Award shows are catnip for the gays. The fashions, the speeches, the awards. It’s all about glitz and glamour, so an entire episode centered on a fictional, RuPaul-founded ceremony is enough to make racers all clutch their invisible pearls in gleeful anticipation.
I am going to start a weekly segment entitled, The Pre-Title, Pretty Pointless Bitchy Corner. Almost every episode starts with someone throwing shade at a fellow queen. After Pearl was magically safe last week, Mrs. Kasha Davis expressed her disdain for Pearl’s lack of enthusiasm for the entire competition. Have you guys met Pearl? Insert Ambien joke here. Never fear, Pearl will face more shade this week, so don’t clam up.
For this week’s mini challenge, the queens are paired off to recreate famous red carpet looks using only paper. Yes, paper. I can barely make a paper airplane, but these queens can recreate Lady Gaga’s meat dress and Lil Kim’s infamous boob pasty in seconds flat. Can someone please turn this into a crafts book or a half hour weekly show? Paper Pasties with RuPaul! Coming to LOGO this fall. Max and Pearl should have won for dressing Max up as Cher from the 1986 Academy Awards, but it went to Kasha Davis and Katya for recreating that travesty of a swan dress that Bjork sported.
The main challenge would make even Joan Rivers squeal with delight. RuPaul’s Drag Race will present the first ever DESPY Awards. Each contestant will be a presenter and a nominee. Working in their paper doll pairs, they will have to come up with witty banter and bitchy commentary, but they also have to be prepared to win an award. The categories are as follows: Sexy Sexy Drag Queen (Kennedy & Jaidynn), Most Busted Queen (Max & Pearl), Shadiest Queen (Ginger & Kandy), and Meatiest Tuck (Violet & Miss Fame). By the way, if you need to know what a meaty tuck is, just do some research online. Since they won the mini challenge, Katya and Kasha will be the DESPY co-hosts. I’m not sure if the DESPY’s are supposed to be like a drag ESPY Awards, but I’ll take it. Yeah, I get sports references. This challenge is like the tackiest version of the Golden Globes to ever exist except it’s done on purpose.
During the rehearsals, Miss Fame and Violet can’t write a joke and spend most of their time trying to figure out who is less interesting, but the shocker of the episode is when RuPaul comes to talk to Max and Pearl. He describes Max as having a big personality, and he mentions that Pearl doesn’t. Pearl takes that to mean that he has no personality, and it results in the longest…stare off…in herstory. It’s awkward. It’s long. It’s painful. It’s not unlike that time I told my parents that I was straight and they weren’t having it. It was quite reminiscent of the first season reunion special when Ru flipped out on everyone, because they didn’t understand why they were brought onto the show in the first place. That’s YouTube gold.
Kathy Griffin returned this week to help the queens with their material, but she ended up just screaming, “GAYER!” when anyone pitched a joke at her. She must become a permanent judge. When RuPaul walked down the runway, she looked like the Oscar that Faye Dunaway should have won for playing Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest. The queens have to present the DESPYs in front of a live audience, so a lot was on the line.
The awards presentations were surprisingly amusing. It was kind of like a standup comedy routine with trophies. Here are some of the best one liners:
“Last but not least, we have Violet…”
–Katya and Kasha introducing the season’s least favorite nominee to the sound of critics
“Now please welcome the stars of Tyler Perry’s Roots, Kennedy Davenport and Jaidynn Diore Fierce”
–Katya introducing the first presenters
“Thank you to the tapeworm for this waist and the man upstairs from upstairs for the lighting!”
–Miss Fame, accepting the Sexy Sexy Drag Queen award
“You don’t like me! You really don’t like me!”
–Violet, accepting the Shadiest Queen award
“I believe it was the great American painter Bob Ross who said, ‘The key to a swollen vagina is…courage.’”
–Katya, accepting the Meatiest Tuck award from the worst presenters of all time, Violet and Miss Fame
Max and Pearl take the main challenge win, so all those anti-Pearl pundits will have to make their bets next week. Maybe my estimations are just off this season, but Katya stole the show in this racer’s eyes. During the critiques, Kandy Ho and Mrs. Kasha Davis receive the harshest criticisms. Ginger stole Kandy’s time to shine (is that necessarily Ginger’s fault?) and Ross Mathews (who magically returned this week) is getting disappointed in Kasha’s lack of giving it. Violet narrowly missed the bottom two, and Kasha and Kandy duked it out to Teena Marie’s “Lovergirl.”
It appeared that Kasha would wipe the floor with the Puerto Rican princess, but Kandy brought it in the end. Is Kandy a force to be reckoned with? Surely, she will need to do better in the challenges to stick around, but she sent Kasha home to her beloved box of wine.
So, what did you think? Was this week a winner or did someone get snubbed in this week’s race?
1 comments