You found my website! Because I’m turning 40 soon, I’ve been posting a small update every day. If you’re looking for a more general update, checkout my post from Feb 14th.
If you’re looking for details about my birthday party, reach out to me and I’ll send you the “secret” link.
In January 2025, it snowed ten inches in New Orleans. Having been born and raised in MInnesota, you’d think it wouldn’t be a big deal to me, but it really was. We don’t have shovels down here, much less plows or salt. I ended up using a broom and a rake.
The snow drifts were so high, I couldn’t open the front door after all the snow finished falling. Alicia and I hunkered down and just waited for it to all melt, which took about 48 hours.
On the plus side, New Orleans took it really well. Most people stayed off the roads, meaning it was the quietest two days I’ve ever seen in New Orleans. There were pop-up snowball fights and snow men being built all over the city. I was a lovely little break.
Let me tell you about some of my most memorable drag performances!
In 2019, I had been performing for awhile but hadn’t gotten much traction. At the beginning of a drag career, a performer usually goes to amateur nights. These are judged by audience applause and can be pretty tough. As much fun as it is performing, it is tough to lose night after night.
I asked a fellow performer backstage about how to handle the stress of not being successful. They said you really just need to practice one routine a lot, not try a ton of numbers. But also, you’ve really gotta look like you’re having fun.
The above photo was me the night I first made it to the second round shortly after. I performed Billie Eilish’s “bury a friend”, which was brand new. I had spent the week watching choreographers on Youtube and stole the best bits. It was a hit! Maybe because the song was new, maybe because I practiced my routine more than ever, but also maybe because I was hot. Who knows?
Either way, afterwards, I started having a lot more fun.
This second photo was also at Lush a few months later on my birthday. I performed “If I Was Your Woman” by Gladys Knight & the Pips. This photo was just seconds after I threw all those ones in the air above me. Sure, I had some friends in the audience, but I also made the most in tips I had ever made (up to that point). I love that lighting, I love that dress, and I had such a blast.
This orange and purple furry dress was a dress I made from scratch. On the back is a train of stuffed animals sewn together. You might spot some eyeballs on the front, and you certainly can’t miss a recently decapitated Kermit the Frog.
This look was for the Bloodbath Ball, a halloween themed pageant. The challenge was to make a look from scratch out of non-traditional materials. My concept was “Muppet Hunter.” The judges didn’t love it, but I still do!
Lastly, this photo of me during the 2019 Minneapolis Pride Parade. A photographer for a local LGBTQ+ magazine snapped this one, and it’s just one of my favorites.
Yup, these are simply the best.
Back in 2021, Mardi Gras was cancelled due to the pandemic. As a result, houses were being decorated and called “house floats.” Alicia and I were brand new in the house but still wanted to participate. We needed a clever theme, since most houses had a pun or reference.
Brainstorming over drinks, we narrowed it down to something sloth related. We were also still nervous about when we’d get vaccines for COVID-19. We decided it was a like a slot machine – you’d have to get lucky to get your vaccine first. Thus, the “Sloth Machine” – a sloth themed slot machine that gave out vaccines if you win.
I rented a truck and drove to Lowe’s and bought large sheets of thin plywood, as well as paint. Over the course of two weeks, I constructed it from scratch. I hand painted everything, using a cartoon sloth from the internet as inspiration.
I still can’t believe I had the energy to make this thing. In hindsight, I should have used foam or cardboard instead of plywood. I would have also hung it from the roof instead of making it rigid and lean against the way. The back-lighting worked on paper, but the street light in front of our house really prevented it from sticking out and glowing.
After Mardi Gras 2021 was over, I deconstructed it and hung the major pieces of art on the fence in the backyard. Eventually, hot New Orleans summers and heavy rain broke down the plywood and it shredded apart. Now, only memories (and a glittery 7) remain. It made great backyard art, though!
I’d always wanted to try dying my hair, but I never thought it was very work appropriate, especially for someone presenting male. Lucky for me, the pandemic changed office work!
First off, I bleached it.
It really turned red, huh? I decided to try blue.
Looking back, it wasn’t great, but I think I was also terrible at styling my hair. I was also horrible at keeping the color vivid, so that fall I let my natural hair grow back.
I think that was about as good as it got. I doubled down the next summer and tried purple highlights, but it wasn’t very great.
Oh well. I’ll stick with my natural color.
I’ve gone full circle on hot sauces in the last ten years. While my friend Andrew Berns has always been an aficionado, the web series Hot Ones definitely ignited a passion to try tons of different hot sauces. The Copeland house used to have an entire shelf with hot sauces.
Now-a-days, I just keep going back to Cry Baby Craig’s. It’s my favorite.
It’s primary spice comes from habaneros, but they’ve been pickled, which dials back the heat while enhancing the flavor. It is a general purpose hot sauce that works across a ton of foods, but it’s especially good on avocado toast from Standish Cafe. While some hot sauces are exceptional in specific foods (like Cholula on fish tacos), Cry Baby Craig’s wins my all-around prize.
There’s lots of good spice out there, though. The Reaper hot sauce above was from the Minnesota State Fair and I’ve never found it since. The Last Dab (from Hot Ones) is really superior at an immediate tongue burn, as is the Scorpion pepper powder.
Any sauces I should give a shot? I’ll open up comments on this post, send me a suggestion!
Bonus: Here’s a video of me eating a ghost pepper at the Minnesota State Fair in 2018.
One theme over the last twenty years or so has been One-Deal-A-Day sites. In the past, I’ve blogged about Woot. Woot.com was bought out by Amazon in 2010 and slowly turned into Amazon’s clearance machine. The previous owner of Woot (Matt Rutledge) left and started a new version of the same concept – meh.com – in 2014.
I’ve always liked saying “meh”, which I’d guess I picked up from Futurama in the early 2000’s. When meh.com launched, I was hooked. In the decade since, I’ve made 298 purchases, a large majority of which are “meh.” branded merchandise. I’ve certainly worn their shirts a lot.
I think what’s fun about the website is they’ve done a bunch of novel things. During the pandemic, they started a website called PastaDrop.com. For $20, you’d send someone 20lbs of pasta. The trick, however, was that some people got significantly more pasta. Everyone was randomly given either 20lbs, 40lbs, 60lbs, 80lbs, even up to 100lbs.
Another concept is the IRK, or Instant Regret Kit. It’s how meh.com cleans out it’s warehouse – an IRK is just a box of random junk. The concept originates from Japan where it’s known as a fukubukuro. I’ve actually stopped ordering them, since I’m sick of throwing stupid stuff away.
The company itself is pretty cool. They’re based out of Dallas and never given me a problem. When the George Floyd protests ended up burning down my post office in 2020, meh.com gave me a full refund for my purchases. Having two houses has slowed down my purchasing, but there’s been some gems. As for my favorite purchase? It’s gotta be Party Bot!
One of the most ambitious projects I’ve ever undertaken was installing a paver patio in the backyard of our new house in MInneapolis in 2012. We bought the raw materials from Menards, found a book at Barnes & Noble, then got to work.
It wasn’t too expensive, especially given the size. But it was before I lost weight and athletically, I wasn’t ready for that much digging.
More importantly, I’ll never do it again. Where as professionals would have completed the job in a weekend, this patio took half a summer. We spent the rest of the summer struggling with what to do with all the dirt.
While the last two bricks were very satisfying to put in, take it from me – hire a professional to install a patio.
I’m not sure how to write about this, because this is my personal and professional website. I’ve always been nervous about combining this side of me with my Drag Queen persona; when I’m in the office or doing Data Science, I don’t wear a flower in my hair, I don’t dress crazy, I stay focused on the work.
But I think being a well rounded person is healthy too. When I started performing drag on stage in 2017, I was stagnating in my Data Scientist career. I was working on personalization for Target.com and the product had matured to the point where there was not obvious “low hanging fruit” for improvement. IE, it was harder and harder to develop a novel personalization algorithm that would beat our current champion algorithms. So there was some “creativity” missing in my life.
But since I turned 28 in 2013, I had been going out and exploring the Minneapolis night scene, of which drag was a huge part. And if you read my fashion post, you know I was really getting into not blending into the crowd. I’d also started watching RuPaul’s Drag Race, which was a blast.
I guess I could have tried a hundred other creative hobbies, but I was most jealous of the performers that had people coming to talk to them all night. It seemed like an art form that made you “cool” instantly.
So, in spite of being a terrible dancer and not knowing drag makeup styles at all, I went to the Monday night amateur night at The Saloon and tried it out.
It was awesome. I did terrible, did not make the second round, and there were a 100 things that went wrong. But I tried. And it gave me something to work on, and made me feel like I was putting myself out there.
I’m still a terrible dancer/performer, but mostly the crowds feed on energy, and I really try to put it out there. There’s not many heterosexual drag queens out there, but at least there’s me – Tilda Nextime. Check out @MistressTilda on Instagram for a ton more photos.
