Two Canadians, Two Englishmen, and Two Americans walk into a bar …
After settling into our hostel, we met our roommates. Stef and Monica from Canada (Toronto) and Dan and Chris from England. Stef said she heard about a Drag show to see at Planet Bar – a gay bar in Edinburgh. We wanted some laughs and fun so of course we said yes to the invitation to join our roomies at the show. And it was free so it was even better!
We wandered over the river from the old part of Edinburgh to the new part of the city. Here we found the bar and moseyed in. We began our drinks w/ a “crunchie bar” shot. It tasted like a Twix bar in a shot glass. Then I made the painful mistake of ordering a whiskey sour. The bartender looked at me quizzically and said WHAT is that? I explained what it was.
I think he put triple sec and a lot of lemon juice in it, cause it tasted like sweet, lemony kitchen cleaner. Of course, it was not the bartender’s fault it was mine for ordering the wrong drink! Ha! For my next drink, I stuck to Foster’s. You can’t go wrong with that.
After drinking and exchanging stories for an hour or two we sat IN THE FRONT ROW of the small drag show stage. We knew what we were in for when we sat in the front, but I had no idea how MARVELOUS the drag queen that night would be. By the end of the show Paul and I had tears of laughter rolling down our face. We basically think we saw a standup comedy show as well as a drag show.
Our drag queen for that Friday night’s show was the magnificent, unparalleled, “Ginger Rogers,” a charmingly vulgar, hilarious drag queen with a proper thick Scottish brogue. Ginger had the best songs, costumes, and she knew how to rippppp on the crowd. She made fun of everyone in the front row – including me and Paul. Once she heard his sweet South Carolina accent, all bets were off, she made hilarious jokes about Southern Americans, Trump … but she also complimented Paul’s accent and said she loved it.
She went through several divas and costume changes. These included Britney Spears, Madonna, Lady Gaga, Tina Turner, and Amy Winehouse. I particularly liked her devilish detail of when coming out as Amy Winehouse she took out a fake bag of coke and spread it all over her nose, later spreading it on the table we sat at with our beers. While she came out as Lady Gaga, she did her very own original rendition of the song. It was to the song, “Bad Romance” but she replaced the word “Bad Romance” with “I Shit My Pants” – at this point everyone was cracking up. She pulled a Ferrer Roche out of the backside of her costume and plopped one in our friend Chris’s beer and the other she plopped into Paul’s mouth. Hehehehe. She also managed to bring a semi-pro football player from Belfast on stage and stripped him down to his underwear. At the very end of the show everyone was on the stage dancing and it was a sweaty hot mess of fun Ginger Rogers created for us all.
