Season Six
Episode 2
Seven Other Sisters
After Kelly Mantle is eliminated, the six original queens return to the werk room. There are balloons, some cupcakes, and champagne on one of the tables. They raise a glass to Kelly, and to themselves for escaping elimination. They already hate the next seven queens. Gia writes a warning on the mirror: beware bitches!
Then Girl RuPaul opens the door to scream at them to be quiet. She’s wearing a robe, curlers, and a green facial mask.
The next day, flies are buzzing around the remains of the cupcakes. Bianca Del Rio is the first new queen to arrive. Her look is high middle-class. A floral dress with a black shrug. Bianca proclaims herself an insult comic. Like Don Rickles, but in a dress and not old. Trinity K. Bonet arrives soon after, wearing a fierce black wig that looks like vulture wings, and a face chain. They don’t seem to have all that much to say to each other.
The third to arrive is Joslyn Fox. She’s very girly, wearing a short leopard print dress that gets progressively shorter the longer she wears it. Bianca notes that Joslyn is wearing all the jewelry she owns.
Milk is so tall in her heels that she nearly hits the top of the doorway. Her look is definitely kooky. She’s got on a matador jacket, with a flat black hat (with a tiny veil on top). Then she has leggings and a leotard underneath. It’s a bizarre look, but at least it’s making a statement.
The next queen in the door is Magnolia Crawford. Magnolia describes herself as a “glamorous trash queen.” Her nose is contoured so severely that it looks like you could cut yourself on it. Milk is fascinated, putting her own thin, blade-like nose into Magnolia’s face as she examines it.
Courtney Act’s clever entrance is her asking “Is this America’s Next Top Model? Joslyn is star struck. but Magnolia is unimpressed. She doesn’t think Courtney’s fishy look is exaggerated enough to be drag.
The final queen to arrive is Darienne Lake. She claims to be the fan favorite this year, but she also says that she’s a compulsive liar, setting up a logical paradox.
The seven queens puzzle a few moments over the remains of the party and mysterious message on the mirror. Then RuPaul delivers a party-punned She-Mail. Boy RuPaul then descends his Tim Gunn door, and explains what we already knew: The first seven queens have already done their first challenge and sent home their first sister.
We move on to the photosoot, which is staged on a forced-perspective set with a king-size bed. Bianca is the first queen. She does fine with the shoot, until the twist comes in. Suddenly, she’s in the middle of a pit crew pillow fight. “Sexier!” Mike Ruiz yells at her as she tries to pose in the cloud of feathers floating around her.
Trinity breezes through the shoot, feathers are all. Joslyn calls it pure chaos, but the truth is that all the queens do pretty well on the challenge, except Magnolia, who looks pissed off during the whole experience.
Trinity, unsurprisingly, wins the photo challenge. RuPaul summons the Pit Crew to bring in boxes filled with left-over decorations and favors from various parties. Trinity gets the honor of assigning the boxes to each queen. The challenge will be to create a couture outfit from contents of each box.
Trinity claims the “Princess Party” box. She gives the “St. Patrick’s Day” box to Darienne, the “Hoedown” box to Magnolia, the “Republican” party box to Courtney, the “Luau” box to Bianca, the “Quinceanera box” to Joslyn, and the “Toga” party box to Milk.
Joslyn loves everything in her box. After narrowing down her fabric choices, she’s still left with a good dozen different bolts of fabric. Meanwhile, Magnolia hates everything in her box.
RuPaul starts the werk room mentor session by calling on Darienne. Darienne shows off her leprechaun accent, but has trouble articulating her vision. RuPaul just seems happy that she didn’t use white fabric and moves on.
RuPaul asks Trinity about her middle name. Turns out to be “Kardashian.” Trinity explains to RuPaul that she’s working on an outfit that will somehow mash-up Princess Leia and Princess Kate. RuPaul finds that confusing.
Courtney welcomes RuPaul to her table and thanks him for explaining the pun in her name to the American public. (In Australia, “Courtney Act” sounds like “Caught in the act.”) Courtney is planning on making a sexy outfit, but worries that Michelle will say “Stop rely on that body!”
We find out that Bianca is famous for her wit. Bianca describes it as having a “rolodex of hate” she can access when needed. She works in a costume shop during the day, so RuPaul assumes she’s going to slay the challenge. Bianca agrees.
Magnolia makes absolutely no attempt to hide how much she hates her box of Hoedown junk. Then she describes her style as being “glamorous trash queen.” This challenge could be right up your alley, RuPaul remarks. Magnolia snarls in reply.
On to Joslyn, who can’t stop giggling about how much she loves her box. She shows RuPaul that she has narrowed the fabric choices down to about a dozen.
RuPaul asks Milk about her drag character. Milk says that she is big and scary. Also: Freaky. Which becomes even more apparent after RuPaul leaves and Milk consults with Bianca about the costume. Bianca wisely notes that the big white pants Milk are making can be problematic when it comes to tuck coverage. And she isn’t sure about Milk’s plan to wear facial hair on the runway.
In a confessional, Joslyn says she plans on being the “black horse” in the competition. Until she’s reminded that the term is “dark horse.” Then she decides to be be that.
Prompted by Darienne, Courtney reveals that she’s famous in Australia. She was a finalist on Australian Idol and signed by BMG music. Darienne mentions that she was on a local stereo shop commercial.
“They wanted celebrities,” she starts. From across the room, Bianca loudly quips, “And none of them were available!” Darienne stops, looking offended. But it’s only a setup for her own joke when she mutters, “… true.”
Meanwhile, Milk is making good on her facial hair threat by attaching a sad little Uncle Sam beard to her chin.
RuPaul struts down the runway in another silver dress. Alas, it’s not as spectacular as last week’s gown. Double alas, Mike Ruiz’s seat at the far end of the judge’s table is empty (maybe he fell ill?) Triple alas, Adam Lambert has been replaced on the other end by Khloe Kardashian. Not that I mind Khloe. It’s just that she’s unlikely to blush and flirt the way he did last week.
But Khloe says that she and her sisters are drag queens at heart. True enough.
Trinity’s runway performance is everything I hoped Gia Gunn’s would be. She’s made herself into a Kabuki princess, with white and red face. Her walk is slow and mysterious. At one point, she blows a handful of powder at the judges. Lovely. Just lovely.
Bianca describes her look as “Miss Honolulu, 1968.” It’s giving me Annette Funicello. Darienne is a bit disappointing, in a shapeless green disco blouse and tight black skirt. The front seam is bunched up, which, when it’s done deliberately is called “ruching.”
Magnolia has made the simplest of simple short cocktail dresses out of some cow print fabric. She has, to her credit, finished with a big back bow. Joslyn, on the other hand, has created the most over-complicated Las Vegas showgirl outfit imaginable. At least, the most complicated showgirl outfit with no theme to it.
Courtney gives her runway a little flair by carrying in her party box — giving her costume a little reveal. She’s wearing a bikini top, with a long cape skirt. A large star on her frontal area provides a nod to the Republican party theme.
Milk’s look is… bizarre. She’s wearing long wide pantsuit, which would could be either 1930s or 1970s. The top of the suit is very low cut, which would expose the breasts, except she’s got on a camisole. She’s also got on a translucent over top.. which attaches to hat that’s shaped like a lily pad like a veil. Her lips are big, pink, and outlined like a circus clown. And she’s wearing a beard.
During the judging, Michelle Visage asks Trinity to remove the stiff cardboard collar she’s wearing. The improvement is striking. Bianca is clocked for her make-up, which Michelle wants her to blend. Like Darienne has done. Darienne’s face is perfect, but her outfit bombs.
All the judges can see on Magnolia is her incredibly sharp-looking nose. Magnolia gets very defensive and start blaming her party box for giving her crap to work with. It gets so obnoxious that RuPaul abruptly cuts Magnolia off to start on Joslyn. Her universal critique is to edit. “Cut everything in half,” Michelle advises.
Santino calls Courtney’s look “Cheryl Tiegs Cosmo Cover, 1986.” That’s a perfect description. Khloe wants to skin and wear her, she’s so gorgeous.
Michelle asks Milk if her look is representative of who she is. Milk confidently answers that it is. Santino suggests losing the beard, but says that the rest of the look is golden. Khloe loves the way Milk owns her choices.
In the end, Bianca wins the Runway challenge. Trinity. Courtney, and Milk are safe. Joslyn is in the bottom three, but it’s Darienne who has to lip-synch against Magnolia.
The music is “Turn the Beat Around” (Gloria Estefan). Magnolia moves her lips, but does almost nothing, while Darienne is moving and grooving to the beat. It’s pretty clear who the winner is. Magnolia sashays away and I’m so happy to see her leave that I barely notice what she says in her parting words.
Much more interesting is a little coda to the show. The six queens return to the werk room after the elimination to find. Dun dun dun! The six queens from last week! They are sitting at the werk table like a Mean Girl’s tea party, all dressed in drop-dead gorgeous dresses. There are a few talking heads that compare the coming week to The Warriors and other epic battles. Can’t wait!
Untucked
The show starts, as usual, with the queens grabbing their cocktails and settling into the chairs. It would be nice if there was a hashtag letting us know the name of the drink. It looks sort of like vodka and tang, with an orange slice garnish.
There’s a moment of the queens just looking at each other and going, “what was that?” in reaction to the judging. I guess you never can prepare yourself for that experience in advance. Milk is a little perturbed about the “twerking.” We see a flashback of RuPaul demanding that they turn their backs to the judges and twerk. Courtney Act is one of the better twirkers. So is Milk, once she gets into it. Joslyn up the stakes by whipping off her skirt, to the appreciation of the camera operator.
Magnolia seems annoyed that Michelle clocked her for the contouring on her nose. Courtney agrees, in a sweet way, that it was a bit thin. Magnolia explains that this is the effect she’s going for — she wants her nose to look thin enough to snap in half like a cracker.
“Why didn’t you say that?” Bianca asks. She tells Magnolia she should have given that explanation — which does make sense — rather than the vague answer she did give. That her make-up and dress came together to form an image. Presumably a glamorously trashy one.
Magnolia then agrees with the criticism Santino gave her: that she really should know how to sew at this point in the show’s history. She should sew, and yet, like Adore the week before, she doesn’t.
The others give gentle feedback on her stank attitude towards the judges. Bianca advises her to adapt her style to the demands of the competition. Magnolia strong disagrees. She doesn’t think anyone should adapt to the competion. Instead, they need to “be you.” Then, Magnolia makes the jaw-dropping statement: “I’m not here for the money. I’m not here for the grand prize. I’m not here to challenge myself. To be honest, I’m only here for the exposure.”
It’s hard to answer that, so Trinity suggests she just saves everybody the trouble and tells the judges to send her home. Joslyn points out that there are hundreds of drag queens who would give their left tit to be on the show. (For the record, India Ferrar’s case, the left tit costs 300 whole dollars.)
Magnolia realizes she’s lip-synching. That didn’t take much deductive reasoning. She points to Darienne, Joslyn, and Courtney as possible bottom twos as well. But she amends that to place Courtney above the other two. Courtney, adorably, decides that makes her the winner of the losers. But she doesn’t disagree with Magnolia. She knows that sewing isn’t her forte. (“But everything else is,” she winks in a confessional.)
Joslyn explains her overbooked Quinceanera costume by saying she thought they were supposed to use as much stuff in the box as possible (and her box had a lot of stuff in it). Trinity explains that she wore her cardboard collar because it’s something she would wear at one of her bar performances. Bianca makes a joke about that — but it’s not really funny and doesn’t actually make any sense.
Meanwhile, Joslyn tells Courtney that she idolizes her. Boy Courtney confesses that Joslyn’s adulation is awkward for her.
RuPaul tells the queens to skedaddle to the Gold Bar, where they open the box and get a message about the photo shoot. Just like last week, we get to see their photos. This is always fun, and provides ammunition for the viewers to fight in the fan wars, so I don’t mind that we’re doing the exact same thing we did last week. If someone starts crying about their mother, however, I will be pissed.
We don’t get sad backstories. Instead, we get a conversation about kai-kai (when people have sex in (or with other people in) drag. Darienne says she has more sex in drag than out of it (because there’s no time to take everything off). Trinity isn’t interested in kai-kai, because he doesn’t want the wig hair getting in the way. Courtney raises her hand and explains that she does have sex in drag or out of it, but that having sex in drag allows her access to straight men. In confessional, she talks about the rigidity of categorizing men as “gay or straight.” If we were all more openminded, she concludes, “straight” men would get a lot more nookie.
The queens remind each other to turn it out for the lip-synch. Then they go back onto the stage and the battle begins! Afterwards, Magnolia is even colder than before. The only emotion she feels is that her feet hurt. Which isn’t even an emotion.
Is there anyone out there sorry to see Magnolia go? Who was worse: Magnolia, Serena Cha-Cha, or Phi-Phi O’Hara? Discuss!
