In the worldview of Dixie Longate, Alabama’s fast-talkingest, gum-smacking, snort-laughing, highest-grossing Tupperware Lady, you can be one of three things: a cherry bomb, a bottle rocket, or a dud.
Which are you going to be, she asked her audience members at Saugatuck Center for the Arts in the final shows of her latest stand-up cum performance art cum drag show tour, Cherry Bombs and Bottle Rockets.
Since we were at her show, we obviously weren’t duds. Cherry bombs make a big mess and scare critters. Bottle rockets shoot up into the air and light up the sky.
Be a bottle rocket, she implores each of us, in this 90-minute, post-COVID, one-person comedy show wherein Longate makes fun of the South, offers a hilarious retelling of Jesus’s life, uses Loretta Lynn as an inspiration on bad days, teaches straight people how to use safe words, and laments the fact that children no longer play with pogo sticks.
Longate is the fabulous alter ego and creation of 55-year-old Kris Andersson who made a splash at the 2001 New York Fringe Festival to become an Off-Broadway and Drama Desk Award nominated hit that turned into a series of successful touring shows: from Dixie’s Tupperware Party to Never Wear a Tube Top While Riding a Mechanical Bull (and 16 other things I learned while drinking last Thursday) to Cherry Bombs and Bottle Rockets.
In each iteration, the bawdy, hard-drinking, fellatio-loving Tupperware Lady subverts good taste, makes fun of heteronormativity as only a drag queen can, and slyly critiques the culture at large, using carefully-chosen props and audience participation to hysterical effect. The first show is, indeed, a Tupperware Party writ large; and the second takes place in a honky tonk; whereas Cherry Bombs and Bottle Rockets eschews any imagined set-up for what it actually is: a comedy act in the theater in which we reminisce about Longate’s childhood and collectively recover from the madness of the pandemic.
She riffs about her crocheted toilet paper when there was a run on toilet paper and how socially-distant Twister for children was like an audiobook of Where’s Waldo: “It don’t work that way,” she says, while sipping bourbon from a Tupperware cup.
Longate’s timing is impeccable, as always, and she’s especially wonderful improvising with audience members—coercing a straight couple from the front row to create “safe words” for three different sexual circumstances and bantering with the one audience member in Saugatuck from the South, for example.
And while she’s happy to share her own sexual escapades, tell tales of serving jello shots to children, use a blow-up Jesus doll to terrific effect, suggest Florida is just a place “where people from New Jersey go for good weather and casual racism”, and weave a yarn about rekindling a friendship via Facebook with her childhood best friend, a brilliant pogo-stick jumper who blew most of the fingers of one hand lighting fireworks, this Cherry Bombs and Bottle Rockets feels a bit tame compared to her other shows. It’s a softer, gentler Dixie helping us all recover from the pandemic. Except five years later, we’re on to different societal horrors, social distancing and toilet paper shortages largely in the rear view mirror, the us vs. them crueler and more divisive than ever.
But overt politics isn’t her game and her performance and storytelling skills remain unparalleled, her ability to drop in a surprise, laugh-out-loud twist in the middle of a story that’s already moved in 17 different directions but meanders back for a fourth punchline, a moral, and to finish a metaphor is utterly phenomenal.
And to enter her imaginary world, tangential to the one in which we live, is a delightful gift, even if in this particular show it’s not quite as shocking or wonderfully deplorable as the honky tonk or Tupperware party she’s created in the past.
The gift, ultimately, is earned at the end of this 90-mile-an-hour, 90-minutes of comedic storytelling from a brilliant comedian who created a most-lovable character who is as much a motivational speaker as a drag queen.
“Life is a gift,” she reminds us, “and it can be taken from you so quickly.” Be the bottle rocket, is her message. Ride your pogo stick. Be the Virgin Mary. Use your safe word. And remember what her mama told her as a way to remember that no matter what, all is not lost: “Somebody, somewhere, is thinking about you when they masturbate.”
Dixie Longate’s Cherry Bombs & Bottle Rockets
Saugatuck Center for the Arts
May 22-23
https://sc4a.org/event/dixie-longates-cherry-bombs-bottle-rockets/
