Québécois Drag Queen

Well, my original plan today was to get home from work and relax and generally unwind, but nothing of the sort. Devon, a good buddy that I know through my Totally Rad Designer Friend, Amy Kwong (of SmittenKitten fame), had been in town this last weekend, and tonight was his last night. I hadn’t been able to hang out with him last weekend, since I was in Lille, and he is going to leave tomorrow (Wednesday). So tonight was the only opportunity I had to hang out with him. I sent him a text message from work and he told me that he was going out to a drag show with friends, so we made plans to meet up later that night.

Work was hell today. I’m still not one to blog in detail about my work, but I’ll tell you that it was deeply unpleasant and I left work 3 hours after I had planned to, exhausted. Thankfully, at least, I got a lot of difficult things worked out, so I’m hoping that this will make things easier tomorrow and for the rest of the week. This is the first week of having the full host of autumn-quarter students here, so that’s why things are as crazy as they are right now.

Anyway, I made my way home much later than I had expected. I limped home around 18h00, packed some leftovers into my maw, and then ran back out the door to meet Devon and his crew at 19h30. We met at this bar in the gay district of Paris called Cox (yes, that’s right), where we had a drink before wandering through a bunch of side-streets to get to a bar / theater called Tango. The event, apparently, was a solo drag performance by a queen from Montréal, Mado, doing a show called “Les Invasions Bâtards” (a play on the Denys Arcand film, Les Invasions Barbares). The price was 20€ for a two-hour show, which made me re-think my complaints about cover charges for techno events. Yeesh.

The show was mostly pretty amusing, especially her deft changes to the lyrics of Québécois folk songs to turn them into bawdy and queer parodies. On the other hand, her “French people do this! Québécois do that!” stand-up got old really fast. Perhaps the highlight of the night, though, was her medley of Québécois pop songs that have lyrics that are so awful, you don’t actually need to do anything to make them a parody. Pretty damn amusing.

After that, we all stumbled out and the other boys went off to find falafels, while I went home for some well-deserved sleep.