Hi there. I'm BenDeLaCreme.
Today, PopBuzz has asked me to paint a self-portrait.
It's been a minute since I've done this.
You know, I actually went to school for painting,
but I haven't done it in so long.
And it turns out that when you don't practise something, you get bad at it.
Who would have imagined? So we'll see. We'll see how this goes.
This is a photo that I took when I was losing my mind in quarantine.
So this smile of desperation truly symbolises
sort of me at my epitome of despair.
Now, the first drag performance that I remember seeing was probably
in the Wigstock documentary and Lady Bunny headed that whole thing up.
So that really set me off.
But the first performance I saw in person that truly propelled me into
my ill advised lifestyle was Varla Jean Merman,
who is an absolutely amazing comedienne and songstress.
I saw her perform in the basement of a nightclub when I was living
in Boston, Massachusetts, and it changed my world forever.
I was already doing drag, but she is so funny and so smart
and I suddenly was like, Oh, this is what drag can be.
Oh, I'm going to do all of us. And now we're friends.
And she was the voice of my dead grandmother who talked to me
through a cup of eggnog in The Jinkx and Dela Holiday special.
So it all comes full circle.
If I'm thinking back to my first show, you know, some people might ask,
what was your first show as BenDeLaCreme?
But actually I didn't take on the moniker BenDeLaCreme until I moved to Seattle,
which was around 2007.
But I used to perform in Chicago under the name Teena Angst,
and it was a punk rock Riot Girl, and I was furious about everything.
And my first performance in a nightclub was to the Le Tigre song Decepticon,
and I was competing in a competition
that back in the early 2000s was called Drag Race, wouldn't you know it?
Long before, you know, RuPaul came out of her blue
jeans and cowboy hats and flat wigs phase at that time that she was going through.
And I won my very first drag competition.
And that gave me all the delusions of grandeur that I live with today.
Sharing a tour bus with a bunch of drag queens
is really an experience that has to be experienced.
I guess an experience you have to experience as most experiences are,
I suppose. The last tour I was on, I have to say Lady Bunny was on that tour.
It was a roast tour.
So that was surreal to be sharing the bus with her, especially because long after
everyone has either gone to bed or left the bus or whatever,
Lady Bunny is just sitting around in the front benches talking politics.
She is one of the most intensely political queens I have ever met in my life.
Those that are older than us
are sometimes wiser, sometimes crazier, sometimes both.
Lady Bunny is the third of those options.
I am really getting hung up on-
I'm so into talking that all i've been doing is squishing around
flesh tones for a solid, what has it been? 3 hours?
If there were a planet run by drag queens.
First of all, I would be out of here. Elon Musk. Move over.
I think it would be certainly a lot less divisive than this one.
I mean, catty-er maybe, you know, I think it would be like a utopian planet.
There would be amazing architecture it would all be fully impractical,
like lots of winding spiral staircases that nobody wants to walk up in heels,
but they'd be gorgeous.
The drag world is such
a beautifully diverse
community of people that I really can't speak to what it would look like. Right.
I mean, I guess if it was different,
like schools of drag, there would be like a section of society
that's all sort of like punk rock and everybody, like sticking their tongue
out of their mouth and walking around like The Exorcist
on their hands and knees, like Yvie Oddly likes to do.
And then elsewhere that would be a sort of Alaska kingdom
in which everybody talks very slowly.
And yeah, and, you know, Jinx and I would run Campopolis,
where everybody would be required to speak in character, voice at all time
and make sly social commentary through stupid parents talking jinx.
Hi there Dela, it's me your favourite
writing partner and collaborator
Jinkx Monsoon, I want to know
what's your favourite memory from our friendship? Pre-Drag Race.
Before either of us were internationally tolerated.
What's your favourite memory from the good old Seattle days?
And we were just a couple of pacific Northwest Queens.
Hoofin the boards, just trying to make it big.
And I love you.
Well, leave it to Jinkx Monsoon
to ask that question in the longest possible way.
Oh, my gosh. First of all, I guess it's tit for tat, because when she was on this,
I called in and basically demanded that she say that I was her favourite person.
Jinkx and I have known each other for well over a decade,
which is a really wild experience.
She's a drag performer who, when I first met her, was so similar to me
in that you could just it's in her bones, you know. And I've known
that drag is my destiny since long before I even knew what Drag was.
And Jinkx's passion matches my own.
And so when I met her, it was instantly a kindred spirit sort of thing.
Also an insanely competitive sort of thing because we were so similar.
The first time I ever saw Jinkx Monsoon perform,
this is one of my favourite stories.
I had seen a bunch of stuff about her on social media
and I wanted to go check her out
because people had been talking about her and she seemed cool.
I hadn't met her yet and I went to see her at 4 o'clock
in the afternoon for free in a Starbucks.
She was performing in front of about 12 folding chairs.
She came out of the bathroom. You have to enter in the code to
And she and her musical partner, Major Scales, proceeded to sit down
and perform one of the greatest drag shows I've ever seen,
which was the Vaudevillians,
which later went on to have multiple runs in New York and London, etc..
And I turn to my friends
that I went with and I said, I need to cast her in my next show
and we need to become friends or we will be bitter rivals.
And we lived happily ever after.
Did Jinkx Monsoon tell me she was going to be in All Stars?
I think I was the first person she called
when Jinkx was first asked to do All-Stars.
She reached out to me and she actually asked me
whether I thought she should do it.
And I was like, Jinkx, of course,
you have been waiting to get back into the limelight for years.
All you talk about is how you wish you were still on television.
So of course I support that.
But weirdly, she secretly thought I was going to say no for some reason.
But no, I was so delighted for her and I did help her prepare quite a bit.
I got you know, we talked through all of her runway looks, their costumes.
We talked about her choices for Snatch Game.
And I was so honoured and I still am that she trusts me in that way.
I mean, she helped me come up with doing Maggie Smith for my season as well.
You know, there's always been that sisterly support and I'm so, so
proud of how she's doing on that show.
It makes me so happy
because I work with her all the time and I'm used to what a genius she is.
But right now the world is learning about it in a whole new way.
A whole new generation of drag race viewers are learning
how incredible she is.
And just seeing what I get to see on the daily.
Jinkx has mentioned
the idea of a best friends drag race and to be on a team on drag
race with Jinx Monsoon would be really fun.
Some people have said like, Oh,
I wish you'd gone through and win one on All-Stars three
because then we could watch Jinx and you compete.
That's the worst idea in the world.
But Jinx and I are on a team together. That would be really, really fun.
You know, after years
and years of Jinx and I sort of being slightly
less in each other's immediate lives, after we both were on Drag Race,
we decided to join forces
on a little holiday tour.
You know, we'd done all of these viewing parties
for both my original season and her original season where we had
just, you know, sat on stage together and gotten drunk, far too many martinis
and just sort of watched the show and babbled and people loved it.
And so initially we thought, Oh, that would be fun and easy
if we just took a show on the road. That's the two of us.
So we decided to do it.
We booked a tour and then we realised that we actually wanted to write
an entire scripted show. And so that's what we did.
Jinkx and I have always been close, but this has only made us closer
and it's been so wonderful to get to work with the sister.
And also, you know, all the dancers we work with on the road and in the film
are people that I have been friends with and who have been part of my chosen family
for many, many years to get to bring all the drag
race fame kind of back to the basics of why I got into it,
which is about community and love and spreading joy.
And I'm so incredibly grateful for it and I'm so incredibly grateful for all
the people who it's resonated with, and I just can't wait to keep doing it.
What makes me irrationally angry?
Well, if you leave out the word irrationally.
I recently had an experience.
By recently I mean like an hour ago. So I'm still shaking.
I was on Facebook because you see, the other night
I was performing my hit solo show BenDeLaCreme is Ready to Be Committed.
My show was at 9:30.
Guess who was on before me? Ricky Gervais.
And, you know, I really tried to I did a lot of soul searching about
whether I had anything I might want to say about that
or whether I was going to let the whole thing slide. And you know what?
Letting it slide didn't turn out to be an option.
All I posted was a beautiful piece of fan art
of something that I'd said about how if you have to make people feel bad
in order to be funny, then you're not really that funny.
Now, I decided completely coincidentally, to post
that while Ricky Gervais was on stage right before me.
And wouldn't you know it?
Ricky Gervais stands, came out of the woodwork,
and I spent almost the entire day to day arguing with them
about whether basic human decency was a good idea or not.
It turns out that's not an easy thing to convince a lot of people of.
So eventually I just took to yelling at them and calling them stupid,
because sometimes you just kind of do it for yourself, you know? Treat yourself.
Let's see my bucket list in life.
You know, you hear the idea about bucket list very often.
And I'd say that in my life I have been so fortunate
to have a lot of experience as I never could have expected as a young person.
And so I think what that's taught me is just to be open to all sorts of things.
So my bucket list, I think, in some ways has yet to be discovered
because who knows what the possibilities are if you just keep putting yourself
out there and risking failure and trying new things.
I think all sorts of doors can open.
But if I'm to think about my wildest dreams right now,
I would direct a major Hollywood feature.
Travel the world in a way that allowed me to see more
than the inside of a hotel room or an airport or a theatre.
And, I don't know. Own a dinosaur.
Be a princess in a castle. X-ray vision.
Do I keep up with all the various drag race spin offs?
How do I put this delicately?
No. However, I have watched several and I would say that,
you know, during quarantine I really enjoyed season 13?
Is that the one that was playing
when it was like Kandy Muse and GottMik and all them? Okay, cool.
So I watched that one because, you know, we were out of things to watch.
But it did reignite my love of Drag Race
because I just found Gottmik's journey on there to be so exciting,
you know, going from being sort of a look queen to being an absolute
performance powerhouse and Symone is the love of my life.
I've written her multiple love letters in her DMS.
She's responded once.
I think it was one word. No punctuation.
I'm trying to do the whites of my eyes and every single brush- this black brush
going to be a good idea?
I'm looking, every single brush is like a different colour of the rainbow.
So the question is, do I use the pink one and look super stoned?
That's Jinkx's Brand. I can't get in on that or I don't know.
Let's see. Let's see.
How are we going to do this?
It's been four years since I've been on Drag Race.
And, you know, there was an iconic moment that I hear happened toward the end.
But don't spoil it for me because I haven't finished. Since then,
A lot of people have asked me about whether I stand by that decision
to decide that I had gotten what I needed out of the show and to move on.
And I got to tell you, it was one of the most empowering things of my life.
Since then, I have gone from doing what I thought
other people wanted me to do, to starting my own production company
and getting back to writing and directing my shows on a larger level.
And it has served me so well.
It turns out that when you trust that listening to yourself
is wiser than listening to the people around you, things go in your favour.
So I would say out of all of those things that I have accomplished,
my favourite thing is probably starting my own production company.
You know, when you're an artist, a lot of times it's
hard to get people to see the value in what you do to the extent that you see it.
And sometimes the only way to get it out there is to create your own opportunities.
All right. Okay.
All right. Okay. We're so close.
Speed round. Speed round! Okay, we got it. All right.
What colour are my eyes. Approximately that colour. Sure. Whatever.
Okay. This is okay.
Okay. Got black in there. That's not the colour of my eyes.
This is the speed round. We're making it happen.
This is just like.
This is like a drag race challenge. Oh, my God. And I got more black on the brush.
I spent so long painting skin.
And now I realised all the skin's in the wrong place.
God, why did I start out by telling you all that
I went to art school?
I should have said I went to school for accounting.
So close! Everybody just.
Hang on. We're getting there. All right. Why do I keep picking up black?
I don't want black. No, no, no. Happy little trees. Happy little trees. Okay.
Green or. Hey, the dress has some green in it,
Oh no!
That was always the intention.
We're doing green. Okay, close enough.
All right, so I ran out of time on the body and the background.
But the beauty of technology is that if you just go in
with green, you just have a floating head in the middle of your background.
What do you think of that?
It's not only is it a beautiful piece of artwork, it's
also Internet savvy.
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