It was high drama on stage and off this week, with yet another performance challenge that didn’t quite suit the younger queen’s strengths. This week’s mini-challenge – get dressed up in Golden Girls drag and do a little Soul Train-style dancing – gave Max and Kennedy Davenport each a win, and thus team leadership for the main challenge: performing a drag-themed Shakespearean parody. Team Max got “Romy and Juliet” and performed the lesbian-themed anti-teen suicide parable with panache; Team Kennedy got “MacBitch” and fell apart like the three witches had personally cursed their cheerleader-themed production.
Max helped Jaidynn Diore Fierce overcome an onstage Shakespearean meltdown with some great leadership, and snagged both the team win and a personal win (along with one of the most fun “bearded lady” runway looks). But Kennedy struggled with clashing personalities on her team: a sourpuss Violet Chachki and a bestie, Jasmine Masters, who couldn’t keep her lines straight in the performance and refused to glue on a beard for the challenge ... and then had to both lip-sync for her life and send her best friend home.
Megan: Every Shakespearean tragedy needs a good villain, and the producers served us Jasmine Masters on a platter: it seemed like she read everyone to filth for the producers, though Violet Chachki got the worst of it (and none of the audience’s sympathy). But as the saying – I think – goes: those who can’t do, read, and Jasmine had a lot to do and not a lot of it got done.
Plus, like, I’m sorry, but I had the same look on my face as Michelle Visage when she explained her painted-on beard as something she “had” to do to avoid a hospital-level breakout: either you’re deathly allergic to spirit gum or you aren’t. But a couple pimples would have been a small price to pay to stay in the competition – and what queen doesn’t know how to make a beard look good?
Brian: I thought the same thing. “Your beard is going to send you to the hospital? Well then how do you keep that damn wig on?” There must have been some clever way out of not gluing a beard onto her face (look at what Pearl did!) without having something strapped across her chin that looked like a slug curled up there and died. However, it was still better than Kennedy Davenport’s chin merkin, which looked like what I pick out of the drain after I give the dog a bath.
And I’m with you: Violet Chachki is totally letting herself be painted as this season’s Phi Phi O’Hara (but with a much better lewk). Violent wonders why she’s always the last one picked, but all she serves up when working in the team challenges is big ol’ platters of stink-eye. Who would want that on their team? The problem is, she’s usually right. She said she should have the main role and Jasmine should play the sassy girl, and she was right. She said they should have rehearsed more and, well, that was as obvious as Pearl’s meaty tuck. The only thing worse than a bad attitude is a bad attitude that has some weight behind it (not that skinny-ass Violet has that much weight).
Megan: The person I did end up having sympathy for was Kennedy, though – both for the chin pubes and the rehearsal issues. I wouldn’t have wanted to send Violet in front of the cameras to do her parody of a sassy black girl, and it felt like the producers let her walk up to the line of calling it racist, wave at the line and fall back.
At this point, I truthfully think being a sour bitch and refusing to be a team player is Violet’s strategy, rather than her personality. It feels like she’s playing the odds that by sabotaging a team challenge, someone else will go home. Even Miss Fame, as shallow and apparently talent-free as she is, seems more pleasant to work with; Pearl seems, as Carson Kressley said, to be on so much lithium that she might be a bitch, but you wouldn’t notice in the midst of her being Eeyore.
Brian: Even though there were a lot of competing attitudes, I don’t know how they couldn’t make it work, as RuPaul screamed at them on the runway. It reminded me of Tyra Banks’s famous meltdown on America’s Next Top Model, but with a much better wig. Usually Ru is all sunshine and catchphrases, so to see her exhibit something even close to anger was out of character.
Anyway, every group works with bad players and silly lines and little rehearsal time, so why Kennedy and company couldn’t pull it together was beyond me. (However, saying Kennedy and “car crash” and pantomiming a gun to the head in the same sentence hits a little close to home for me.)
Megan: I am totally waiting for the extra footage from RuPaul’s meltdown on Untucked tomorrow: they normally cut out what seems like 75% of what the contestants say on stage, so I absolutely have to believe that everyone just stood up there whining and making excuses for so long that she just lost it.
Brian: I just want to end this with a brief discussion about Max, because I am once and forever #TeamMax. I think that no one really saw her coming; she has a very refined aesthetic, something we haven’t really seen before, and she showed in this challenge that she has diversity and can really act when it comes down to it. She had a win in both the individual and team challenges, so you better watch out. Right now my top three is Max, Mrs Kasha Davis and Pearl, mostly because she acts like my old babysitter after one too many Valiums.
Megan: Dom and I have been very Team Glamour Toad, but Max keeps worming her weird little way into my heart. But could she please stop with the gray wigs? Just one platinum one? Something?
Best lines:
RuPaul: “She’s a friend of Dorothy ... Zbornak.”
Ginger Minj: “I’ve done Shakespeare plenty, and he liked it every time.”
Jaidynn Diore Fierce: “No ma’am, no ham, no Pam, no cauliflower, no cornbread, no green beans.”
Jasmine on Violet: “Wear some panties, girl. We don’t want to see that Barbie-doll mannequin p****. Panties, bitch.”
Carson Kressley on Kennedy Davenport: “It looks like she had some old pubes lying around and just glued them to her face.”
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