vrocotamy

Following the comment on Violet's hand-held face wheel....I didn't find it it as fabulous as the judging panel. I understand where she was going with it - '50s or '60s sci-fi goddess with a fabulous radio aerial around her head - but the materials (literally) didn't hold up to the concept. The netting was droopy and made her look like Little Bo Peep. Violet was certainly the best of the group, at least in concept, but I didn't think there was that much of a difference between the best and the worst this week (which can happen when you have a challenge this insane.) Honestly...if I had to judge this challenge, especially the second part, I would have simply thrown up my hands, started laughing, and said, "Not today, Satan." Or I would have gone and smoked a big ol' blunt and come back, to be in an appropriate mind-frame to judge this challenge. There are rare times where I think Michelle is the sane one on the panel. This last episode was one of them. Pearl wore a Hello Kitty snuggie topped with a bobbly-head and Santino compared her to Veruschka. It's the kind of thing Pearl can only get away with doing because she's 90 pounds and 6'4" and a very good makeup artist. If I saw her in person, I'd want to point at her and laugh. Kennedy was the worst, even if only because she botched the first portion of the challenge completely, discounting her second look. Everyone else fulfilled the first part of the challenge pretty well, following a different prerogative. Violet and Ginger turned out characters that could be part of the Sanrio brand and Pearl and Katya (particularly) sent Hello Kitty up in a funny way. I don't think Pearl should have lasted as long as she has, but I'll give her props when she does well (and, like Michelle, a reference to Blonde Ambition Tour-era Madonna goes far with me.) If this were Project Runway or America's Next Top Model, Kennedy would have simply been eliminated. I completely understood Katya's concept for the second look, even if it was too busy. She looked like she walked out of the campy '60s Batman live-action series. I was rooting for Katya and, as I've said elsewhere on the forum, think she was the most original, imaginative, well-rounded queen this season. It's a tragedy that she didn't make final three, but she lost the lip-sync to Kennedy, even if it was close. Kennedy's face and pacing were closer to the spirit of the song. Still, it was this season's best group lip-sync.

I feel like Mariah Balenciaga reading Raja, but, when I see Pearl, all I see is "club kid, club kid." There have been comparisons made to this season's cadre of fashion queens and those in S3 - the Heathers, primarily Raja and Manila, and Yara Sofia - but I still see Pearl and Miss Fame, at least, as having less stage presence, poise, and personality than those queens. The "club kid" read, IMO, isn't accurate for the S3 queens, but it is for Pearl. Let's explore that. Manila, prior to S3, was essentially a "club kid" who'd been doing herself up in drag for 5-10 years, first in Minneapolis and then at clubs like Westway in New York; Sahara pushed her into performing and she learned how to sew in a matter of days before flying to Los Angeles for RuPaul's Drag Race. Where Manila and Pearl diverge is that a.) Manila had a fairly wide diversity of looks, b.) Manila had a sparkling, open, and professional personality and drive, c.) Manila knew how to create character through look, and d.) Manila knew how to entertain (as proven by "MacArthur Park.") Like Pearl, she stumbled at the harder performance challenges (Manila was mediocre in the singing challenge and flunked the stand-up), and relied on a set shtick to get through the comedy portions (the Margaret Cho-style Asian woman impersonation.) But, in spite of that - in the ways listed above - Manila proved she was a drag entertainer, not just a club kid. Pearl has yet to prove that. There's always a burden on the pageant queens like Kennedy to prove they're not just pageant queens, but Pearl hasn't had to work as hard to transcend expectations, IMO. I'm actually fairly convinced Pearl will make it to the final 4, and quite possibly the final 3, even if Ru can't remember her name. The "Hello Kitty" challenge is very much in her wheelhouse in terms of styling. .

I could elaborate more on the forthcoming comparison later, but the last time the show had so many "baby queens" (IMO, meaning queens under 24) making it far was S2. Tyra and Tatianna, who were both 21 at the time of filming - younger than Violet even - made it far. Tyra reminds me (more than a little) of Violet, and Pearl is a bit like a (hipster) Tatianna. Except...Violet has Tatianna's charisma and Pearl has Tyra's lack thereof.

Ultimately, all of this comes down to personal opinion, so I respect yours but I differ. I've seen her post-show work and yes, it may be "compelling" in terms of being unusual and stylish, but she's done the same thing every time. She can serve face, sure, but what drag queen worth her salt can't? Both Pearl's wins - in the DESPY awards and Conjoined Queens - were part of Trixie's storyline, and, at least in the first case, required heavy producer prodding (apparently, she was absent from the work room for over an hour, ostensibly with producers giving her the lowdown on what storyline she was expected to fulfill.) I will admit Pearl can be witty and funny (as proven by Snatch Game) and is a really creative and skilled makeup artist. As for her lip-syncs on the show...Pearl's first lip-sync was believed by Ru and Michelle to have "embodied Debby Harry", but you can see on Ru's face in Divine Inspiration that she's realized the lip-sync she gave for "Dreaming" was just Pearl's schtick. And having beaten Miss Fame in a lip-sync is no great feat.

I'm on the same page. I've probably been a little too hard on Pearl personally, but I do have problems with her making top 5 in the competition (much less top 3). And what is the source of my problems? The source is that, in my opinion, she's a very good reality TV contestant but a very mediocre drag queen. I see drag queens primarily as entertainers, and executing looks as an essential part of skill at that entertainment, not an end into and of itself. Pearl cannot do compelling stage performance, either as a dramatist/comedian or as a lip-sync performance, for the life of her. Pearl's performances in the Snatch Game and the DESPY awards - and her talking heads - show she can be funny and witty, but she hasn't shown it's something she has shown she can translate as an entertainer. And if you see what she's done since the show, she hasn't progressed very much on the entertainment front...she's just moved on to another, admittedly very stylish, gimmick. But Pearl has been a great reality show contestant. She's confronted the host, had a redemption arc, is good-looking, and gives good quip in the talking heads. And that's why she's still here, which makes me concerned about the direction of RPDR. Like other skill-based reality competitions (perhaps even more so), RPDR makes no pretensions to objectivity. But, unlike shows like Project Runway, the queens on RPDR - or those who make it far - are consistently actually very good, at least in one facet, at the art in which they're "competing." Even if Laganja, for example, was mediocre in the show's challenges and mostly valuable to create drama, she's a great drag queen. I'd pay to see her. In fact, in Season 6, I would pay to see every one of the queens who made the top 8 (and a few who left earlier), because, in spite of the editing f*ckery, they're more than reality show characters - they're all talented entertainers. Pearl is basically a good reality TV character; her skills lie in makeup and styling, not in entertainment. Of course, you could argue some previous queens who made it far - Phi Phi or Tatianna - were better reality TV contestants than drag queens, but their post-show careers have proven that wrong.

I don't think MF was actually worse than Pearl or Violet; it's just that the powers that be decided to finally cut the strings on her and force her to lip sync...which spelled her doom, since there's no way editors can make it look like MF could win a lip sync against anyone. IMO, Ruduction should have forced her to lip sync in Snatch Game; her Donatella was worse than Jaidynn's Raven Symone and it would have ensured Max, a more talented competitor, would have stayed in the game.

I'm contemplating exploring drag - I have been since I was 16, well before the show aired - and I've had a few thoughts: Adriana Drescher (a combination of Adriana LaCerva from The Sopranos and Fran Drescher); Adriana LaCervix (again, from Drea DeMatteo's character on The Sopranos); Jaclyn Veronique Bustamante (long story, but you can probably picture such a character); Ariel Ciccone (combination of Ariel from The Little Mermaid and Madonna's surname); Tori Anus (self-explanatory); Bridget Ann Tunnel ("bridge and tunnel"); Lincoln Tunnels; Cabiria Ciccone (from Fellini's Nights of Cabiria and Madonna's surname); _____ Magnani (from Anna Magnani.)

I might add more to this later, but here's a beginning as to why I think the show was off this season: 1. Poor casting. There aren't any larger-than-life personalities on the cast, or truly quotable queens. Ginger and Katya have their moments, but it's all in the confessionals. Honestly, Jasmine Masters came the closest, and she could be execrable. Last season, every queen who made it past the first few episodes (Courtney excepted) had a huge personality. They made good TV characters. 2. Poor challenges (for the most part.) There have been a few challenges I liked - Conjoined Queens, Spoof! There It Is, Divine Inspiration, and Prancing Queens - but the season was dominated by poorly written scripted dramatic group challenges without solo portions. The worst might have been the Merle Ginsberg Ru-Enactment challenge. Being poorly scripted, they didn't give the queens opportunities to be entertaining. In not having solo portions, they didn't give us a chance to see who was actually talented (or simply making it work.) I personally think Seasons 2-4 had a number of challenges that seemed irrelevant or just didn't produce interesting results - Dragazines in S4, the stripping challenge in S2, etc. - but Seasons 5 and 6 had the right mix. The group dramatic challenges (like the rap challenge in S6, which was great) frequently had solo portions where individual contestants could shine and were less frequently scripted. I also think they need to revive the marketing/pubic speaking challenges, as a poster up-thread mentioned, since it's a great chance to introduce skills that are relevant to the queens' post-show careers. 3. Poor editing. We virtually never see work-room interactions between the queens, which is how you get to know the characters. There's no real villain or bitch, so we have to suffer through unfair attempts to make Ginger or Kennedy (who is rumored to actually be sort of unpleasant, but not completely awful) into villains. 4. Poor (or forced) judging. There have been many efforts to keep pretty girls like Fame and Pearl in the competition longer than their expiration date that cause the judging to seem nonsensical. I'll add more later...

Large parts of Ru and Michelle's podcast sound eerily (and hilariously) like the reminiscences about New York nightlife in the late '80s and early '90s from Sharon Needles' Snatch Game Michelle impersonation. Two thumbs up. This is priceless and true. RuPaul and Michelle are living examples of how far a little CUNT can take you with some smarts and determination. A major concern of theirs on the podcast is what will happen to the queens once the show ends and they're no longer famous, and whether or not the queens will properly capitalize on their ephemeral fame in a way that will lead to success and security in the long run. There are definitely some from the show who have - Latrice, Alyssa, Shangela, Willam, Courtney, Jinkx, Bianca, and in a debatable way, Sharon and Alaska - but there are just as many who have really not.

I think concerns over Katya's sobriety shouldn't play in to the decision to award her $100,000 or not, however well intended. Katya's been sober for about two and a half years at this point, making a living in nightclubs, about the environment least conducive to sobriety, and survived the most stressful experience imaginable (reality TV!) without relapsing. Interestingly, she intended to go to graduate school for counseling before being cast on RPDR. She's not Sharon or Alaska, who were in the throes of substance use and abuse in 2012 and 2013. I don't think Katya will win for other reasons - production wasn't really pushing for her and she didn't get enough improvisational comedy challenges to really show off her skill-set (or do her Russian prostitute character) - but she would be the most compelling, original winner out of this group, IMO. She's arguably the most well-balanced queen this season - she's a fantastic stage performer, has a unique, absurdly hilarious sense of humor, and knows how to use visuals effectively to create character (and do sexy, albeit in an ironic way.) She wouldn't really be like any previous winner, whereas I think Ginger has marked similarities to both Jinkx and Bianca. Katya is most similar to Alaska, but I think she's quite a bit sharper and more mature than Alaska, with broader references, and more consistent in her output.

Yep, it's a bit of a cliche that Millennials have a complete antipathy to criticism and want to win just for showing up. In relation to this show, it's very much used for some queens born in the mid-late '80s and early '90s and not others. It's used for Laganja (who was probably born in 1989?) or Pearl (who was probably born in 1991?), but not for Jinkx (born 1987), Trinity (born 1991), Adore (born 1989...well, maybe it is used for Adore), Alaska (born 1985), Detox (also born 1985), Jujubee (born 1984), or Tyra Sanchez (born 1988). I think that in Trixie's case it comes from a.) youth and b.) a need to constantly buoy herself up from her abusive childhood. I also think many of the queens who counter criticism with "Everyone loves me!" are simply inexperience and haven't been doing drag for very long, or in a variety of venues.

I listened to parts of the few What's the Tee podcasts with RPDR queens - Latrice, Raven, and Alaska (I haven't gotten to Mariah's yet) - and I have to say all three were informative, as much about RuPaul and Michelle as about the queens. RuPaul gets forgotten as a driving force in a lot of discussions of the show, unfortunately, and is criticized online quite a bit for mixing up the seasons the queens were on or not knowing their boy names. But people forget Ms./Mr. Charles has a life beyond RPDR, which is just one of her jobs. The interview with Latrice has the fullest account of how she ended up in jail that she's given, and she also talks quite a bit about her childhood and family (two of her brothers were involved in the Crips in Compton and her mother moved her to the Valley so that Latrice/Tim wouldn't be involved in the violence of Compton in the crack epidemic years), as well as how she's developed and diversified her career post-Drag Race, particularly in managing queens. She's really one of the smartest and most accomplished contestants. Raven's interview was utterly hilarious - she's one of the most articulate, fierce, intelligent, and witty queens to have appeared on the show - even if her intelligence apparently doesn't translate into her personal decisions (she has two back-to-back DUIs she's still working through the community service for.) We get the tidbit that Raven was an obsessive Michelle Visage fan as a child ca. 1990 and won tickets to see Seduction at the time. Alaska's a far worse interview partner - she's not particularly articulate - but the main takeaway was about the depths of Alaska's alcoholism during the breakdown of her and Sharon's relationship in 2013, after Season 5 aired.

. My prediction for next episode is a Katya vs. Kennedy lip-sync. Ginger is clearly a judges' favorite (for good reason), and I don't think they'd put her in the bottom three for the third time, especially against Kennedy or Katya, who are superlative lip-sync queens. Even if they were to keep Ginger in a third LSFYL, they need to make it look like she won the lip sync, and that would be hard against Kennedy or Katya. Pearl's style is very suited to "Hello Kitty" couture, as we saw with the Japanime character she brought out in the John Waters challenge, and Violet's specialty is runway (and costume construction.) Katya can sew - she's the only other queen besides Violet who makes virtually all her own outfits - but I think they'll finally get on her for "not being polished enough" or some BS. And a Kennedy vs. Katya lip-sync is a recipe for sure-fire splitting and spinning pyrotechnics, which we've lacked this season in our LSFYLs.

I listened to the podcast kieyra posted and that couldn't be further from the case; the idea that Ru is ready to quit RPDR is Reddit hearsay. What Michelle and Ru meant is that the show's position is precarious as explicitly LGBT programming, and that it staying on the air, whatever the ratings, is always in question - and in the hands of network execs above Michelle and Ru. I really enjoyed that episode of Ru's podcast, which I hadn't heard before (surprisingly), and there was some very good T. Mainly that Ru said that her initial instinct when Pearl "came for her" (to use Alyssa's family language) was to scream at her and kick her off the show, but that she resisted because: a.) she's a producer; b.) she realized Pearl would be a popular character, as a cute boy; and c.) she knew Pearl had a lot of personal problems that went beyond Ru (I'm thinking Daddy issues). The statement about it being possible that RPDR could go off the air at any moment came in the context of a discussion of online nastiness, much of it by teenagers, ad how they don't appreciate how hard it was to get RPDR on the air, and how a program like RPDR couldn't even have been greenlighted before 2008 or so. It makes me feel ancient, since I'm still quite young - I'm 25 - and when I was in middle school and high school RPDR wouldn't have been on TV, and there weren't a million gay-positive YouTube videos put out there by World of Wonder and many others, etc. I do feel like the generation under 21, who were born after 1995 or so, don't necessarily appreciate the very existence of RPDR as a show about gay men and transwomen on their own terms and how that only recently became possible.

It's a good point that people wouldn't have been as disappointed with Trixie (or had as high expectations) if Trixie had been eliminated at the proper place in the competition. It's entirely possible Trixie might have combusted at another point during filming, but I think that talent-wise she's around 6th, behind the queens you mentioned. I listened to Michelle and Ru's most recent podcast, and they discussed the "Justice 4 Trixie" phenomenon extensively. Apparently, Ru and Michelle thought Pearl embodied Debbie Harry. However, the night after the elimination, Ru talked to Debbie Harry and Mark Stein (who wrote "Dreaming"), who are both super-fans of RPDR, and they far preferred Trixie's interpretation. I think Ru's story about the elimination is only a half-truth and Pearl was saved to create a story arc (something of which Pearl seems very conscious in saying "the story has come full circle" and whatnot), but that's a whole other gig... I think that due to the poor challenge design of the first half of the season - resulting in challenges where no one did specifically well - and an overall rise in the cast's talent level, there have been a number of eliminations that didn't seem to make any sense. This explains, for me, why Kandy Ho stayed so long. Miss Fame and Pearl were saved for storyline purposes, and Max didn't play the reality TV game well and made a number of very, very bad decisions. For the first half of the season, you can re-think the logic behind the bottom two for any given episode pretty easily, which then would change the elimination order for the whole season. Here's a brief exercise in it. 1. Born Naked: Kandy Ho vs. Tempest. Tempest eliminated. 2. Glamazonian Airways: Katya vs. Miss Fame. Miss Fame eliminated. This, of course, would mean that producers didn't want to protect Miss Fame and her inability to perform... 3. ShakesQueer: Jasmine vs. Kennedy. Jasmine eliminated. 4. Spoof! There It is: Pearl vs. Trixie. Pearl eliminated. 5. The DESPY Awards: Sasha Belle vs. Kandy Ho. Sasha Belle eliminated (this is pure speculation, of course...) 6. Ru Hollywood Stories: Jaidynn vs. Kandy Ho. Kandy Ho eliminated. This would leave Max, Mrs. Kasha Davis, Jaidynn, Kennedy, Trixie, Ginger, Violet, and Katya as Snatch Game contestants. My guess is that Max would still be eliminated in the Snatch Game, and then might have returned in the next episode, with Jaidynn eliminated. You could also re-do the eliminations from Snatch Game onwards by having Miss Fame lip-sync against Max and Miss Fame being sent home (the invariable result of Fame lip-syncing). Trixie would still probably have returned in Conjoined Queens. The big difference would be that Pearl would have been eliminated in Divine Inspiration if Miss Fame had no longer been present, probably in a lip-sync against Violet, leaving the final six as, as you said, Max, Violet, Trixie, Katya, Ginger, and Kennedy.

I think there were a few queens this season who generated a lot of excitement because of their look, concept or quip - namely Max, Mrs. Kasha Davis, and Trixie - who either turned out not to deliver what they seemed to promise (or in Trixie's case, explicitly promised), or be pushed out of the way for walking memes like Miss Fame or Pearl. As said, I like Trixie (and her look), but I'm even more puzzled by her cult-like following than Pearl's. Ginger drawing herself into a corner this episode demonstrated, for me, what this season's queens share in common to differentiate them from those of other seasons, with the exception of Katya and maybe Kennedy. Their consistency is in their conviction to being one-sided, or their anxiety in departing from areas they know themselves to have expertise in. To be clear, I've generally been against "Aryan Airlines" and the preeminent importance they place on look for look's sake, and I think performance talent is the basis of a great drag queen. That said, Ginger clamming up and portending her own failure in dancing and design challenges ironically reminds me of Miss Fame's complaints about the performance challenges this season, or Roxxxy, Coco, and Alyssa complaining about all the "comedy" challenges in Season 5. Ginger has presumably seen six seasons of the show and knows that styling, design, and dancing are all part of the competition, particularly in the last few challenges. I wasn't able to articulate it completely until this episode, but what puts Ginger just below the mature low-camp comedy or shock queens who slayed in the past three seasons - Jinkx, Alaska, Bianca, and Sharon - is a lot of reticence (or fear) around attacking challenges outside her wheelhouse and the lack of an ability to use striking costume and styling to communicate character. The visual component is important in drag, as much as in low-camp comedy or shock drag as in high-camp pageant drag. Ginger seems to avoid really embracing the visual component of drag out of a lack of confidence in her body, although overweight queens like Delta or Darienne who use costume both effectively and spectacularly to communicate character should prove to her body size doesn't have to be a limit. Honestly, Katya is the only queen this season who uses costume in a clever way to communicate her particular "80% sexy, 20% disgusting" character. My favorite queens from the show have been able to convey their character(s) as much visually as through performance, and Katya's really the only one this season who satisfies that criterion. It's arguable with Kennedy, but I think Kennedy's strength is really all in performance.

Chad has been mutated by plastic surgery, including botched plastic surgery. He was a rather ordinary looking guy prior to all that, so it's not quite a fair comparison. Alyssa, conversely, has extremely strange features for a man that read as very pretty on a woman. He (Justin) has huge eyes with a broad forehead and virtually no chin or lower face bone structure to speak of, but it all works out well when painted. Jinkx is, quite frankly, a very homely man as Jerick who makes a stunning, delicately feminine woman. All that said, it's a truism that conventionally good-looking men don't make good-looking queens, but there are a few counter examples, most notably Raven.

So...we get one of the few (if perhaps only) challenges - and perhaps the most difficult performance challenge ever on the show - with only good to great results in RuPaul's Drag Race's worst season yet? This makes me think that either the queens this season are simply prepared to try harder or that the issue with S7 is the hitherto terrible challenge design, not the cast. Seasons 2-6 were more entertaining than S7, but just imagine how bad some of the results would have been if this challenge were executed with the final six in a few of the previous seasons. The closest challenge I could think of to this one was the sister-act challenge with the final six in S4; none of the teams were terrible in that challenge, but only Latrice and Willam stood out, and that whole episode was a set-up for the suspense around a Phi Phi-Sharon elimination. I do agree that the form of the tango gave Violet and Katya an advantage and Ginger and Trixie got the short end of the stick with the country-robot. Visuals are an important part of any choreographed dance, and the linear, lateral forms of the tango really dramatized the male-female split effectively. I think Ginger and Trixie were only as campy or jokey (or whatever they were) as their material called for. Trixie is a former alt-country singer as a boy and Ginger is from the "country", so perhaps production thought it would be fitting...or a good trap, in that they would be tempted to go for low camp and then dinged for it? Violet and Katya had the clear advantage insofar as they're the only two queens who sew all their own garments and insofar as they both have experience with kinetic expression, as an (amateur) aerialist in Violet's case and an (amateur) gymnast in Katya's case. I agree with the many who said Trixie was eliminated less on the quality of her performance - given the uniformly high quality of the performances - than on having the overall weakest record in the competition. And I hate to agree with Violet, but if you're sent home and return, you really need to prove to the judges that you were worth their investment...and Trixie didn't. To be perfectly honest, Trixie seems perfectly nice and all, but I don't get the fuss over her. She talks incessantly about herself as a sewing, dancing, acting, riotously funny triple (or quadruple threat), but the most she's ever delivered was in the Glamazonian Airways challenge, which was entirely lip-syncing. There's a lot of outcry on Reddit right now about how Trixie's elimination this week was the "most unfair ever" - they believe Ginger was both worse in her performance and her lip-sync - but I'm not sure why they expect fairness from RPDR (have they been watching the same show as me for seven seasons?), and Ruduction was clearly not going to send home Ginger at this stage in the game, not with three wins and a virtually flawless track record up to the Conjoined Twins challenge. And Trixie really had no record to speak of. Trixie's slavish fandom puzzles me even more than Pearl's, frankly. Also, I think Ginger's lip-sync to "Show Me Love" was very good. Sometimes, less is more in a lip sync, when it's consistently high energy and focused.

Apparently, you can also see India Ferrah (also very old school drag) at a club called Piranhas. Or so I hear.

I think it was in Season 5.

Since I only know Adele from her popular songs like "Rolling in the Deep", I couldn't judge Ginger's Adele based on any similarity to Adele. I can only judge it based on finding it, for the most part, funny, which tends to be how Snatch Game contestants are judged. I agree that the "fat girl eating" is a crutch and Ginger didn't need to go there to make it funny. I had mixed feelings about Katya's Suze Orman. I liked the deadpan aspect of it and she captured Suze's corny diction, but you're right that she relied too much on lesbian stereotypes. What I think made Katya's performance was her reads on the other queens, namely Fame's Donatella. As for Pearl's Big Ang and Violet's Alyssa... I feel like impersonating another reality TV character isn't really doing Snatch Game justice, since they've already been pre-digested and equipped with funny tics by other reality TV editors. It's entirely too meta for me. I think Pearl's Big Ang was her best performance of the whole season - the Batman and Robin and medical mystery lines were priceless - but it wasn't quite up to the level of Kennedy, Ginger, or Katya. As for Violet's Alyssa...I could probably impersonate Alyssa pretty accurately after a few cocktails and watching Alyssa's Secret on loop. Violet did well, but it didn't require a lot of creativity or effort.

I've been thinking about why S7 is bad from day one and am gestating an extensive post on it, but I'll answer this one question quickly. The ostensible reason RuPaul's Drag Race aired so late this year wasn't because they were trying to fix it in editing, but because Michelle was on Celebrity Big Brother: UK and was contractually barred from appearing in another reality TV show while it aired.

Ugliness is always in the eye of the beholder, but I think the judges were looking for John Waters' brand of ugly: garish, tacky, church rummage-sale brilliant hideousness. To me, only Katya, Ginger, and Violet understood the directions. Katya's was hideous from head to toe (although, as John said, "the hippest girl in Brooklyn would wear that today"). Ginger's outfit, in terms of cut, wasn't too dissimilar from what she normally wears (which is a read on my part), but I think the forest-green plastic rosettes around the color (and the combination of the forest-green with lime green) pushed it into truly ugly. Violet's outfit channeled Connie Marble from Pink Flamingos or an I Love Lucy sack dress, as the judges said. Trixie and Kennedy's outfits were in poor taste, but they weren't outrageously ugly. Kennedy's dress was standard church lady drag with a Golden Girls palette and Trixie's was an '80s prom dress or bridesmaids' dress. Pearl came out as a cute Japanese Lolita/anime character and Fame looked like a whimsical children's book illustration. They failed the assignment.

I see that argument about "Straight Up", actually. Carmen is very good at the one stage performance she does - stripping to great aplomb and applause - but she can't do anything else. I forgot about All Stars on my list since I sort of prefer to pretend All Stars never happened, but the ones you mentioned were great. I pretty much agree with your lip-sync champs list up-thread - Dida, Latrice, Jujubee, Trinity, Coco, Darienne, and Alyssa are all superlative lip-sync queens. I'm going to add Alexis to the list, whose performances on S3 are generally under-rated. There are also queens who lip-synced a lot on their respective seasons, like Jiggly, Laganja, Joslyn, Delta, or Milan, who don't get a lot of credit for it. On the other hand, some of the most lauded lip-syncs were the only ones by contestants who went far in the competition - Manila, Jinkx, or Raven (well, Raven had two.) As for under-rated lip syncs...I think both halves of "Take Me Home" in S5, Lyneisha and Detox, were really spectacular in very different ways. Ditto with "Vibeology" in S6 between Adore and Trinity K. Bonet, or "I'm So Excited" in S5 between Coco and Jade Jolie. S5, without a doubt, had the strongest lip-syncs overall.

The spoiler I heard on Reddit - from someone who was apparently right about this last year - is that Ginger, Pearl, and Violet are the F3, with Kennedy fourth. Now, it would make more sense that the F3 is Kennedy, Ginger, and Violet, with Pearl as fourth, considering Pearl's lax recent performance. However, one has to factor in the ball challenge falling on the F4. Kennedy's runways have been the most inconsistent of any of those four queens, and she could easily get knocked out in that position. If she and Ginger are in the bottom, I think Ginger's staying over her. I've also heard rumors that TPTB are really pushing for Ginger as a winner. Honestly, it would make sense that the other two finalists would be Pearl and Violet in that case, since neither gives Ginger a run for her money. Due to various clues off the show, I'm fairly sure Katya gets eliminated at 5th or 6th place, guaranteeing her a (deserved) Miss Congeniality win. I'm a firm believer, however, that the deserving final three - the three most talented queens on a given season - are the three best at Snatch Game. I'd discount Season 2 from that, since most of the queens didn't understand what Snatch Game entailed yet. That challenge involves everything you need to be a drag super-star, from pitch-perfect use of look to impeccable comic timing. In S4, the three best were Willam, Sharon, and Chad; in S5, the three best were Roxxxy, Alaska, and Jinkx; in S6, the three best were BenDeLa, Bianca, and Adore. In S7, the three best - and the deserving F3, IMO, based on talent - were Ginger, Kennedy, and Katya. I like the idea of Violet as a spoiler based on her spunk and runway skills, but she hasn't done well enough in areas outside her comfort zone, despite good-faith efforts, to warrant getting in to the F3 over Kennedy, Katya, or Ginger. This is, of course, in a fair-ish world, which RPDR is most decidedly not.