Page 93 of Here We Go Again
It’s not until Remy leads them around the back that signs of the extraordinary start to appear. The thrum of a bass. Glitter on the walkway. A white feather boa hanging from a low branch on a beech tree. At the back door, a butch biker asks for the password.
“Willi Ninja,” Remy whispers, and then they’re in a giant basement with a stage erected on the far end. There are a dozen tables throughout the room, but most people are standing. A few drag queens gather around the makeshift bar, sipping martinis andflirting with the young man who’s playing bartender. A group of college students hover in one corner, looking both excited and out of place. A queer couple in street clothes is kissing in the middle of the dance floor. Close to the stage, people have clustered around to watch a queen do a gut-wrenching rendition of Celine Dion.
Logan goes to the bar to get a round of drinks and Remy takes Joe to an empty table, but Rosemary just stands there, mesmerized by the performer onstage. She’s a large Black queen with a silvery wig and a sequined dress, and Rosemary knows it’s lip-syncing, but she puts her whole heart and soul into it. In this church basement in Mississippi, shebecomesCeline Dion. For the length of this song, she gets to be someone else too.
When the song ends, everyone claps and catcalls for Celine, and she takes several proud bows. Rosemary claps the loudest, caught up in the buzz of this supportive community. How could this ever be illegal?
There’s a hand on her lower back. “Hooked already?” Logan asks close to her ear. She’s got another glass of dark alcohol for herself and a ginger beer with lime for Rosemary. “She was soamazing,” Rosemary gushes.
“Is this your first drag show?”
Rosemary nods, and for some reason, that answer earns her a kiss. Logan stoops down and pulls her in close. “I can’t wait to see Rebel up there,” Logan purrs in her Chad voice.
Rosemary wants to protest—she doesn’t sing, doesn’t dance—but she stops herself. She has no idea what Rebel will do tonight.
At the table, Remy and Joe are whispering, but it stops as soon as they join them.
“Welcome, welcome, welcome!” someone calls out from the stage, and Rosemary turns in her chair to see a king dressed like John Wayne, using a microphone to hype up the crowd.
“Gladys!” Logan grabs Rosemary’s leg under the table. “MJ fucking Rodriguez, it’s frozen shrimp–selling, Brandi Carlisle–lovingGladys!”
Rosemary looks again, and it is the auto mechanic who fixedup the Gay Mobile. Remy shouts over the noise when he sees their shock. “I told you we are friends!”
“For those of you who are new to the Gulf Coast Amateur Drag Show, this is a chance for the untested queers, sissies, and missies to take the stage. But fair warning: our judges are a bunch of jaded bitches, and they will eviscerate you. Let’s get those bitches up here. Please welcome to the stage Girl George, Miss Maybell, Madame La Tush, and Deena Diva!”
The room erupts in catcalls and applause as Remy and the other three judges take the stage. There is a round of rehearsed trash talk between the judges, while Remy leans in and whispers something to Gladys. Then Gladys is back at the mic. “All right, my beautiful children, it sounds like we have a fresh young king ready to make his Gulf Coast debut. He hails from—well, from a teeny town no one cares about, so we’ll just say he’s from Portland!”
“Maine?” Someone shouts from back by the bar.
“No, the other one.” Gladys pretends to expectorate into a spittoon. “This Wall Street bro will steal your life savings and your wife. Please give a huge Mississippi welcome to Chad Van Dyke!”
Logan flies out of her seat in mock outrage, pointing at La Tush onstage. “Did you do this?”
Madame La Tush blows a kiss, and Logan makes her way up to the stage with a cocky swagger. Rosemary’s heart thumps in her chest as Logan forgoes both the steps and the wheelchair ramp and leaps her way onto the stage instead. There are probably only fifty people gathered in this church basement, but that’s still a paralyzing number of witnesses. But Logan—who has nothing prepared and, quite frankly, no musical talent to speak of—is grabbing the mic like it’s nothing. She stands in the center of the stage beneath three glowing spotlights, and she smiles like the crowd is already hers. It probably is.
“Hey, y’all,” she says in a sultry drawl. “Thanks for that warm welcome.”
The group of college girls cheers spiritedly. Logan looks like a masc god up on that stage, so of course every sapphic in the room is losing their mind. Rosemary is losing hers, too, even as the rest of her body riots from secondhand nerves.
“This song might seem like an odd choice for a ladies’ man like me, but I want to dedicate this performance to someone very special.” Logan points directly at her from the stage. “Rebel Without a Cock. We used to sing this song together when we were young, but I would always switch the boy to girl in my head.”
Rosemary feels like her heart is beating outside her body, like it’s been put in an airless jar for everyone at Amateur Drag Night to examine. Because the song Gladys cues up is “She’s in Love with the Boy” by Tricia Yearwood.
Rosemary gasps, and Joe reaches out for her hand. The guitar and piano kick in, and onstage, Logan is doing some sexy head bob, but in Rosemary’s memory, Logan is wearing an oversized T-shirt as pajamas, singing this song into a hairbrush; she’s in the backyard holding a camcorder, directing a music video to this song; she’s on that front porch swing, sharing one set of headphones, staring at the stars to this song.
The lyrics start, and Logan dramatically lip-syncs. She begins with a slow-ballad performance, eyes closed, hand to heart. But as the song picks up, Logan switches to a full-on interpretive dance. It’s horrible, but it’s also so damn funny, no one seems to care about her lack of coordination. By the chorus, everyone is screaming the lyrics along with her. Because obviously, all the Mississippi queers know Tricia Yearwood.
Rosemary laughs so hard, she forgets about her twisting stomach and exposed heart. And then, when Katie and Tommy are at the Tastee Freeze in the song, Logan leaps off the stage, shimmies her way to Rosemary and Joe, and drops to one knee at “Tommy slips something on her hand.”
Logan pantomimes proposing to Rosemary, and Rosemary’s brainknows this is all part of the charade, but the rest of her doesn’t get the memo. Her jar heart nearly explodes.
I would always switch the boy to girl in my head.
She’s in love with the girl.
Logan finishes the performance with a triumphant knee-slide across the stage, and the room erupts in a standing ovation.
She has to distract herself from the overwhelming surge of feelings. “I… I see why you did drag,” she says to Joe, still staring at Logan onstage where she’s taking an absurd number of bows.
