The Creation of Adam (Michelangelo, c. 1512)
This week on The Drag Queen Make a Wish Foundation, Jinkx Monsoon gets to demolish Snatch Game.
I apologise for this recap being late, they will ordinarily be going out on Mondays or Tuesdays but I can’t promise that life won’t get in the way occasionally. And by life, I do mean my terrible immune system.
Snatch Game
For this week’s Maxi Challenge the queens were playing Snatch Game, but they weren’t just doing 1 round, they were doing 2! And upon hearing this Monet looked like she was warging out of the Werk Room
and who could blame her, she’s played Snatch Game twice and excelled once as Maya Angelou – which I think was funnier because it came very soon after ChiChi DeVayne (God rest her soul) absolutely flopped as Mya Angelou [sic]
that caged bird moment is one of my favourite coincidences, but the less we say about Monet’s sweaty Whitney Houston the better. And this Snatch Game was again a tale of two halves with Monet – her performance as Martin Lawrence’s Sheneneh character, while spot on
didn’t really amount to much – not that anybody’s second performances did because it was pretty much just 15 minutes of Jinkx Monsoon doing the most transcendental Judy Garland impersonation and leaving absolutely no survivors. But I REALLY loved her Mike Tyson which had the same sort of angle as Shea Coulee’s “woke progressive Flavor Flav” and as much I loved her repeatedly telling everyone she wanted to fuck them them in their “atheth”, every time she turned to the side to reveal the face tattoo that was just a scribble I cackled
I would have quite liked her to do a little more with the boxing gloves – at least try to write the first answer while wearing them – but I do feel like there was a lot of physical comedy from her that got cut because there was this throw away shot of her gnawing on a piece of beef jerky like a ravenous coyote
which was clearly a dig at him blaming his previous “craziness” on eating red meat.
Monet wasn’t the only one a little worried going into Snatch Game because while Raja and Jaida had both been safe for their Snatch Game performances, Yvie had landed in the bottom two with her Whoopi which is easily in the top 10 worst Snatch Game performance of all time because it did not make a lick of sense
and I do think Yvie was done the biggest favour by the whole season just being a celebration of the queens because her Rico Nasty was not great and I don’t think anyone was enjoying it because Michelle had this far off look in her eye every time Yvie stuck her tongue out and screamed while Ross pulled the sort of face you make when you’re trying to pretend that your 5 year old cousin can sing
but I do think it was a character that suited Yvie very well and she was clearly more comfortable with than marijuana proponent Whoopi Goldberg
that painted slogan shirt HAUNTS me to this day.
But Yvie’s second character, The Boogeyman, was better – I still think it would have got the crickets treatment in any other season and there didn’t seem to be a great deal of jokes other than the fact she looked hot and changed her card to The Boogieman, which as a connoisseur of bad puns, I did enjoy immensely
but I do kind of think that at that point she might as well have just been playing Lenny Kravitz which might have given her more material – such as the infamous dick flopping incident during his performance in Stockholm.
Jaida’s previous turn on Snatch Game was pretty unmemorable – I think the only things I can remember from the Season 12 Snatch Game are “My husband, Harry Hamlin!”, Gigi Goode’s Maria The Robot, Brita’s mouth and Patricia Quinn absolutely ruining Aiden Zayne’s life after it all happened. Apparently Jaida was a thoroughly forgettable Cardi B, which is something CardI B should never be. So she had a pretty clean slate to go off of and while I don’t have a lot to say about her Lady Chablis performance other than the fact nobody has ever looked so beautiful on Snatch Game
her Prince, to me, was a thing of pure genius. One of my favourite things on Snatch Game is when someone does a very bad impersonation and that’s the whole point of it, it’s very hard to do but I think Jaida absolutely nailed it – every time she did one of those squeaky Ooh Oohs that sounded like a broody chicken I lost my mind. Sure there were a couple of answers that, much like her reads, were long walks to not a trace of a punchline, but her really bad flirty interactions with Ru were where the strength of this performance lay
I thought it was sublime, and I would have been very interested to see how she and Yvie would have interacted had they played Prince and The Boogieman in the same round.
Raja was clearly out with something to prove – I always forget she didn’t win her Snatch Game because I think her as Bleeding Eyes Insane Tyra (a rare Yu-Gi-Oh card) is one of the more iconic Snatch Game characters
and instead it was Stacy Layne Matthews as Mo’Nique – more for storyline purposes but we can forgive it.
I do think Raja’s Tyra is one that a lot of people have been trying to replicate for years where it’s just the same joke over and over again but it gets more unhinged every time, which she could have easily done for her Diana Vreeland, which suffered the same fate as everyone’s second act performance by being utterly bulldozed by The Judy Garland Express – but she had the look DOWN
and given that she only ever said “purple mittens” and “boDEgAAAAA”, it’s surprisingly memorable, so it was nice that Diana Vreeland got a Snatch Game redemption after the character assassination she got at the hands of Robbie Turner performing her like she was Rocky Balboa in drag
again, a performance that haunts me.
But I adored Raja’s first round as the puppet Madame, and she had the characterisation down extremely well
I think what probably stopped her from being put in the top was the fact a lot of her jokes were pre-written predictable jokes that Madame would have told back in the early 80s, there wasn’t a lot of creativity in the humour – which I think is what The Vivienne also struggled with, especially with her Catherine Tate character that the show was having to subtitle
you do dig yourself a bit of a Snatch Game grave when you do someone’s sitcom character, I know I kind of check out of the performance. I also think we’re kind of beyond the comedic trope of an old person that says really filthy things – just look at how hard The Nan Movie flopped – although I want to know every single detail of its hellish production because it sounds deliciously awful. I’m going to be generous and assume that the utter dearth of The Vivienne in round two was as much the fault of Monsoon Judy and that her jokes were too crude to keep in, much like Alaska as Lady Bunny in season 5 because that’s kind of the whole point of the Nan character.
But it clearly just wasn’t The Vivienne’s episode because her Patsy Stone didn’t get a great deal of screen time either beyond chugging a bottle of wine
and she tried to have this running joke with saying she loves Chanel in order to get free Chanel stuff, but I think if anything she could have taken a note from Raja’s Tyra and realised that Chanel wasn’t biting and just slowly aim at cheaper and cheaper brands until you’re looking directly down the barrel of the camera seductively saying “I love Fruit of the Loom!”.
Shea was also a little low on content, although I did think her interaction with Yvie after Yvie had thrown the money around was one of the funnier parts of the first round
I wasn’t aware of who Elsa Mojimbo is, although having watched a very hypnotic compilation video on YouTube of her best Instagram Reels, I did realise that I have seen her content before and she truly does have the best laugh, which I am guessing is copyrighted because Shea didn’t do it ONCE! Although she did at least have the potato chips, and Shea Coulee’s canon of Personalised Chip Packets continues to expand
shout out to her prop maker! And also to her for not making me sit through a full performance of someone eating potato chips, I simply would not have made it out the other end alive.
Shea also did Miss J, who I have been waiting to be either a guest judge or a Snatch Game character so I was thrilled when I first heard that they were who Shea was playing – and she had the look DOWN
sadly the performance wasn’t particularly funny or memorable – she just didn’t manage to capture what makes Miss J such a captivating and memorable person, but she did at least continue the grand tradition of Miss J giving us some good reaction memes
but I can’t really say she was particularly funny and I definitely think it ranks the lowest of her Snatch Game performances.
Much like Yvie, Trinity was choosing to play a fiction character – it’s an angle I’m still yet to get fully on board with, and I have always been grateful that amongst the disaster of a Snatch Game that Season 11 had, we were at least spared the misfortunate of having Honey Davenport play as Santa Claus
because on top of weed smoking Whoopi, Norwegian Celine Dion and Vanjie’s Elmo voice – we absolutely did not need weird sexual Santa.
Trinity was of course doing Satan because she wanted to make fun of the fact she was brought up as a Southern Baptist
But there’s also the fact of the storm in a teacup that was the SheDevilByNight drama on reddit. For the uninitiated, an account of reddit called SheDevilByNight made a lot of disparaging remarks about certain queens while always gassing Trinity up – and when someone brought it up on Twitter, Trinity made a vague allusion to the fact she was SheDevilByNight, but has since denied it. Either way, the queens the account often disparaged still work with Trinity quite regularly so the whole drama never came to anything and probably never will come to anything. But Trinity doing The Devil did feel a bit like Disney supposedly calling Frozen “Frozen” so that when you Google “Walt Disney Frozen” you only get information about the movie and not the conspiracy theory that Walt froze his body.
I don’t think I found Trinity’s Devil as funny as the judges did, I thought it was good and well executed pastiche of the concept and a great character, I just don’t remember a lot of what she said other than “Hey girl!” when they first introduced her, and I do think the funniest part of her doing the Devil was the fact that when she was talking to Ru about her plans, they brought up this image
this is the sort of stupidity that I love from this show.
Trinity’s second character was Leslie Jordan, which she had brought a set of fake legs for and then… never used them? But I did love that it looked like she and Ru were sacrificing someone to The Devil during their walkaround
I did really like Trinity’s Leslie and I thought it was a much more engaged performance, probably because it was the second round so everyone had had a bit of a warm-up so they had a better handle of the situation – and I thought her jokes were a lot better and much more well constructed, although it was easier given she was mostly just telling jokes that Leslie has told himself a number of times.
Now for the queen of the hour, just giving the most sublime pair of performance – starting out as Russian Doll Natasha Lyonne
Natasha has a very specific physicality to her and Jinkx just captured it absolutely perfectly and the impression was scarily spot on! What I liked most about it was that as much as she was being Russian Doll Natasha Lyonne, none of the jokes relied on that being the point of reference, it was just a look that most people would recognise. And you know how much production was committed to letting Jinkx just have the best time with this because she was allowed to use an actual cigarette on a closed set
my one criticism is that she never found a way to say “Thursday? What a concept!”
the Twitter account that posts that image every Thursday is the only good Twitter account.
But as good as her Natasha was, it was her Judy Garland that truly stole the whole show, and everyone was more than happy to just sit back and let her do her thing
another of my favourite Snatch Game tropes is when a queen does a celebrity that’s dead and makes that a part of the act – Sasha did it with her Marlene Dietrich and Jinkx doing it with Judy meant we got what might be the best Snatch Game moment of all time as she absolved Dave of the crime of supposedly killing Judy Garland
I LOST MY MIND, as did Michelle
it was so damn good, and then there were the covers of RuPaul songs in the style of Judy Garland, and watching her yanking that seemingly endless microphone chord filled me with joy
mostly because it reminded me of Becky Hill on the first season of The Voice UK running around the studio with the long microphone cord and getting more and more frustrated by it
and everyone lost it as soon as she started singing the song from the opening credits of Drag Race
and I loved that when she finished Trinity pointed out that they’d subsequently changed the lyrics from “woman” to “Drag queen”
I thought it was cute and a sly little dig at the fact it’s taken the show so long to assess the language it uses.
Who The Fuck is Pleather?
This week’s theme was Pleather, and overseeing the proceedings was Rupaul dressed as Space Age Dorothy Zbornak who sadly does not give as a performance at 0.25 speed this episode
and then there was also special guest judge Daphne Guinness who looks like a Xenomorph at Studio 54
or a bit like this character from Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance video somehow became its own being and escaped into the real world
either way I am obsessed that somehow she manages to look so interesting and yet sound so bored.
First down the runway was Monet dressed as the dreaded chocolate bar
I really love this, it’s sculptural, impeccably made and it fits her like a glove – she was clearly having to keep the bow up herself because she had an iron grip on that thing at all times. But I enjoyed the elegant simplicity of it all when it would be very easy to make this quite a comedic look.
Yvie was next going for an anime look, which I did really like
I did find it very odd though that the judges waxed lyrical about how only Yvie would ever think of doing something as crazy as inflatable hair when Aja did it in All Stars 3 and it was one of the best looks of the season
but Yvie can at least proudly say she is the first person to ever Naruto run down that runway and my inner weeb was delighted by it
I do maybe wish the outfit had a more specific reference point rather than just kind of being a little generically anime – but I guess she also has to take the terrible copyright lawyers that the show employs into concideration.
Raja was next and OH BOY, the storm that this outfit has caused online is insanity
for those that are somehow unaware of the violence that Violet Chachki chose, she seemed to have taken it upon herself to Boot both of Raja’s looks on Fashion Photo Review, which has sent a large portion of the fandom into a frenzy because apparently Raja is owed nothing less than a Toot. (that sentence is complete jibberish to anyone who has never watched Drag Race.) I personally quite like this outfit – it’s clearly referencing that same brand of oxymoronically affluent punk that Vivienne Westwood ascribes to – I am a little distracted by the crotch triangle that looks like the mouth of a baby bird and I don’t particularly care for the fascinator
it just doesn’t feel like it belongs to this look – it looks like something the queens would’ve made in a Mini Challenge with whatever materials the cocktail sponsor sent them.
Trinity was bringing the obligatory trans flag colours to the runway in an outfit that does look a bit like a stack of beach balls that have slowly lost their air, which I’m going to guess wasn’t the aim of it
it’s a perfectly cute outfit, nothing about it wildly excites me but because of the tone of the season Ross was praising it as thought it was the highest form of art and Michelle had to sit there looking like a demon was trying to escape her
they’re going to have to tone it all done? Surely?
And if you want to know what it’ll look like in 2035 when Jessie J starts a questionable political party, here’s The Vivienne to demonstrate
I’m not sure I love this, the texture of the top is just making me think of a tomato that’s started to wither and like it might burst if you so much as look at it for too long. But congratulations to her for winning the Season 14 Shoulder Pads Runway 7 weeks late.
Next up was Jinkx dressed as pleather Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle
This is a really great look, and often these very period dress costumes don’t read very well on the runway because the queens have yet to master the art of the hoop skirt or the petticoat but this had none of those issues, and I’m really impressed by how lovely the drape of the pleather is.
Someone was going to have to do a Matrix look for the pleather runway and I was a little relieved that instead of another vague nod to Neo, we got Jaida doing Jada
this is pretty damn fabulous – I enjoy that it’s not just a literal copy of the outfit Jada wears in the films, and instead kind of put it through the 90s hip hop wringer to make it a little more original.
And lastly we have Shea Coulee as a graffiti tagged sphynx cat
this is a fun look, but it does very much feel like “Well, we dropped a lot of money on that Valentino dress, so we’ll just decorate this corset with some Sharpies” which gives it the distinct energy of being a Halloween costume – and to be fair, it’s a costume that would probably go down very well in a club on Spoopy Weekend.
A Pleather Look Runway Ranking
- Michelangelo’s Statue of Dairy Milk
- 2 Layers of Jaida
- Dominatrix Potter’s Pleather Tiggy-Winkle
- Raja’s Punky Pleathers
- Neon Genesis: Yvie-ngelion
- Don’t Draw On Your Cats
- Fascy J
- 3 Beach Balls in a Trench Coat
Jinkx was an easy choice for the top – God tier Snatch Game performances and a really solid runway look. The second choice could have been either Trinity or Raja – I think I would have given it to Raja, and I’m surprised they didn’t purely to have the lipsync be between a pair of queens from Drag Race’s Logo TV Era. In the end they bring it down to a lipsync between Jinkx and Trinity.
Ru-mour Has It
I did love that just about EVERYONE changed for this runway – imaginably because sitting for a good 3 hours during the filming in pleather is not a fun experience
obsessed with Jaida and Shea both changing back into their Snatch Game characters though.
The lipsync song wasn’t as an off the wall choice as last episode’s with Jinkx and Trinity singing to Adele’s Rumour Has It and sadly not the clearly superior Glee version which I’m surprised hasn’t been used before. I did also immediately think that Jinkx was going to win this though because Trinity was not giving Adele vibes with her outfit
in fact she really, to me at least, looks like Aubrey O’day during that brief moment as a redhead in 2012
and then you had Jinkx who looked like she had ridden her bike to the opera, which… sounds a little bit more like something Adele might do. At least pre-showing up on Instagram with the Bantu knots
both of them went for a comedic take on the song, I’m not sure I really loved this lipsync to be honest – I didn’t feel like either of their takes on it particularly amounted to something, they had a few jokes to smatter throughout it, Trinity using up her best one in the opening of the song by pointing at her ass and singing “She ain’t real”
and Jinkx pulled some funny faces the likes of which I’ve only ever seen on as Aardman character
I think I just needed more of a concept from someone, I’m curious to know what Jaida would have done as Prince or Yvie as… a printer leakage personified?
in the end Jinkx did win it, which I think was fair, Trinity by the end of it was very tonally off and Jinkx did have a whole segment devoted to puppet theatre
and so she gets to choose who to block, and I am curious to see if her choice to block Shea will start a tradition of just blocking the queen that won the previous episode
because if it does, this might get a little repetitive.
And if you’ve enjoyed reading this recap of All Stars 7’s Snatch Game and would like to support the blog, you can leave a small tip via my Ko-fi account HERE. A HUGE thank you to everyone that has tipped me so far, it helps out a lot!