible dancer—I always had been. So the prospect of learning choreography, in heels no less, was very nerve-racking. Eric walked us through the initial steps, which, thankfully, were pretty simple. I was impressed at how easily all twenty guys moved in their heels, including me. Only a handful of people were having a hard time—one particularly unfortunate guy who was even bigger than me couldn’t keep his balance to save his life; at one point I really thought he was going to fall off the stage and die. After a while Eric politely suggested he rehearse without the shoes for the time being. I could see the relief all over the guy’s face.

I feel you
, I thought.

The other queens were a smorgasbord of looks and personalities, no two alike. There were skinny boys, heavy boys, black boys, white boys, Asian boys, Latin boys, Indian boys, even an albino boy. I was feeling, surprisingly, at ease. There was something really freeing about being in a group of people so vastly different from one another, and I wondered if that was why New York City itself was so freeing, because it was an entire city made up of vastly different people. It seemed to me that anybody who needed to feel less alienated in life should simply come to New York City for a couple days … as long as they steered clear of fancy hotels, valet attendants, and Tash.