I Want My Funeral To Be Fun
These experiences helped me learn something important about myself: I want people to have fun at my funeral. After all, the word does have 'fun' in it.
Wear an outfit you think I'd like, but please remember I hate high-low dresses, skinny jeans, and khaki pants—the inspiration is Naomi Campbell at Andre Leon Talley's funeral. A movie theater-sized slideshow should be only hot photos of me—if I've ever texted you a tasteful nude, go ahead and throw it in there to remind everybody how good I looked. Let's hire Caffè Panna to hand out ice cream cones while a champagne tower overflows (each glass finished off with a crunched-up antidepressant adorning the rim). Maybe Sephora can do beauty touch-ups on-site, giving everybody a dab of Victoria Beckham lip gloss and a pop of Westman Atelier blush? Book the venue for the entire night, even though we all know if I was there, I would have snuck out at 9:15 p.m. sharp to be home with my cat. But I want my funeral to be a capital P party.
Last month, transgender Filipino-American drag performer Bianca Castro-Arabejo (also known as Jiggly Caliente) passed away. Instead of a traditional funeral, 'Slaybill' (a play on Broadway Playbill) was hosted in her honor. The event took the idea of a celebration of life to heart—guests wore pastel colors and the run of show included eulogy-turned-comedy acts all about Caliente, as well as roasts that walked the line between dark humor and just plain dark. Fellow drag queen Karl Westerberg, known as Manila Luzon, embodied it all in his laughing-and-crying-at-the-same-time eulogy. When recalling filming Caliente's Drag Race tryout video in an Apple store, he said 'it was giving a glamorous Augustus Gloop going up the chocolate tube in Willy Wonka,' but also 'I'm so sad we can't keep doing and dreaming bigger and bigger things together.'
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