This weekend will be kicking off with a Drag Race.
The Okotoks Drag Race, billed as a comedy drag pageant, will be hosted by drag queen Farrah Nuff and Jared McCollum at the Rotary Performing Arts Centre (RPAC) on Saturday, Aug. 19 at 7 p.m.
“So we’re getting a lot of queens from Calgary and area – we've got some locals,” said McCollum. “It’s like a comedy, we have a plan of how the whole evening will go just to guide the story, and make it more than what you would expect from a drag show."
With that in mind, Farrah Nuff has a show planned that will be fun and accessible.
“Our goal with Okotoks Drag Race is to make people laugh, and show them another side of drag,” said Nuff.
“Because a lot of the times what we see is things like readings, or the jump scares of a highly sexualized show.
"With this show we wanted to do something that was a little bit more campy, a little bit more kitschy, something that took drag to a different level.”
As such the show will be more of a pageant format that may be familiar to fans of RuPaul's Drag Race.
“Our goal is to have the performers not only showcase themselves as drag artists, but also showcase talents they may have outside of being a drag performer, and the easiest way to do that is through a pageant,” Nuff said.
Our goal is just to make people laugh, and show them that if you can laugh at a birthday clown you can laugh at a birthday clown just as well
The RPAC will be a new format for the queen, as they and the community have expanded drag shows from a small set of queer venues to more mainstream establishments, and as those shows have become more commonplace, Farrah’s been running off her heels.
“Since the pandemic and what we’ve been working on with HireHeelsYYC, we’ve been able to open up eight new venues in the city to drag shows,” Nuff said.
“It’s been one of my cherished things I've done in life is opening drag up to such a larger group of people."
While McCollum’s nine-to-five is being Dr. McCollum, acupuncturist, he’s no stranger to the stage – or heels – having run Rocky Horror Picture Show nights at the RPAC going on nine years, often dressed as Dr. Frank-N-Furter.
The doc had tried to get the drag show going for three years, with the pandemic and scheduling getting in the way.
This year, he happened to catch a show with Farrah Nuff of HireHeelsYYC and the two connected.
“Farrah was there with the other Nuffs – there's a whole Nuff family – and we were talking about it, that it would be awesome,” McCollum said.
“We’d like to build it up each year; my plan is for it to be funny and fun, but I do want good competition,” he said.
The show is billed as 18 and up, and as with most drag shows billed for that category, while the performance and dialogue can take a racy turn, there is no actual nudity.
The show kicks off at 7 p.m. with doors open at 6:30 p.m. Event information and tickets are available through EventBrite.com under 'Okotoks Drag Race 2023'.
