Addendum! A Saturday in Salem

I have been remiss!  My last post got so sidetracked talking about how much I hate Dawn Summers and staying up past 10:00 pm that I forgot to actually finish writing about my birthday weekend.  Here is a summary of a fantastic birthday-adjacent activity that took place last Saturday. 

A few weeks previous, my friend Jon Sue-Ho sent me an email inviting me to Salem, MA, to see...

wait for it...

Drag Queen Golden Girls!!!

Of course I accepted the invitation immediately.  The only engagement more pressing would have been a tea with the actual Golden Girls, which would have involved bringing three women back from the dead, so obviously that would be a higher priority than seeing some men in lady clothes.  But here is the tale:

We took the Commuter Rail to Salem, which was pretty fun because I like riding on trains.  We got there and decided to keep our expectations very low.  After all, we were going to see a drag show in the basement of a bar in Northern Massachusetts, so we couldn't expect much.  We waited in line behind some female musical theatre enthusiasts (the kind whose dream role is Mama Rose) who had clearly been pregaming the show, so that was fun and also really loud.  We sat down and waited for all of the people who had paid more for tickets than we did to get their drinks, and the show started.

IT WAS AMAZING.

I'm not going to describe the whole plot but it was basically the Golden Girls "Lost Halloween Episode" which was a main plot with a "clip show" of Golden Girls episodes that actually happened.  So good.  Also, I got to take a picture with the Golden Girls afterwards!

It's not every day that I take a picture with four men
and am not the prettiest one in it.
But, check out the Bea Arthur.  Spot.  On.

One cool thing was that the one who played Sophia was an award-winning Judy Garland impersonator, and after the show he came out as Judy and sang a song.  Also Dorothy and Sophia are a couple in real life, which is darling.

After the show we went to get food, because the food proviso in our tickets was a $20 per person minimum, which would have been fine if we were drinking alcohol, but that's a little excessive for bar food, so we went to a hot dog place across the street and it was DELICIOUS.  Also way cheaper than $20 per person.

Then we had some time to kill before our train, so we wandered around Salem.  Salem, MA, on a Saturday night in October strangely reminds me of Waikiki...only colder and much more haunted-feeling.  Nonetheless, there were tons of tourists and tons of stuff catering to the tourists.  It was pretty cool though, seeing people in Halloween costumes two weeks before Halloween.  All of the museums were closed, but I got to poke my head into a few magic shops and I think I would like to explore them more on a future occasion.  There was a red line on the sidewalk that we followed around the main part of town through all of the landmarks (akin to Boston's Freedom Trail--maybe it was called the "Wrongful Persecution" Trail?) and we were determined to find the end of it.  And we did, in the most anticlimactic manner.  It just stopped among some not-particularly-special-looking houses.  It was probably a decoy line painted by some murderers to lead tourists to their lair.  Thankfully we got led to no lairs, but we did double back and get to the train station.

The most remarkable thing that happened while waiting for the train was that we were standing uncomfortably close to a couple that was furiously making out.  So furious was the out-making that the girl dropped her jacket on the ground, and I spent the next five minutes concerned that she would forget it when boarding the train.  And she definitely did.  Thankfully a more outspoken bystander pointed it out.  This may have been the highlight of the trip that didn't involve drag queens.

Anyhow, Salem + Drag Queens + Birthday = Goodness.  Thank you to Jon Sue-Ho for a lovely evening.