You open this newsletter, dear Final Reader, imminently before this weekend’s highly anticipated Final Four matchups.
I’m not talking about basketball this time. I’m talking about Friday night’s semifinal episode to this season of RuPaul’s Drag Race — obviously! 💅 And here to talk about it with me is Rep. Taylor Small, P/D-Winooski.
Welcome back to Power Lunch, where I sit down with a Statehouse mover and groover to talk about anything but politics. This week, Small chatted with me mere hours before Friday night’s episode, where this season’s final four queens will face off to see who advances to next week’s final episode. (That’s at 8 p.m. on MTV, for anyone who would like to follow along at home. No, this is not a paid placement. I wish!)
For the uninitiated, RuPaul’s Drag Race is, in the words of Small, “the Olympics of drag.” The show is not just about the queens’ stage performances. It’s a competition of drag as an entire art form: the hair, the makeup, the dancing, the acting and — perhaps most importantly — the personas.
“It’s also a competition of … the personalities that they — I don’t want to say manufacture, because that makes it sound like it’s completely fake, and it’s not,” I relayed to Small. “Just like drag, it’s not completely fake. It’s personality plus adornment.”
“Right,” Small nodded along over a Dr. Pepper and a turkey sandwich in the Statehouse cafeteria. “I think of it as a theater kid’s dream of ultimate character development. You are creating a whole persona.”
Small and I counted to three and said in unison who we think will be next Friday’s winner. Small’s money is on Nymphia Wind, mine on Plane Jane. Only time will tell whether either of us is correct.
I asked Small: Is politics drag?
“Oh, yeah,” she replied. “I mean, I think politics is theater, and so one and the same. I often think of … the work that we do on the floor as a form of theatrical performance.”
While there’s an expected script to follow in the Statehouse, Small explained that “there’s a lot of improv that also happens,” just like drag. And like RuPaul’s queens, lawmakers bring their personas to every performance.
“There is this piece that we see with drag that I would love infused more in the legislative process, which is finding ways to break that script up, to make it our own,” Small said. “I think what we see on Drag Race is that any of the girls that divert from the status quo, that divert away from what is expected of them, are always the ones that shine.”
If politics is drag, drag is also political — perhaps now more than ever, as state legislatures elsewhere in the country advance bills targeting drag performers. Amid the political turmoil, Small said that Drag Race allows audiences “to see queens in all of their multitudes, being able to see them not just as performers, but as real people.”
“It really is the narrative that we need globally, but more importantly, right here in the United States,” Small said, “because so often, we have this stereotypical concept of what a drag queen is. Usually, the attacks are degrading them to being a nighttime, adult performer, and that they’re despicable, that they’re doing something unnatural.”
“What this show goes on to really expand for folks is … drag is like the ultimate craft,” Small continued. “You don’t just do one thing. You are not just a makeup artist. You are not just a hairstylist. You are not just a designer. You are not just a model. You are not just an actor. But you have to be all of those things, and you have to do it all on your own.”
— Sarah Mearhoff
In the know
As tens of thousands of visitors are expected to stream into northern Vermont this weekend to catch a glimpse of Monday’s total solar eclipse, some motels and hotels in the state’s emergency shelter program are clearing their rooms to accommodate the celestial event chasers — who are driving up hotel prices across the path of totality nationwide.
Hotel rooms in Chittenden County this weekend are booking for upward of $500 a night. The state currently pays motels and hotels $80 a night to shelter unhoused Vermonters.
Three lodging establishments that shelter unhoused Vermonters have told the state they would not accept state vouchers in the days leading up to the eclipse: the Anchorage Inn in South Burlington, and the Motel 6 and Days Inn in Colchester.
Around 50 households are sheltered through the program at the Chittenden County locations, with the majority at the Days Inn, said Miranda Gray, deputy commissioner of the Department for Children and Families’ economic services division.
— Carly Berlin
For many years, Vermont’s courts have been unable to hold perpetrators of timber theft accountable, despite several earlier tweaks to the law.
“Everybody’s pissed. Everybody’s frustrated at the inability to get at these guys,” Rep. Marc Mihaly, D-East Calais, told lawmakers earlier in the legislative session, about why he is sponsoring H.614, the state’s latest attempt to put an end to the practice. The bill passed the Vermont House last month on a voice vote with little debate and is now under consideration in the Senate.
Among other measures, the legislation would create a new category of crime for timber theft, called land improvement fraud, similar to home improvement fraud, which is already a crime.
But on its journey through House committees, the bill has lost some of its teeth, including a provision that made it easier to seize the logging equipment owned by serial offenders. Without it, some question whether the proposed law would make an impact.
— Emma Cotton
Visit our 2024 Bill tracker for the latest updates on major legislation we are following.
What we’re reading
Arson attack damages Sen. Bernie Sanders’ Burlington office, police say, VTDigger
Vermont eclipse forecast: Sunshine and clear skies still predicted for Monday, VTDigger
Six months later, still no suspect in Honoree Fleming shooting, VTDigger
