Friday, June 22, 2018

Death, Contests, Drag Queens

Remember that time Tzivia saw Charlotte's Web and asked me if the kid who played Charlotte died at the end too?

Well, we went to Pride last weekend, and Tzivia was really taken with the drag queen who was MCing the Pride performances. So we watched a bunch of YouTube videos featuring drag queens, starting with Kids Meet a Drag Queen:


She was really enjoying herself, as she's very into performing right now, and it was cool for her to see a kind of performance art she'd never seen before.

We were watching a faceoff between two drag queens, a clip from RuPaul's Drag Race,  and I was trying to explain to her about contest TV shows, about contests in general. We really haven't stressed the ideas of "winning" or "losing." (When we play Candyland, whoever makes it to the Candy Castle first is like, "C'mon, everybody, come party with me at the Candy Castle!") Her main contexts for contests are the watermelon-eating contest from last year's 4th of July, and the little green peas on bikes in a "race" in the book LMNO Peas.

Anyway, I thought I'd explained contests well, but her response was,

"So if the judges don't like the performance as much, then that's the person who dies?"

I love my kid.

1 comment:

Vegans in Love said...

Oh dear, I just rewatched the RuPaul's Drag Race clip, to see if maybe they called it a "sudden death round" or something, and RuPaul very clearly says, "LIP SYNC FOR YOUR LIFE!" right before they start performing. I'm usually very aware of the idioms people say and how kids might take them literally, but I missed this one!