Ooh La La Drag Extravaganza!Special EventIn-Person
Friday, Jun 14, 2024
5:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m.
The Bitter End
147 Bleecker St
New York, NY 10012
5:00 p.m. - Bar Opens
5:15 p.m. - Showtime
The Bitter End is the oldest rock and roll club in New York City. For over 50 years, audiences have been blown away by legendary artists like Stevie Wonder, Bob Dylan, Lady Gaga, Jackson Browne, Neil Diamond, Gavin DeGraw, Woody Allen, Jon Stewart, Randy Newman, Billy Crystal, Tommy James, Norah Jones, Donny Hathaway, Curtis Mayfield, and thousands more.
Ooh La La!
June is Gay Pride month, and to celebrate the occasion, The Academy for Teachers invites our Fellows to “Ooh La La,” our first-ever Drag Extravaganza. The evening’s line-up includes one of our own—Mark Oleszko, who accompanies the Academy’s chorus on the keyboard. Performances will range from campy to subversive to artistic, so please join us for “Ooh La La” and get a taste of the wide variety of performance styles possible in this remarkably flexible art form.
Bring a friend, enjoy a drink, and get you some ooh la la!
Teachers can purchase up to four $10 tickets, includes entry and drinks—a $60 value each. (We hope, but don’t insist, that your guests be teachers.) Space is limited!
For the nerds among us:
If you define drag simply as men dressing as women, it has a long global tradition, with male actors performing women’s roles in the theaters of ancient Greece, Elizabethan England, 17th and 18th century Japan and China, and elsewhere. But as a form of exuberant rebellion largely performed by gay men, its origins are more recent. Some historians trace it to the 19th century and from there blossoming into the drag balls held in New York during the Harlem Renaissance. By the time of the Stonewall Rebellion, drag queens were at the forefront of resistance to gay bigotry, defiantly and heroically battling the police. Today, “Ru Paul’s Drag Race” has brought drag into the mainstream, although not without continued controversy.
Say hello to Lyra Vega, WorshipHer, and Wesley, AKA The Bad Judies, New York’s one-and-only drag band specializing in a crazy mishmash of house, disco, pop, and rock. The band promiscuously performs on as many stages and queer venues as it possibly can. You can catch them weekly at Red Eye NY and, this summer, they’ll be shaking it up at Fire Island’s Ice Palace every Thursday.
Julie J is a Black trans performer, writer, and interdisciplinary artist. Texas-born but claimed by the city of New York, Julie J has been doing drag basically from the womb. Credits include performances at Ensemble Studio Theater, TADA, Dixon Place, The Secret Theater, Hudson Guild Theater, and The Acorn, as well as on international stages at Spazio ZUT!, La Mama Umbria, and the Prague Fringe Festival. They were named Entertainer of the Year at The Glam Awards (which is kind of like the Oscars but for queer performers in NYC).
Amygdala is an interdimensional apparition merging the hypocritical, the paradoxical, and the absurd into immersive multimedia drag performances. With the hair of a horse and teeth like the keys on a piano, she’s lived many lives, emerging into this mortal coil for the purposes of mischief and an ice-cold Canada Dry.