The audience was bathed in spirits as the spotlight hit the mirror ball. Tiny shards of luminosity encircled the room, making space for people to feel alone with everyone in their grief, rejoicing and remembering. It was as if we were swimming together at night at the bottom of the river. The first notes of a track once known only to those who had trolled Broadway soundtracks in an effort to put their misery to song began to fill the room, calling us back to the surface.
When the spotlight went off and the stage lights came back on, standing there defiantly, blond wig a star-on-fire against the black theatre, dress shimmering as if made of a 1000 rare disco-skinned snakes, heels dug into the stage as if it was extension of the earth, body deservedly thicker than when the voyage began, frame solid as if bracing against the exhaustion of loss that was sure to come, Darrin Hagen as Gloria Hole stood there for all to drink in, project upon and be in awe of for one last time.
It is a rare occasion for someone to transcend their physicality and become a living mirage but for one moment as people in the audience continued to lament for friends long ago passed and a time and place gone that would now seem almost unrecognizable, Gloria was that trick of light on the horizon.
After a standing ovation and two curtain calls Gloria left the stage and the house lights came on. People in the audience pretended that they were collecting their coats—but no one was ready to leave. Once they stepped out into the reality of the icy night, people knew that the memories conjured up from Edmonton Queen: the Final Voyage would once again slowly slide back into the recess of their minds.
Instead people loitered around, glimpsing through the snapshots on the perimeter of the stage. Older audience members took in the images as if flipping through their own albums, younger ones walked slowly slack-jawed in awe of time when Edmonton looked cooler—a stand-in for an artic New York.
Gloria came back out into the theatre looking younger, even in the face of the house lights, than she did only moments before. She was wearing the same dress but somehow now seemed cloaked in a bravado that she had not brought on stage with her.
Her game face was on, sadness left back in the dressing room. She was now ready to be attended to, to perform her duties as drag queen den mother to the gaggle of queens waiting and legions of homos hoping that she would acknowledge them—and of course Gloria did not disappoint. Man as Woman as Force of Nature, Gloria was everything for everyone. Now, as if satisfied, people began to file out into the night, burning as stars in their own right.
Gloria had accomplished what she, as both captain and vessel of the Edmonton Queen, charted out to do—infect the minds one last time of a place and era now long gone yet still relevant. A time when a terrorist/drag queen/paper bag princess could find herself sitting on the lap of an Edmonton Oiler at the Klondike Days parade, a time when queens strolled home on Jasper Ave in the early hours of the morning only to have the shit kicked out of them by random gomers.
As a testament to the wide river that the Edmonton Queen has traversed through her books and countless performances I found myself in the audience sitting between two 20-year-old girls from rural Alberta, one of whom is studying the Edmonton Queen in University and an older man who fondly remembers that going to Flashbacks was the last time he really had a good time going out. For them Gloria represents not just the 1980s or the queers but Edmonton in all of its DIY, scrappy, punk-made-good glory.
In the opening monologue of his hit- Broadway-play-cum-classic-movie, Torch Song Trilogy, Harvey Fierstein as Arnold Beckoff as Virginia Hamm laments that he is, “the last of a dying breed”—the drag queen as a symbol for a movement, as the sister of the queer revolution. Hagen is of the same breed and could tell what was coming as far back as 1990 when he retired his tiara and transfered the queer politics of drag into mainstream entertainment, along the way schooling the masses on the allure of the underground, the other ground. Rubbing the good times they missed in the faces of the insiders and creating a place where outsiders were finally in on the joke rather than being the joke.
As the Edmonton Queen sinks slowly into the North Saskatchewan, I see Darrin Hagen, standing strong on the river bank, ready to begin a new voyage, and I hope he once again brings us along on for the ride.
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