Spotlight on Mental Health
Two weeks before the world farted on itself with a Pandemic, a 6ft 3 hairy-ass Drag Queen with a mustache was crying to herself in a jam-packed Royal Hotel.
It was the night of the inaugural Miss Fernie Amateur Drag Pageant. With a line out the door reaching all the way to Big Bang Bagels, our Drag extravaganza had attracted a raucous crowd of Fernie fabulousness. Miss Marisa Fuénté-Mojådå had finished her strip tease when something breathtaking happened. A Drag King named Stan Dex took the stage with a broom.
As Michael Bublé’s ‘Feeling Good’ blasted, ‘Stan the Chimney Sweep’ swept their way through the crowd to mount the bar. People screamed with joy as Stan ditched the broom and hit a jaw-dropping death drop. Bublé was silenced by roars of the crowd, harmonious in their celebration for Stan's glorious performance. I shit you not, my mascara trickled down my face as the crowd howled in adoration.
In this moment I knew. Fernie was the place to embrace my brand of weird. This community not only accepted the bizarre, but welcomed it.
Cut to COVID and extravaganzas were banished to the dark ages. There was a sudden loss of appetite for sweaty Drag Queens grinding on strangers and lip-synching ‘It’s Raining Men’. I locked down, isolated, and retreated into a cocoon. A big, beautiful butterfly clipped of her wings.
My makeup palette was stashed, and my ombré wig was thrown to the back of the wardrobe to knot. Social extravaganzas were replaced with lonely episodes of Tiger King. My exotic sensation was overtaken by an endless dread, growing sense of anxiety, and depression set in.
When lockdowns broke, the Royal had an impossible task of reinventing itself as a sitdown venue closing at 10pm - Ha! Julie, owner of the legendary dive bar, encouraged me to run a Bingo night in the bar’s carpark she was now calling the Royal ‘courtyard’. Bingo??? Really? It wasn’t quite the glorious comeback this Queen was hoping for. There was no opportunity for strip tease, bar mounts, or grinding, just me, holding balls in an old car park where drunks used to throw cigarette butts and fight. Desperate times…
Fernie was thrilled to escape the monotony of isolation and to my surprise my first show sold out at the last minute. I wasn’t too sure how to even run a stage show in the
Pandemic but by the end of the night I had developed some new material. I worked the room and ad-libbed with the crowd, morphed a few Steamy Harlequin passages into X rated show tunes, and I’d found my first running gag - a stage husband in a handsome Kiwi I’d been flirting with from Table 2.
I was back, and Fernie embraced my new ragtag show. The summer of 2020 birthed
a sit down cabaret/comedy show: Isabella’s Bingo Soap Opera. Socially-distanced tables would sell out week after week with masked audiences hoping to get a taste of the unpredictable and wild pantomime life of Isabella GiaVulva.
What I couldn’t have predicted was the relationships I began to form. Each week I found the same masked faces returning. During intermission, I’d talk with regulars, overwhelmed at the fact I even had regulars (paying!), dare I say it, fans! Despite my pounds of foundation and eyeliner, I was able to make genuine connections with these gorgeous people who came to my silly shows.
It’s a special feeling for a performer to find their audience. To look out at a crowd and hear ‘Yas Queen’ as you twerk. Fernie not only gave me the opportunity to have my own show but loudly cheered “We love what you do”.
Fernie makes me feel fabulous. Fernie makes me feel like I belong.
