Go Piss Girl (RECAP)
RuPaul's Drag Race S16E12 "Bathroom Hunties"
I’m ready to call this season right now.
Sapphira has now won three challenges in a row? Three? Next week Q is walking into the Werkroom with a gun. And with all due respect to the Nymphia hopefuls out there, I think it’s time to hang it up. The New York Times has yet to launch an election needle for Drag Race crownings (despite my many emails) but if they did I fear this race would be all but called.
For the most part, Sapphira’s unstoppable late season dominance has me feeling… 😃
The queen’s got charisma! No matter what the challenge, the circumstance, her relative expertise or comfort level with the material, Sapphira is gonna put on a goddamn show. She’s a seasoned host with the well-honed ability to put an audience at ease: an absolutely essential skill for a Drag Race winner imho.
And what better distillation of that talent than this week’s challenge? Nominally, the queens are tasked with designing a luxury bathroom experience from scratch and presenting that idea to “homebuyers” Michelle and Carson. In practice, it’s yet another hosting challenge, where the queens are judged on their ability to sell their idea (regardless of quality) and keep the these prospective buyers entertained throughout their presentation.
This task proves insurmountable to Team Nymphia/Dawn. Predictably, two of the season’s most visually distinctive queens decide on an art-forward concept for their bathroom: a “F’Art” Museum to be exact. The execution is a somewhat vibeless, off-puttingly horny, white-walled room with some mid-art installed on the wall (i.e. a perfect recreation of the Whitney Biennial.) But the real problems arise from their ability to walk us through the space. Both Dawn and Nymphia often fall victim to a very common illness afflicting non-comedians, which is of course Whacky Voice Syndrome™️. This arises in performers who aren’t accustomed to having to be funny in front of audience, so they instead default to affecting a whacky voice in the absence of telling jokes. Sealing Dawn’s fate, she’s unable to even get a word in edgewise! Nymphia is no more equipped for this challenge than Dawn is, but she does have the good sense to make her (whacky) voice heard as often as possible – saving her from her sister’s bottom two status.
Across the hall, a similar fate awaits Q and Morphine. To be Dawnest, I actually think Q and Morphine had the strongest and most consistent comedic concept for their bathroom (not that that counted for much, apparently). Coat hangers that drop your coat, a torturously uncomfortable toilet seat, out-of-reach toilet paper… these are all solid bits riffing on their premise of “bathroom from Hell.” Of course, WVS™️ spares no one (especially not Q) evidenced by the way the pair present their bathroom with grating valley girl accents. Q – like Nymphia – monopolizes a majority of the jokes and airtime, which proves to be the tiebreaker. This leaves Morphine in the bottom for the second week in a row.
Last, of course, there’s Plane and Sapphira. The producers really stacked the deck here. Pairing the two queens with the most comedic experience and stage presence together results in a pretty uneven distribution of entertainment value, which comes into stark focus the minute Plane and Sapphira open their mouths. They easily riff off each other in running jokes: they’re unemployed, they don’t know each other’s names, one of them is into weird sex stuff... It’s the Ned’s Declassified Podcast up in here. And the judges eat it up. It’s clearly the best time Michelle and Carson have in any of the bathrooms, and if we’re being real it’s the only bathroom in which Carson isn’t the one responsible for most of the punchlines. And Sapphira manages to accomplish all this while also maintaining her busy schedule as Season 16’s on set therapist. What can’t she do? Sapphira has been colloquially described as “the mother” of the season, but now that she’s fully busting out therapeutic exercises and CBT techniques, at what point do we start to speculate that there’s a real certification involved… Sapphira Cristal Psy. D., if you’re reading this do you accept HealthFirst BronzeLeaf Premier?
So, after Plane snags her third win, Sapphira her fourth as well as her Nobel Prize in Medicine for her advancements of the field of Drag Queen Psychology, Dawn and Morphine are left to lip sync to “Body” by Megan Thee Stallion. Dawn, sweetie, I am so sorry but you never stood a chance. Her elven twink frame is simply physically incapable of the choreography required to do justice to a Megan Thee Stallion song. Morphine, however, was born for this. Surgically enhanced for it, even. She splits, she shakes ass, she slides across the floor… Morphine is a BBL Terminator and Dawn a hapless Sarah Connor.
This elimination will likely be shocking to some, but not to me. Readers of this newsletter will note that I’ve been saying Dawn has been barely eeking by for weeks. And don’t pity Dawn! There are worse fates for a New York queen. Dawn leaves the competition with a passionate fanbase, some iconic runway looks under her belt, and – most importantly – having not overstayed her welcome.