Here’s a look back at the past month or so. I’ve seen a lot of drag shows, some people would say too many, most people have said too many, I’ve said too many, and we would all be correct. I’ve stumbled into this community that includes a whole lot of different artists in all senses of the word, and those social circles I talked about last time are slowly beginning to include me in some sense or another. A performer will come over to me after a show with a hug and kisses on both cheeks and tell me she’s happy we made it, I’ll get pointed out across a room by a friend of someone I’m going to do a shoot with and feel like a celebrity. We’ve began to get recognised for going to way too many events and then try our hardest to remember people, but it’s a little difficult when you meet them in different places in or out of drag and they’re actually pretty much a completely different person half the time. It usually takes them a moment, a ‘Wait! I don’t always look like this!’, a show of a photo and we can place each other again. Somehow I’ve become the one doing the introducing of new friends to less new friends that I’ll wave at across a bar in a kind of makeshift form of camaraderie that we can’t really place the source of, this is a kind of community and atmosphere I’ve dreamed of and I can’t even fathom that it could actually be happening.

In other news we’ve moved yet another person into our house, so now we’re technically a 2 bed apartment but really we only have bedrooms, a kitchen and a bathroom now, with 2 people making bedrooms out of the living room, 2 in the second bedroom and 1 in the master. I’m sure we’ll all get by somehow, and the $150 reduction in my rent with him moving in doesn’t hurt at all… We just have to figure out what to do with the giant white leather sofa that our neighbour gifted us. We’ve definitely run out of space, we cannot handle any more strays, sorry San Francisco. You see the newest member of our household ended up going to jail in some sort of made up ruling and was then homeless with a restraining order and nothing but the clothes he was wearing, an iPhone and the tiniest charger in existence, so we didn’t really have a choice with him…

We had a week off for Thanksgiving, a week I spent in the best form possible. By that I mean I managed to lose my phone and my debit card within three days of each other. Great. I spent the day before Thanksgiving emailing every yellow, green and red taxi company in San Francisco, because although I don’t know the specific company of the car we took that night, my hazy memory tells me it was one or all of those colours. I don’t regret the night I lost my phone though, which I guess is the only silver lining of the occasion, if it had been a terrible night I would have been in a much worse state than I was the next few days after that debacle. The picture below is from that very evening/morning, so it can’t be all bad.

That night we went to our usual Monday night show (Midnight Sun, Mahogany Mondays. Do it.) which was one of the best show nights I’ve seen there, a plethora of performers with class acts and a whole lot of diversity between them, forward rolls of the stage, breaking cucumbers in half and everything. I talked to a whole lot of people that night, being left alone in a bar for more than 5 seconds was something I could not have even considered in the slightest a few months ago, now it’s not something I mind too much, well, in certain spaces, but being left alone in a bar and actually talking to people and not pretending to text the whole times, that’s on a whole other level of things I wouldn’t have been able to imagine a few months ago. While outside my friend met a man who offered to show him some other bars and buy some drinks, he came and asked my opinion, we stayed a little longer, said hello and goodbye to everyone and then met this guy, an older artist who had lived in San Francisco forever. He was dressed in all black, a label for everything, money to flaunt and a story for any place, object, person and subject you brought up. A nephew of some sort to Dolly Parton, a story of a whole lot of drugs and Grace Jones, apparently 365th in line for the throne and as he flipped through the Jukebox he told us exactly which songs were written about and for him. He was an enjoyable/amusing drinking companion, and he paid, so no complaints there.
We met with one of his friends and then went back to his rooftop. The setting of a posh penthouse in Van Ness with views like this:

We sat round the fire pit shaped like a flower, the building had doormen to buzz you in and out ,and the elevator can only be used if you have a key card or a code, I’m not exactly sure, but it was fancy. I’ve never seen a lift with a touch screen keypad for floor choice before either, a purple backlit one at that. My phone got lost somewhere within all the awe of this situation… I searched for it on the roof that night, at the bars the next day and tried every possible online tracking device feeling like a detective, a really unsuccessful detective, but a detective nonetheless. It hasn’t appeared as of yet, but I’m still somewhat optimistic that I’ll get to swap out my super cheap doesn’t-really-work-at-all version of the same phone back for the beauty I lost at some point in the future…

In academic news I’m writing what feels like 1000 essays and realising that the class I somehow managed to buy absolutely no books for has a final exam. It’s only worth 10% but I’m pretty sure the whole middle part of the module will have something to do with it so I should probably sort that out. I’m organising photo shoots that I’m overexcited and nervous about, I’m going to brunch and drinking bottomless mimosa’s and realising who the greatest people in my life actually are and all the while looking forward to Christmas and heading home for a few weeks, I’m pretty happy right now.

English winter weather will be more than a shock though.

– Georgia Tomlinson-Spence
(@georgiarts)