Last Night's Show was a Real Drag

It was fun and I like fun

When you are walking down Commercial drive in Vancouver looking for something goofy or fun to wear for a show on St. Patrick’s Day, you don’t necessarily expect to suddenly come upon a pure green, sequined bra and belly-dancer’s skirt in a window. In such a moment, you turn to yourself and ask: how committed am I to entertaining this crowd tonight?

Well I’ve done this before. Wearing dresses onstage is super fun. I wore a wedding dress onstage in 2003 and all I remember was that it was (a) super fun, and (b) not super fun in the sense that the back zipper got snagged on my back hair and it slowly tore the hair out for the entire set. So I’ve repeated the act a few times. A year later myself and the fiddler in that old band did a promotional photo where we looked like this:

Then for example with the Dreadnoughts at the Fortune Sound Club in Vancouver, where my all-time favorite press photo was snapped:

The funny thing is that ever since then the act of a guy like me dressing up like this has become so heavily politicized. “Is it drag? Or is it a sexual thing? Is he trying to disrupt the cisheterocolonialpatriarchy and its ontologically constructed gender norms? Is he trying to indoctrinate children into deviance? WHAT MESSAGE IS HE TRYING TO SEND?”

Yes friends, everything these days has to have a message. You can’t just be in a dress, it can’t just be a fun unusual thing you’re doing to spice up an otherwise mediocre set of music. You have to be saying something.

Well, if I must say something about the fact that last night I slipped out of my boring grey clothes to reveal an extremely short sequined skirt and bra in front of 700 screaming morons, I’ll say this: it was fun and I like fun.

Fig 1. Fun.

Anyway, thanks to all the amazing bands that made it another memorable night, thanks to the Rickshaw Theatre for hosting this event for the seventh straight time, and thanks to JQ Clothing on Commercial Drive for facilitating what turned out to be a deeply unique experience for me. Before the end of the night, the audience had stuffed more than $80 into the bra I was wearing. I started to wonder whether music wasn’t really my true calling…

And that isn’t even the best part. And the best part about all of this? Paid subscribers, I’m going to tell you what the best part is, in one sentence…