Earlier in the evening we (James and I — he has more photos) saw Kiki and Herb at the Knitting Factory with Glenn, Dan and a few of their friends. Oh my heavens! Why didn’t someone drag me to see them earlier? I LOVE THEM.
As I told Glenn, I think our drag sisters have MUCH better politics than the gay community in general. They can’t really buy into the “but if I act like a straight white middle class male I’ll be OK” version of gay politics. (I thought about linking Andrew Sullivan in that sentence, but I couldn’t bring myself to sully my web site with a link to that miserable excuse for a pundit.)
Where to begin? As Dan said, it’s certainly not what comes to mind when one says “drag act” — it’s much more of a brilliant piece of theatre by two very talented people. Kiki’s politics are great, and political theatre that works is my favorite thing in the world. She hit on 9/11, the idiocy of Bush, his illegitimacy, our obsessions with kidnapped children, and probably some things I didn’t even catch in the whirling chaos that is Kiki and Herb.
Favorite excerpts included:
Shitty things happen sometimes, but that’s not an excuse to do more shitty things.
After a song in which she says she’s tired of crying for victims of this or that, she says: because crying doesn’t change anything.
After she talked about the shitty things that happen in the world, and about the idiot that passes for our President, and received a lot of applause, she said she was glad to hear that she’s not alone, and when they round all of us up, she’s glad she will be with people like us at Guantanamo.
The opening act, of whom I had also heard, but never seen, was The Wau Wau Sisters. They ROCKED. I feel like such a scrawny wimp — they both had bods of death. They gave us rockin’ songs, hilarious repartee, and acrobatics! We bought the CD!
Heard on the way out of the Knitting Factory, from an Ani di Franco-type young woman: “I’m wearing my new sweatshop free panties!”
