- If it's a studio day,
and I'm shooting content for YouTube,
I like to be finished by 6:00 p.m.
That way I can go home and do some editing
and pat myself on the back for having done drag today.
Hi Vanity Fair, It's me Miss cracker.
And this is everything I do in a day.
[upbeat music]
I wake up and get out of bed
at seven-- at 10:00 a.m.
I use my phone to wake me up
and I put it on the most obnoxious setting
because anything soothing, I will ignore.
I only set one alarm because I am determined
and I will get up after the fourth snooze.
I check my phone, don't tell anyone,
before I even roll over.
The first thing I look at on my phone
is pictures of me.
It's to give myself confidence.
I'm drinking coffee all the time,
like as we're speaking.
I'm from Seattle, so the most important Part
of my diet is coffee.
I have my first cup of coffee
as soon as I can possibly get to a pot
we're talking about within an hour
of when I wake up no matter what,
no matter where I am in the world.
I take my coffee however it comes to me
if someone brings me a coffee
and they're like I hope it's the kind you like,
I'm like it's the kind I like the kind of coffee in it
I don't care, can be cold, can be hot,
could be ice, could have cream,
could be black, don't care.
I am a morning shower person
because I want to get my day started right away
and you can't do drugs.
Smelling like I smell in the morning basically.
[laughing]
My typical shower is 10 minutes.
You know why?
The environment, I use a hydrating soap
to moisten my skin and prepare it for shaving.
Sorry to break the illusion.
I use the cheapest shampoo I can possibly find
because that's the way I am
and I use a dove body soap to make sure
that my skin is smooth and supple,
soft and supple
[laughing].
I'm a religious toothbrusher.
So I use a old fashioned toothbrush
and I brush for three minutes that I carefully time
on my phone to the second, 15 seconds
for each surface of my teeth.
I'm really serious about this.
And every time the dentist gives me a compliment,
I'm like, yeah.
And I did it without an electric toothbrush.
I floss religiously, like one of those people
that gets a four foot long strand
and does like a whole, like I'm toweling off
between my legs like this much
[laughing].
Like this much floss.
My glam routine if I am a boy
for the day is putting on hands.
My glam routine if I'm becoming a woman involves taking
my shower, doing my morning rituals,
sitting down in front of a lighted mirror,
moisturizing and priming my skin,
going through an hour and a half of makeup,
putting on a huge wig that I made
and stepping out into the world.
The most important part of any glamor routine
is leaving the house
and I try to make sure
to do that every time I glam up.
Breakfast is as long as I can possibly delay it,
it's called dieting.
And then it's like all the carbs I could possibly find.
[laughing]
My favorite to go breakfast is eggs,
and sausage on a croissant.
And you can tear it up with nails on into smaller pieces.
And that's the most important part
because you can get it past your lipstick
without messing anything up.
By the time I'm having breakfast,
I'm usually dressed because if I like gave my to self time
to have breakfast,
I would lose steam and never get in makeup.
I would just spend the rest of the day matching.
I based my outfits on where I'm going
and what town I'm going to be in.
So if I know that the author of Frankenstein
was born in the town that I'm going to
or die in the town
that I'm going to I'm gonna dress like Frankenstein.
That's what the day calls for.
A day to evening look.
[laughing]
If I am going to be on stage,
I dress very differently than if I'm going
to be on camera,
if I wanna be on stage,
I know that I can paint bold,
and I can take risks and try new things
because it's going to be far away,
like blasted out by the stage light anyway.
But if I want to be on camera,
I do the face that I know is going to work
and that is not going to fail me.
And I spend that extra time making sure all my eyes
are crossed, and my T's are dotted.
I'd say that it's noon by the time I catch an Uber
to go to do some work.
For me work means wandering around whatever town
I'm in and meeting people that love drag
and taking photos in front of landmarks,
and the rest of the evening is of course hopefully a show
if I'm not lucky, but the real work for me
is in meeting people.
I don't take a lot of phone calls during the day
but I do take a lot of text messages
from people saying, is this ready yet?
Are you gonna have this submitted?
What time is it where you are?
And those are the things that take up the bulk
of my life and they have gotten me so addicted to my phone,
I should be ashamed, my old self that refused
to have anything but a sidekick
would be so ashamed of me right now.
I tried to stay off social media,
so I don't have the Twitter app or Instagram.
I spend all my time on safari,
looking at Twitter and Instagram.
[laughing]
Like To be honest,
I tried to keep myself out of social media,
but where there's a will there's a way
and I found my way back in.
By the time I have to do a show at the end of the day,
I have already fully been in drag.
[chuckles]
For like, five or six hours.
So all it takes for me is just putting
on some dancing heels and putting on a leotard
and saying okay, we have made our transition
from gay to evening.
Before I do a show, I always do like 30 minutes
of rehearsal to make sure I know my numbers.
But if I'm gonna put together a brand new show,
we're talking like a week of rehearsal time,
with two to three hours every day
where I'm working through everything I wanna say,
and making sure that my numbers are tight.
From then on, it's only
like little touch-ups every day just to say,
okay, what have we discovered?
And what can I do that's new?
Usually for me, a show starts at like 6:00 p.m
with a meet and greet.
And then I say hello to everyone
that I know and love, because I see a lot
of faces returning, and then I go
and I do a little Switcheroo with my outfit,
and the show itself starts at like eight o'clock.
To get ready for a show,
I always try to hype myself up.
So I put on my headphones and I listen to my tracks
and I breathe deeply,
and I'm just walking around like a monster
because the most important thing for
me to do is sort of embarrass myself
in front of the stage hands.
Because if I can do that,
then I can get in the mood for a show.
But if I stay shy
and little backstage,
that's how I'm gonna perform on stage two.
So I try to bring that stage five up
while I'm while I'm getting ready for the show.
Oh, I always have outfit changes during the show
because think kids expect production these days.
We're talking reveals, we're talking backstage switcheroos.
If I don't catch my nail on something,
and almost yank it off by the end of the show,
I know I'm not doing enough with my outfits.
On a typical work day where I'm not gonna do a show,
but instead shoot something for YouTube.
I come to my studio in the Bronx,
and it's this big open space that has everything
I love all of my fan art
and all of the clothes that I've worn over the years.
It takes about eight hours to shoot a 10 minute episode,
you have to prepare the outfit,
then you have two to three hours
of getting dressed that's four right there.
It takes an hour to shoot
the thing, takes an hour to take it down,
then it takes three hours
to get everything transferred and edited.
So yeah for those 10 minutes, you have a lot of work.
And if you have a really complicated show,
it can take like 20 hours,
I finished work at like 10 o'clock after a show is done.
Let me tell you about when I get out of drag
as soon as the curtains like, boom,
I'm like slam and we are out of drag.
[laughing]
Unless there is an opportunity to be seen one more time.
Like if I think that people might see me walking
from the gig to my home,
I will definitely stay in drag
because these heels were made for walking
and they deserve to be seen.
After I leave the studio,
after I leave the stage, the first thing I do
is feed myself because it's the biggest means
of self care and it's also the best way
to celebrate with people.
So whoever has been helping me all day long,
we're gonna sit down together
and break bread and enjoy that feeling
of having done something beautiful
for the world today hopefully.
And I always tell people if it is cheese on carbs
then it is a go, it can be lasagna.
It could be Fettuccine Alfredo, it can be pizza,
as long as is a cheese on carbs.
That's all I require, no matter what I'm doing,
it takes me like 10 minutes to get home.
Because if I'm at home in New York,
my studio is 10 minutes from my apartment
so it's like nothing.
And if I'm on the road, it is definitely 10 minutes
or less between the theater and the tour bus,
so that is a blessing.
As soon as I am out of my drag, I am into my PJs.
I have a lot of silly socks.
I have kangaroos in space
and two cans and grapefruit
and all that kind of stuff on my socks.
You know, when I'm in the socks
that the day is done,
I like to unwind with a nice binge-worthy show .
I tried to only watch a binge show
until I pass out.
And then no more because I don't want to wrap
my brain.
Once I get into bed-- I used to be blessed with insomnia.
Now, I feel like I do so much during the day.
[laughing]
That I just I'm unconscious pretty much
as soon as I hit the pillow.
If I don't wake up in a cold sweat with night terrors,
then it is not a night.
I have a really vivid dreams
about exactly what happened during the day.
And I feel that it's really unfair
for people who dream they can fly
or have superpowers because I'm dreaming
about my foundations not blending.
I wish my mind had a more expansive imagination.
Instead, I'm dreaming about looking
at comments on YouTube,
which is what I did when I was falling asleep.
[chuckles]
I get as many hours of sleep as I possibly can,
but I think the sweet spot is seven.
I have a very disrupted sleep and it is
because of my anxiety,
but maybe that's for another episode
for the show.
[laughing]
So that is everything that I do during a day.
Vanity Fair, thank you so much for watching
and I hope it gave you a laugh
or two because it gave me one or two, five.
[laughing]