This is the UK’s new Covid monitoring system.
Brace yourselves because here comes the second instalment of The Bossy Rossy Show that absolutely nobody asked for but at least they’ve not allowed anyone to dress up as a baby this time – once a season is once too many already.
The Lady’s Been Sent Home
In the wake of icon, star and inevitable All Star 8 contestant Tamisha Iman’s elimination Kandy has chosen now to start feeling a little more mellow and guilty about the events that transpired between the two of them. I’m sure this reformation will last a whole 2 episodes. Olivia on the other hand is celebrating her first proper win and as she mentions being safe a lot the editor chose to RUDELY cut to Denali
Honestly, the tailspin that they are sending Denali and Rosé into by continuously making them just safe is lowkey the highlight of the season for me – one more episode of it and I’m 90% sure one of them might self-combust – my money is on Rosé – it’s that New York blood.
Green. Yellow. Read.
This reading challenge is brought to you by RuPaul’s Valentina’s French Vanilla Fantasy Cosplay
After a few years of increasingly bad mini challenges – whether it be the quality of the reads or the shameless product placement forcibly injected into it – this year’s was kind of a good one? Of course there were the usual bombs like Elliott who stuttered her way through the reads she had obviously bought from a joke writer and limply threw a tiny child’s superman costume cape at Kandy and called her “Super Mad”
I hope the cape was worth the $15 she payed for it.
The best part was Olivia’s reaction at the end because she was just glad she wasn’t the worst one anymore
I’m not sure telling Kandy she had sex with Joey “That Gay Bitch” Jay was a read ma’am.
But at least there was only 1 fat joke as Rosé told Kandy she ate a tonne of it. The lowest hanging fruit though was telling Rosé she was more like some lesser beverage and you would think Tina “I’m A Comedy Queen” Burner might have scratched that joke after anti-comedian LaLa Ri made the exact one but more concise than her own rambling screed about wine notes. The only other joke of Tina’s that was given the privilege of screen time was her calling Utica a potential murderer, which is fair
Gottmik on the other hand surprised everyone and managed three whole reads, one of which was a recycled Nina West being an NFL player read but he played well off Tina’s rebuttal and then proceeded to truly murder EVERYONE with a nuclear read in which he congratulated Kandy for representing the pug community – which is only one step removed from the fact everyone on Reddit called Kandy “Bulldog Aja” when the two of them were still on speaking terms.
The only other person in running for a potential win of the mini challenge was Denali whose delivery I enjoyed, the vocal fry joke about Gottmik was good but it was her impression of Utica and Gottmik trying to dance in the Disco-mentary that truly got me
the accuracy.
I do love that the few reads about Denali that did make it in were all about how forgettable she was and yet the entire reading challenge contained absolutely not a single read for Elliott despite the wealth of material she has given everyone, which in many ways was the greatest read of them all.
And because this is Drag Race and Denali can’t have nice things Gottmik is declared the winner and recipient of a $2,500 giftcard to some place that is using Asia O’Hara as promotion
Each day we come a little bit closer to Asia O’Hara’s Drag Race.
Gottmik’s win doesn’t extend to any power within the main challenge which unfortunately is a bringing back of Bossy Rossy except this time it’s funny because they’re making fun of it being awful… (it wasn’t funny). The teams are instead decided by whoever was standing closest to one another and I greatly enjoyed the dawning horror on Tina as she realised she could only be partnered with Elliott who has thus far worked in a team with every single girl that has been sent home
We could only wish.
The teams and… sketches are as follows:
Denali, Rosé (LOL) and LaLa Ri: I’m Carrying My Imaginary Boyfriend’s Baby
Olivia, Gottmik and Utica: MIMES ARE A CULT!
Symone and Kandy: Former Teen Queens
Elliott and Tina: A 600Ibs Ass Destroyed The Friendship of Two NASA Scientists
Imaginary Pregnancy
This is essentially just a rehash of the Cactus Boyfriend sketch that Blair and Monique did in in season 10 and somehow managed to make less sense than the two of them descending into a wig snatching brawl while screaming “VANJIE! VANJIE” VANJIE!” at one another in front of an audience that had no context for it.
Of course Rosé and Denali are both playing a trailer trash Mother and Daughter duo
It’s a Drag Race staple.
Denali had a lot to prove after landing in to the bottom two during the last acting challenge (although she was only there for not knowing the exact Bette Davis reference) and I suppose doing one hell of an accent is one way of showing your new found acting chops – she sounded like Eustace from Courage The Cowardly Dog. She and Rosé played off pretty well with one another and then they had to introduce LaLa into the mix as a therapist and she promptly sucked all of the energy out of the room like Colin from What We Do In The Shadows and you could see Rosé realising that her win was slipping away
It’s such a shame because LaLa in the Werk Room is a delight, her running away pretending to be someone on The Jerry Springer Show was funnier than anything that anyone in this challenge achieved
And in this sketch she was just playing too normally, you have Rosé and Denali sitting there looking like the conquests of Joe Exotic and LaLa looks like she dressed up to go to the bank
But in her defence, her revealing her Caucasian baby bump was the funniest part of the whole sketch
I was a little mad that they didn’t play up the whole Imaginary Boyfriend thing more, like when Rosé was asked what her favourite part of her boyfriend was she just said “his penis” – he’s imaginary SAY SOMETHING STUPID, “His tentacles”, “His third penis” or “The tiny little hole in the back of his neck that I can put my finger in”.
Everyone else made out that Denali and Rosé had killed this challenge and truthfully, they just survived it – which is honestly the most you can hope for in a Ross Matthews acting challenge.
Hush Hush Sweet Cheryl
I love it when groups fight over roles in these because they can all smell the dud from a mile away and EVERYONE was avoiding the role of Bella because clearly she did not belong in the scene in the way the script was telling them she did.
The fight was really only between Olivia and Utica who both wanted the role of Cheryl The Escaped Mime while Gottmik silently and stealthily was just like “I’ll do the other one that isn’t Bella” and let them duke it out. It doesn’t surprise me AT ALL that Utica has both done mime work and was part of an improv troupe AND that she was noted as “a scene stealer” – which loosely translates to “I was a complete nightmare and the audience probably hated every second of it.” Eventually Utica is the one to budge because Olivia is a stubborn little madam and we have no choice but to stan.
I can’t believe I’m about to write this but, maybe this skit was actually funny? Or it was funny up until Utica appeared. Gottmik perfectly personified that vapid television therapist – I kind of wish she had toned down her signature makeup for the look though
and I get that they’re drag queens, they’re meant to look draggy but it was kind of just Gottmik in a suit but her line delivery was great and her narrating Olivia Lux’s miming was very funny – as was Olivia’s physical comedy
but we all knew Olivia was going to be an excellent mime, lest we forget the air guitar and my personal favourite air panicked airport luggage
And while those two were getting on spectacularly, Utica came in like a foghorn and threw everything off-kilter screaming about how they got her order at Starbucks wrong
I just wish she had played it less as an airheaded valley girl and more like a wound up republic mother with an inverted bob.
Olivia and Gottmik weren’t too thrown off by whatever it was Utica the professional improv artiste thought she was doing and something about Gottmik closing the whole sketch with “This is classic my book!” really got me, but it might have been because I was desperately trying to find something else to concentrate on other than Utica crawling on all fours for no apparent reason
The amount of sketches on this show that just result in someone crawling around on the floor being messy is really quite astounding.
Teenage Dreams
Believe it or not the calmest most composed team of the lot was a team starring Kandy Muse because she wanted to show her range by playing her character Tiffany as a slightly low energy valley girl, much to Symone’s concern.
As it turns out, keeping things calm and level headed was the best approach because it at least helped your skit make sense and I could keep track of everything that was happening and knew who everyone was. They also had a clearer frame of reference because they were obviously pastiching the fall out between Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie – a very timely reference, RuPaul has only just discovered that pop culture continued after the 80s, give him some time.
This was also the most rigidly framed of the bunch – they can tell us that there were no scripts but CLEARLY there were and they were given obvious joke set-ups for Ross because Symone got those candles from somewhere and both of them had those microphones ready to go for the moving rendition of Row, Row, Row Your Boat at the end.
Symone’s ability to make anything comedic by pronouncing a single word slightly incorrectly is astonishing, she could have built an entire empire off the word “Fleg Fectreh!” alone and now she has “Deborah!” to add to the arsenal – I would be very invested in having her read the dictionary to me. And while Kandy was very good and played off Ross and Symone very well, it would have been hard for anyone to not be totally eclipsed by Symone’s anecdote about accidental prostitution
Her mind is astonishing.
N-ASS-A
This sketch out of them all felt like the most panicked, late addition of the bunch – like they didn’t know there would still be 10 queens at this point so they just thought big butts are funny and that was as far as the prompt got and Nina and Elliott seemingly tried to spice it up by making them… NASA scientists? And yet somehow didn’t make a single ASSteroid joke.
Unsurprisingly Tina “I’m A Comedy Queen” Burner showed up in a red dress and a red wig and an ass I would describe as large but could have been larger
I wanted something so big that she couldn’t sit in the chairs.
Tina came into the skit at a 10, most of which involved falling over
And because she had peaked before Elliott, somehow looking 70 years old, had entered the chat there was only one way for this to go and like LaLa Ri, Elliot kind of dragged it all down a little – and she was very dedicated to whole NASA bit, something about her saying “the corporation” was very funny to me but not necessarily for the right reasons
and then as is written in stone upon Mount Sinai: At least 1 (one) sketch on every season of RuPaul’s Drag Race must end in a very uncomfortable kiss and/or titty bouncing
Comedy Gold…
The Good, The Bead and The Ugly
This week’s runway prompt was “beads” and I think for the most part everyone killed this runway, there were a few unfortunate souls like LaLa Ri’s whose outfit I very much like and think the nude illusion is one of the best we’ve seen on the show but did unfortunately have that gaping tear on the side of it
but I think it’s a great little performance number that would go down very well at any club she performs in. I’ve also seen a lot of people online saying that Olivia’s outfit was too simple and missed the brief, which it absolutely does not
I think it’s an incredibly smart and plays into Olivia’s cute, bubbly brand and she looks delightfully like Susie Carmichael from Rugrats. Also let’s nip the discourse about the wig in the bud – it’s clearly Olivia’s and was intended for this look but was borrowed by Kandy for the Bag Ball in which Kandy decided she was dressing up as a schoolgirl by gluing a load of backpacks together and calling it a skirt.
Speaking of Kandy she looked PHENOMENAL, the colour palette, the glow, the textures – it’s all correct
There’s something sort of 50s bombshell about it – I think a fur stole might just do that to any outfit but despite the lack of an outfit she still looks like some sort Golden Age of Hollywood starlet courting controversy.
Elliott was more intentional with her 20s throwback as she repurposed Mardi Gras beads into a little flapper style number
It’s cute, I don’t think it’s as flattering as she was claiming it was and while I LOVE her makeup and the pheasant feather headpiece, the hair could have been a more period appropriate finger wave because this short back and side blonde moment is looking a little youngest-son-in-a-90s-sitcom
Tina on the other hand was trying to up her wig game and came out in the same orange wig but badly teased
It at least momentarily distracted you and made easing in to the awfulness of this runway outfit at least a little more manageable
She looks like one of those horrible fabric clowns that only the weirdest of great aunts collect and just to make it worse, she removes the beaded belt, which hits the runway with such a thud I’m surprised they didn’t subtitle it, and reveals that the ugly trousers can also be an ugly skirt
and just to cap if it all off the tits come off too for no other reason than TITS ARE FUNNY
Tina Burner, comedy queen.
Here, have some Symone to cleanse your palate
Isn’t she phenomenal? And once you get passed her superhuman glow, this take on traditional Zulu jewellery is a knockout and then as a perfect cherry on top she has her name beaded into her hair
CROWN HER IMMEDIATELY.
The fact they made Tina follow her in the runway order was CRUEL.
While Symone went for something minimalist and very streamlined Utica did the opposite and came out in what can only be described as a cacophony
Do I love the idea of a murderous bride as much as the next repressed queer person? Yes I do. I just find this to be messy that almost achieves that chaotic Galiano aesthetic but just falls a little short in how overworked the caging is, and the view of the skirt from the side is almost as bad as LaLa’s torn bodysuit
Denali could have also potentially over worked her outfit in which she is dressed as a chandelier which is ENTIRELY HER IDEA AND KATY PERRY DEFINITELY DIDN’T DO IT AT THE MET BALL
While I think the outfit is great, her description is *iconic* the obsession with lamps as a child? Who amongst us didn’t endlessly browse the 150 pages of lighting in the Argos Catalogue? The teenage oath to one day walk the Drag Race runway dressed as a chandelier when most people probably hoped they would just not be living with their parents anymore? I love her and yet seeing her fail to win a challenge brings me so much more joy, as is the same for Rosé who has come as Perler Bead Tinkerbell
She looks amazing, and the amount of time and effort it must have taken to bead this entire outfit and have it look so symmetrical and precise is unfathomable. She looks like a butterfly in a colouring book and really it’s kind of a travesty that the judges didn’t tell her how incredible this look was.
And lastly we have Gottmik who has come as some anal beads
Someone had to do it eventually.
I do also want to know what the person packaging the delivery of 50 anal beads thought while they were having to do it – I hope they dropped a note of concern into the box. I’m torn on the makeup, I love that it’s different and interesting – I’m fast getting bored of the amount of neutral beauty makeup we keep seeing, but it does also look like the sort of weird Giles-esque art you see hanging in a Toby Carvery in which everyone has weirdly rosy cheeks
I’m just glad we know that VH1 hasn’t totally sanitized the Drag Race experience.
A Bead Runway Ranking
- Symone’s Beaded Africana
- Rosé’s Tinkerbead
- Olivia Lux in 3rd Grade
- Gottmik’s Anal Option
- Denali Loves Lamp
- The Nude Stylings of Kandy Muse
- Utica’s Hard Worked Bride
- Elliott in the 20s
- LaLa’s Gap
- Tina Burner, Comedy Queen.
For the judging Gottmik, Tina, Rosé and Denali are all called safe, the last three take this VERY well
And with next week being a Rusical I can only imagine how utterly exasperated both Denali and Rosé are going to be.
The tops of the week are Olivia, Kandy and Symone while the bottoms are Utica, Elliott and LaLa Ri.
Olivia takes the win while looking absolutely radiant as she does it
I apologise, I am an Olivia Lux stan account, but who isn’t? Meanwhile Utica is only just called safe and I for one cannot wait for the politest and most good mannered feud between Olivia and Utica next week
This of course means that Elliott and LaLa are in the bottom.
A Whole Lotta Something
The lipsync song this week is Whole Lotte Woman by Kelly Clarkson, a song I did not know existed despite it having the lyrics “Pot full of grits, I’m hotter than your mama’s supper” which is exactly my kind of cringe, and of course in a lipsync Elliott hit that line by pretending to stir a pot full of a grits
and I was so sure she was going to go home and then she really hit her stride from the moment she and LaLa did the synchronised grinding
and as Elliott hit her stride LaLa kind of checked out, so checked out in fact that Rosé gently grooving in the background was overshadowing her
there was only so much that the dazzling swish of the beads on her hips could do to save her and meanwhile Elliott is doing the splits
having a roaringly great time at the front of the stage
and even with all of these theatrics the lipsync was won purely in the moment Elliott pointed at LaLa while singing “Ain’t no competition, babe”
THE SAVAGERY (how did LaLa not realise that the song was almost entirely chosen as a lipsync song for that one line?).
And so we must say goodbye to LaLa Ri, who I will genuinely miss and thought she was a fantastic queen – she did after all give us the most memorably ugly outfit to have ever walked this runway in her Bag Ball dress
And so, 9 Queens remain
