Unpaid Spokeswomen #20

Welcome to Unpaid Spokeswomen, a column where we log what we’ve been into this week. Behind the wigs, makeup, costumes, and several layers of irony, we are two humans who genuinely enjoy doing things. Here is a weekly roundup of our unfiltered expert recommendations.

---

Subscribe to our GOOPED Substack! You get an extra post EVERY WEEK for only $5/month!

---

Trixie:

Stephen King’s Misery

(NOTE: NOT to be confused with Trixie Mattel’s Misery, which is this Substack.)

This book is truly litty. I am admittedly a purveyor and consumer of Stephen King’s works and I have read Carrie, Salem’s Lot, The Shining, Doctor Sleep, and IT–twice. Yes I am a freak from hell who read IT twice, a novel that is 444,414 words. I love the way Stephen King writes because while he is considered the king of horror, he is at the core a fabulous fiction novelist. His books are frightening but they are not scary because he dreams up the worst gore or the worst monsters. His books are terrifying because he creates characters that you genuinely care for. They are so fleshed out and so human that the stakes feel extremely high when one of them is being stalked by a killer clown or consumed by a vengeful hotel. He also has a way of spinning beautiful metaphors into these ghost stories. These metaphors add depth to these horrific scenarios and tackle trauma, alcoholism, family violence, and obsession. 

In Misery, the theme most heavily explored is the bizarre and at times harmful relationship between celebrities and their “fans.” (NOTE: Now you are a lovely and harmless enjoyer of our Substack and I wish to in no way deliver a pointed analysis of these dangerous #1 fan scenarios.) I have of course seen the amazing Misery movie starring James Caan and Kathy Bates and if you have no intention to read this book, this film is also amazing. However, the book has the time and space to add so much texture to the stomach-turning character of Annie Wilkes. 

Basically, the story setup is that a famous novelist crashes his car and is rescued by a stranger in a remote and rural area. The woman who saves him turns out to be the #1 fan of his books and also viciously unhinged. I’m not done with it yet, but this book already paints a portrait of a dangerously mentally ill woman so  vividly that I will never be told someone is a #1 fan again without thinking of her.

I only ask that if one of the Substack readers kills me one day, it is with haste so that only a short Substack article is needed to tell the story.

Cleaning

Let me tell you an almost universal truth; drag queens are not clean. Drag queens don’t show up on time, they don’t take responsibility for their own shortcomings, and they definitely don’t clean. Drag queens are disgusting. I have smelled drag queens who reek of moth bolls, marijuana, and even cat pee and no one mentions it out of a bizarre uncommon courtesy. 

But not all of us queens are disgusting. I love cleaning. Since the worldwide Omicron wave has obliterated my NYE plans to DJ at my bar in Milwaukee WI, I temporarily fell into a slumber of sadness. I am a workaholic and an absence of obligations tends to rot me from within. Dark thoughts surround and asphyxiate me like the smoke from an insidious brushfire and only the purpose of employment can revive me. 

Enter stage left: CLEANING. I put on a lovely audiobook, I lit a Bath and Bodyworks Peach Bellini candle, and went to town. This week I cleaned hundreds of brushes, organized all my makeup, and decluttered my drag entirely. I feel healed, peeled, and revealed. When your house is clean, it feels like your whole life is together. I scrubbed my white tile kitchen floor this week by hand and it basically gave me a leaky boner. I organized all my lip pencils into a binder for colored pencils that would make you complete cum. My home currently doesn’t have one piece of unlaundered clothing and I’m planning on staying naked to keep it that way. Amen.

A real picture of me preparing to clean my house

Katya:

The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021)

If you saw season seven of RuPaul’s Drag Race, you may recall in episode three a particularly gruesome acting challenge where two groups of contestants were given parody scripts based on the works of Miss William Shakespeare. My team was saddled with a piece titled “MacBitch,” a humiliating turd of a sketch that my team and I fumbled to an  excruciating level of cringe hitherto unseen on the program. The challenge was an absolute bloodbath, and it was followed by a bearded runway where RuPaul yelled at us on the mainstage. It was a tragedy that you absolutely could look away from. Some sevenish years later, Joel Coen’s film version of Macbeth is a tragedy that you cannot look enough at. Jesus Fucking Christ this film rules. My knowledge of The Bard is about as deep as a dog dish, but the witches of Macbeth have long held my fascination. Before seeing the movie I had read that the three witches were all played by the same actor, and my skepticism quickly turned into utter amazement, because Holy Fucking Shit does Kathryn Hunter not only turn the party, she shits all over it and then burns the house down. Every shot is exquisitely set, every role is impeccably acted, and basically it’s just an hour and forty minutes of excellent people doing something extraordinary. The staging of the famous “double double toil and trouble” scene is so breathtaking and ingenious, I nearly fucking cried because it was just so COOL. For those unfamiliar with Shakespeare or not very proficient in English, you might not understand a motherfucking word, but goddamn, I would watch this shit in Swahili. Please see it on a big screen with the best audio you can, because the sound design yanks it right off. 

The Alamo Drafthouse 

This lovely theater in downtown Los Angeles gives Nicole Kidman and AMC a run for their money, because I went to this place last night not only for magic, not only to laugh, not only to cry and to care, but to watch the aforementioned Macbeth and eat a fucking delicious baked pretzel and drink a divine chocolate milkshake, all from the comfort of an automatic reclining sofa chair. I may be an AMC Stubs A-List member but I would snub that stub in a second if I lived closer to the Alamo. It’s a cinephile’s theater, and they take movie watching very seriously, as evidenced by their ruthless policies regarding lateness, cell phone use, and talking while the movie plays. I love that shit. It’s a movie lover’s dream.

It’s the movies, just like mom used to make.