My last newsletter prompted more than a handful of you to reach out in genuine concern for my wellbeing and I realized that I maybe laid it on a little bit too thick. Yes I am filled with a constant feeling of existential worthlessness and a paralyzing fear of frailty and death, but isn’t that just how everyone feels all the time??
So this time I thought I’d lighten things up a bit this time lol
BUT FIRST. Promo: If somehow any of you have escaped my onslaught of posts about this, I am doing one final “stop” on my Saved by the Bellini book tour. It’s next Wednesday October 11th in Brooklyn and it is a FREE drag show by the legendary and iconic and gorgeous drag collective, Switch n’ Play. The event is generously sponsored by Chambord and if you haven’t seen a Switch n’ Play show, they are literally life-altering experiences and you owe it to yourself to make it to this show, since it’s free, and we’ll be serving drinks from Saved by the Bellini and I will have signed copies and it will just be generally awesome and life-affirming.
And now I want to talk about music.
Anyone upon whom I have inflicted my tastes in music knows that one of my favorite forms of music is vaguely (extremely) fagotty disco synth pop made by women. Tove Lo, Madonna, Robyn, Björk, Slayyyter, Kylie, Carly RaeJepsen, Goldfrapp, Ava Max, Jessie Ware, Mel 4Ever…inject it into my veins.
But there is one such artist who does not get nearly as much play as she so obviously (to me) deserves: bisexual megababe Bonnie McKee.
I first heard her track “American Girl” during a Monét X Change show at the Laurie Beechman theater a few years ago and was like WHAT IS THIS SHIMMERING SORCERY?? If you’ve ever seen a show at this place, there is literally zero cell phone service so I actually had to write down what lyrics I could understand in my notes app and then google the lyrics later in order to find out who this was.
Bonnie McKee’s most visible work was what she did for Katy Perry. She wrote some of Katy’s biggest hits: California Girls, Teenage Dream, Roar, and a few others. She’s also done work for other artists like Kesha and Britney. The coolest thing about this is that she actually ended up working for Katy Perry after meeting her while waiting to sell her clothes at a vintage place in LA. They were both starving artists, and mutual fans, and yada yada yada, joint slayage. I just love how that story illustrates how much of what we define as “success” is reliant on happenstance and being in the right place at the right time (and having the capacity to take advantage of those chance encounters).
Her latest single is Hot City and the video is pretty great. It’s actually a song she wrote about ten years ago but it was stuck in legal limbo so she re-recorded them so she could own the masters.
Turns out she’s also been sober for the past ELEVEN YEARS and she once vandalized a music exec’s car in an attempt to get out of her record contract. These are all fun facts contained in this great interview with her that popped up randomly on my Youtube and I actually watched the whole thing beginning to end. She mostly self-funds her work, which is really impressive, plus she’s amazing at Tiktok.
So there it is. See you Wednesday.