When writer and performance artist Taylor Mac started working on a holiday show nearly a decade ago, something didn’t feel right about it. “I just wasn’t into it,” said Mac, who uses the gender pronoun “judy.” But then, Mac’s mentor and drag mother Mother Flawless Sabrina passed away. Suddenly, “I really just wanted to make a show about her,” judy said.
The show that emerged is both a holiday cabaret and a deeply felt tribute to a queer elder; a raucous and subversive acid trip and a sincere attempt to reclaim and preserve the parts of the holiday season that have not been fully eroded by capitalism and forced domesticity. Called Holiday Sauce, a reference to one of Mother Flawless’ favorite proverbs (“You’re the boss, applesauce”), the show has been an annual tradition since 2017 and will tour to Duke Arts Presents December 4-6.
Mac, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and a MacArthur “Genius Grant” recipient, is no stranger to the Triangle’s stages: A section of judy’s marathon work A 24-Decade History of Popular Music toured to Carolina Performing Arts in 2014, and Mac once performed judy’s one-person show, The Young Ladies Of …, at PlayMakers Repertory Company while passing a kidney stone.
During this trip, Mac will blessedly be getting to know Durham’s queer elders instead of its emergency rooms. Wherever Holiday Sauce tours, Mac has a tradition of working with the local community to identify elders to honor during the show. (When we spoke, Durham’s honorees were still being confirmed.) “That’s our tradition,” Mac said.
Other elements of the show change every year, and Mac is tight-lipped about what Durham audiences will see. But it’s probably safe to count on some Christmas standards like you’ve never heard them before, some covers of songs that, on the surface, have little to do with the holidays (think: The Velvet Underground, Frank Ocean, and The Rolling Stones), and at least one Mac original, equally heartbreaking and hilarious. “Putting together holiday music and Velvet Underground songs … there’s something very liberating about that expansiveness,” said Mac. “That’s what’s fun for me, not having to compartmentalize.”
Other Holiday Sauce staples include costumes by maximalist genius Machine Dazzle (a critic described one of them as “a Christmas tree ornament made by Picasso on an absinthe bender”), special guest appearances (“sexual consent Santa” sometimes makes a showing), and lots of audience participation.
Mac called it all “a feast of humanity,” which feels apt. “We’ll hopefully make you laugh, and make you feel closer to each other,” judy said. “That’s the hope.”
Tell me about your relationship to the holidays historically, and how that relationship has changed since you started this tradition of Holiday Sauce.
I didn’t enjoy the holidays. As I got older, I realized that the holidays were fraught with a lot of family tension and a lot of unresolved anger. And then, as you become responsible financially, you start to see how detrimental capitalism is to most of our lives. As a queer person, it’s challenging to navigate the religious aspects of the holiday, not to mention the family aspects when family members aren’t in support of your queerness. So the holidays became a very oppressive experience for me for most of my childhood. It wasn’t until I started hanging out with chosen family that I enjoyed the holidays.
Doing this show has been liberating. I haven’t seen some of the band members since the last holiday, so it’s a little bit like family that lives in other places. It’s great to get everybody in the same room together again to have fun and make music together. The music has always been the best part of the holiday season for me. So now it’s something I look forward to instead of roll my eyes at.
Were there pieces of holiday culture—music, movies—that were a reprieve during those times, and that shaped you and this show?
The best part for me was caroling. The lights are pretty. There’s a kind of beauty to it all. The interesting thing to me about the holidays is that, for a lot of people, it’s this combination of torture and joy.
It’s very hard to reconcile all that, and I think that’s really what our show is about—acknowledging this reality and leaning more toward the joy of it all rather than being overwhelmed by the horror of it. My drag mother, Mother Flawless Sabrina, would say, “You’re the boss, applesauce.” What she meant by that was, we’re in charge of our own lives.
If there’s something that tortures you every year, how can you shift it? How can you reframe it? How can you deconstruct it and use the parts that are good? That’s part of what we’re doing with the show. The other part is that, as a queer person growing up during the height of AIDS, there’s a lot of sardonic humor that I’ve developed, partially as a defense and partially because it’s fun. Combining that sardonic humor with the earnestness of the holidays, because I am also a fairly sincere person, is interesting to me. It makes a great night out where you’re not ignoring the world, and you’re not packing away a part of your personality during the holiday season because it’s not appropriate.
If there’s something that tortures you every year, how can you shift it? How can you reframe it? How can you deconstruct it and use the parts that are good? That’s part of what we’re doing with the show.”
Instead, it’s like, why don’t we unpack it and let it be in the world? And maybe there’s a way to take some of the sincerity and earnestness from the season into the rest of the year, too, because we’ve all gotten so cool and sarcastic and ironic. There’s a lot of eye rolling in the world, and a lot of anger in the world.
You mentioned Mother Flawless Sabrina, whom this show is dedicated to. Tell me more about her.
She was a Nativity scene. She was a theatrical Christmas pageant. My favorite Christmas was the year she invited me over. It was a wonderful bohemian party, and I thought, it can be fun. So it’s fun to share her story. She had over 200 full-time employees for her drag pageants that she started in the late fifties. They would go all over the country, even the Bible Belt and the Rust Belt, all the places that people would say you wouldn’t go do drag. It was like RuPaul, 40 years before RuPaul. She led a very impressive life and was such a wonderful den mother for us all.
Do you have any advice or wisdom for folks—especially queer folks—who are dreading the holidays this year?
Come hang out with us! It doesn’t have to be torture. I love sharing Mother Flawless’ advice: You’re the boss, applesauce. Make the life that you want to have. No one’s forcing you to have a turkey dinner. If you’re going to family and they don’t love you, you’re choosing to do that, and maybe that’s the right choice. And isn’t that fun, that you know you’re making the right choice, because it’s radical empathy and radical love. It’s not always easy, but it’s such a great place to live from.
My entire life, my mother couldn’t embrace my queerness. It was very hard for her. She’s passed now, and I’m sorry for her that she could never get there. But I have a lot of pride that I kept at it with her. I just kept digging. I lived my best life with her, even if she wasn’t able to live hers. So there’s something wonderful about putting out that olive branch. Just keep doing it, because it’s good for you. It stopped being about her—it was good for me. But also, balance. I stopped spending Christmas with her, that’s for sure. I would see her around the holidays, but on Christmas Day, I wanted to be with my husband and the band. That made my life better.
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