My Week #8

This week I've mainly been working and continuing on with my Doctor Who rewatch however I have had some ideas about future things I'd like to do on here including putting up some more captions to celebrate my 10 years on Rachel's Haven and some tributes to some of the more stylish characters on the small screen. I've also had an idea for a short story I might write to put up here while I'm away on holiday in a few week's time. It involves a trip to the beach and my Silent Swapper entity.

Since I've been going into the office all week for the first time in months I haven't had much time to dress for work however I have now started playing around with the gender swap function on FaceApp and I'm loving the results so I'm now resisting the urge to transform all my photos. Using it on photos of me dressed though it's very much "oh so that's what that's supposed to look like". At least it's a new way of trying out certain outfit combinations and I would certainly give it a look if you're interested in what your female self would look like.

Check-Up #10

Things are still getting back to normal around here so there's not been a lot going on recently. I do want to get back to more captioning too but I'm still having some laptop issues so I'm a bit hamstrung at the moment with the amount of time I can spend on it. There's also some cosplay stuff I need to sort out plus another blog I want to start but I'm having trouble coming up with a name which is really frustrating when you want to get going on something. As you can tell by the name of this blog, I'm not the best at doing so. 

I'm also doing the Doctor Who pilgrimage which means watching every single episode from the very first back in 1963. In addition, along with season 5 of Drag Race All Stars I'm also watching yet another iteration - Canada's Drag Race which is quite good so far.

I also bought a dress recently from a local charity shop as well. It has a black, ribbed top leading into a patterned skirt. I would have preferred perhaps a houndstooth skirt but it still works well. Trouble is at the moment it feels like even more eyes are on you when you go into a shop and look around plus you have to trust your size even more than usual as there are no changing rooms. 

Just to update on my Ask Me Anything offer I put up a few weeks back on here and Rachel's Haven and unfortunately I haven't had any takers so there won't be a follow up post.

Finally, I've been going back to a story I've mentioned before on here in my Pink Library strand - With The Blink of an Eye by Brittany Montgomery which has six parts to it and is the charming story of a man who suddenly becomes a teenage girl after encountering a car of them on his way to work. It's well written and very enjoyable.

The author's page on Fictionmania is here: Brittany Montgomery

Wig

Despite the title this isn't a blog about how I've bought a new wig but this is about a documentary I saw earlier this week that I very much enjoyed.

Wig is a documentary made in 2019 and directed by Chris Moukarbel regarding the Wigstock festival regularly held in New York by drag queens. It was a fascinating watch and a delve into the flip side of the culture which has now become somewhat mainstream thanks to Ru Paul's Drag Race. The festival started out in 1986 as a one off performance by some of the regulars at New York's Pyramid club and was so popular it returned every year until 2001 when, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, it was decided to stop as the mood of the city had changed. That is until 2018 when drag legend The Lady Bunny, one of the driving forces behind the original shows, decided to bring it back. The documentary follows her as she does and looks at the history of the festival and the comeback show itself. 

As any Drag Race viewer knows, queens come from a variety of backgrounds from the primped and perfect pageant queens to the more edgy club kids and this is more a celebration of the latter with some very edgy performances reminding us how pioneering drag performers are. It's not just about putting on a dress and a pair of false breasts but pushing the envelope in not just performance terms but in gender barriers as well. 

While Ru Paul only appears in archive footage, Drag Race does loom large over the documentary (some familiar faces from the show also appear) as it has catapulted drag to the mainstream like never before and some argue that it's not necessarily for the better. In some ways Ru Paul and Lady Bunny represent both ends of the spectrum of drag with Ru taking it mainstream and Bunny preferring the more edgy, envelope pushing, performers. It's a nice exploration of the different generations of drag artists too.

If you have an interest in drag then this is definitely worth a look. Here in the UK I saw it on Now TV as it was originally shown on Sky Documentaries. I'm not sure about other streaming services but I think it's also available via HBO. I'm also intending to check out Wigstock: The Movie, an earlier documentary on the festival made in 1995. It's also inspired me to check out some of the drag based films I've never seen such as Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Kinky Boots, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar (which surely has one of the most bizarre titles in the history of cinema). 

I sometimes wonder if, in another life, I could have been a drag performer and films like this are certainly inspiring. I know I certainly wouldn't have the courage to do a lot of what these girls have.

Ask Me Anything!

Ok so next month I will have been on Rachel's Haven for 10 whole years and I've been blogging here for around eight years.

It's been a wonderful experience and one that has helped me grow a lot as a person and create some wonderful stories. With that in mind I thought I would do a Q&A to see if anyone would like to ask me anything about my 10 years in captioning or anything else. I've documented on here my experiences cosplaying and how I started and become more confident with crossdressing and getting to know my own style again.

Please let me know either by putting questions in the comments section below or by completing the form to the left and I'll do my best to answer. Now, I  know the form asks for an email address and it's marked as a required field and of course I realise that given the topics covered some may not want to give this away. I fully respect that and, truth be told, I have no idea how to get rid of that section or not make it a required field so please by all means put in a false address. I have absolutely  no intention to privately email people (unless asked) or to pass any data on. Alternatively, if anyone knows how i can disable this then please let me know.

I'll put this up for a couple of weeks and we'll see if anything comes of it. I do feel a little self conscious offering this but I thought I would give it a shot for better or worse. 

Breaking Free: Part Two

Here is the second part of my Breaking Free story which I wrote as part of the writing challenge on Rachel's Haven. The theme was 'Sun Down'

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I don’t think I’ve ever properly seen the sunset. I mean, I guess I could have caught it if I had wanted to but it’s not an easy thing to catch. I imagine if you intend to catch sundown then you’re either too early or too late. Once I finish college for the day most times I just slump in front of the TV so I miss the sunset and by the time the thought enters my mind, it’s pitch black outside.

It’s not like that with Lucy. She’s one of those people who likes to run barefoot through fields of grass no matter the weather and insists on dragging me out into nature to see things. Tonight though I’ve brought her down to my level, well almost, we did intend watching something on Netflix but we never got out of the pub. It’s the most beautiful, and hot, summer's night and I’m sitting on a vaguely damp bench outside The Kings Head watching the sun slowly sink into the distance. I finally caught it. A cool breeze wafts through the beer garden and whips up my dress a little. I shift my body, padding my dress down lest anyone should see, and feeling the heels of my shoes dig into the ground a little reminding me that I’ll have to walk home in them. It was my own fault for wanting to try heels and I’m determined to master it – until I fall and break my ankle at least. I raise a hand to wipe my hair from my eyes and tuck it behind my ears as my bracelets jangle on my arms and my bright red nails shine in the dimming light. It’s hard not to feel self conscious as I sit here alone with only two other patrons for company although they’re more interested in each other than they are in me. At least I hope. After dressing like this on and off for a few months you wait for the inevitable moment when they turn to you and start asking questions.

And then my fear goes just that because she’s back. Lucy comes through the back door unsteadily carrying a tray of drinks for us both. She smiles at me and I smirk back and once again it feels like we are the only two people in that garden. Lucy’s wearing the same black dress as I am but carrying it off a lot better. She’s wearing it as it’s meant to be worn, as it’s meant to look on a woman and not a misshapen lump like me. If I said that out loud she would scold me for it. This was her idea though, in fact we bought the dresses together in Next. Ever since that night Lucy has encouraged me to dress more and far from switching clothes she finds it quite amusing for us to wear the same outfits. It’s certainly perked the interest of some of the photography students we know.

Lucy put the tray down, spilling some of my beer onto it in the process. I laughed slightly but I knew that my turn would be next and that these heels would not make it easy but at least we’re wearing the same thing so it’s a level playing field which is more than can be said for the garden which has more varied surfaces than Crystal Maze zones. The crazy paving alone looks like it will be my downfall. Lucy asks me why I was looking into the sky. “The truth is out there” I tell her and receive a playful slap on my arm. Then I told her that I think I had just seen my first sunset. “Rubbish!” she replied. “What about our weekend at Beckfest or the prom last month or when we all had to walk back three hours from Stanford?” “Yes, ok, Miss Memory” I replied “maybe I could be wrong and it wasn’t the first. It’s certainly the best though,” I smiled back, contented, and no longer confined.