Tammie Brown brings Holiday Sparkle to Bend

Published 12:15 am Thursday, December 19, 2019

Tammie Brown is ready to sparkle in Bend — even if she is a bit “over the holidays.”

Brown — the stage name of drag performer Keith Glen Schubert, who rose to fame after appearing on the first season of “RuPaul’s Drag Race” in 2009 — has performed her Holiday Sparkle tour for 13 years counting this year.

The show, which features Brown’s original, irreverent holiday songs such as “Coal in Your Stockings” (sample lyric: “Coal in your stockings will be diamonds in the morning as long as you believe in me” — the “me” being Santa Claus, of course), will be at The Capitol on Thursday.

As Brown put it multiple times during a recent conversation with GO! Magazine: “Holiday sparkle, holiday shine, these are the times that we feel divine.”

Anyone who remembers Brown’s colorful turns on “Drag Race” and her subsequent return on “RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars” in 2012, which spawned plenty of meme-able moments and quotes such as “I don’t see you out there walking children in nature,” probably has an idea of what to expect. The multicultural performance (Brown teased a posada — a traditional Mexican Christmas celebration — section of the show) will also feature host Clare Apparently of “Camp Wannakiki” fame, frequent Brown collaborator Michael Catti and support from local drag performers.

But fans also know Brown has a serious side, and “Coal in Your Stockings” provides a pretty good primer on Brown’s take on the holidays. The song turns a critical yet comedic eye toward the ever-increasing commercialization of Christmas.

“People get into this fantasy that, ‘Oh, it’s Christmas, so for one month, we’re gonna pretend to be so wonderful and give everybody something,’” Brown said from Long Beach, California. “But as soon as the new year rolls around, slam the door, shut the floodgates.”

And beyond that, Brown has a hard time celebrating while others are suffering. She mentioned refugee families being split up at the southern U.S. border and the children being held in cages there. With everything going on in the world right now, the show was much easier to do when she started it 13 years ago, three years before her first “Drag Race” appearance, she said.

“People forget that Jesus Christ was a refugee, and also people forget that it’s a pagan holiday that we’re actually celebrating,” Brown said. “Most Christian holidays come from paganism, but it’s not addressed that way. It’s just that Christianity used it as marketing for their own product — for their own agenda. They also accustom themselves to other customs just so they can get their custom out or whatever — their product, their faith or philosophy, whatever.

“So do I like decorating for the holidays? Most definitely,” she added. “I think it’s fun to be able to decorate, and I do enjoy getting together with the family — I think that can always be fun — and having fun with all that. Yes, I like that. But on a spiritual level, there’s nothing there.”

Brown has a long history of using her platform to champion the environment, indigenous people and LGBTQ+ causes. Recently, she adopted the social media hashtag #QueenWithACause, stemming from her recent track “The Whale Song” from her 2018 EP “A Little Bit of Tammie.” She said she’s also planning a web series of the same name to go along with her other video offerings, most notably the fictionalized reality series “The Browns,” which has run three seasons so far.

Her activism continues on her new mini-album, “Schubert,’” which was coincided with her 20th anniversary as a drag performer this year. “Sexy Orangutan,” a “fun dance-with-a-meaning song” as Brown puts it, is a prime example, offering a commentary on palm-oil deforestation. She had advice for people who are concerned about these issues, too.

“Start contacting your politicians; let your politicians know that they’re working for you,” Brown said. “… Tell them to stop lining their pockets. You can’t breathe money, and we can’t eat money, and that’s the bottom line. I don’t know where all these people think — I don’t feed into all these conspiracy theories and all this other stuff that is out there. I mean, we’re on this planet; we’re all in it together.”

Then there’s “Queen Killer,” a song that decries violence against transgender people. The album’s engineer, Pierce Rolli, wrote the song for Brown based on a true story about a man who attempted to scam Brown out of money, as she explained to Billboard Magazine.

“That’s gonna be an anthem for the trans community for all these people that this happens to,” Brown said, “where these bruisers come around and they mistreat you in the dark.”

As the title suggests, “Schubert’” (pronounced with a silent “t,” though in real life Brown pronounces her birth name with the “t”) is often deeply personal, as on the autobiographical “Round ’n Round.”

In a way, it also brings Brown full circle. When she started as a drag performer in her home state of Texas, she wanted to use her real name.

“My family and friends — close, nobody else — calls me Glen on a personal level; that’s it,” she said. “Then I thought to myself, ‘Glen Schubert: now that’s a Hollywood name in its own.’ But when I started doing drag, they were like, ‘No, you have to have a drag name, yada yada yada.’ And I fought them of course, me being me, knowing who I am, but they said that I had to have a drag name.”

Brown always loved playing dress-up as a kid; she said she has fond memories of playing dress-up with her sisters and neighbors.

The movie “Tootsie” was another big influence on the young Glen. She went full drag for the first time in 1996 while still in high school.

“I always had this fantasy … I would go to a department store, get everything I need — you know, the full mall experience, and get everything I need in the mall,” Brown said, “And then I would go into the dressing room — I don’t know what dressing room, the men’s room or the women’s room. I don’t know how I was gonna do it, but it would be this Superman change sort of a thing — go in one way and come out the other. And I get to live that now, although it’s taxing and hard and not so much fun, but I get to live that fantasy as a woman. I get to produce my own art now, and I get to do it for a cause, an environmental cause, and so many people are inspired.”

Brown said she is thankful for her experiences on “Drag Race” and for the attention it has brought to drag culture — even if the portrayal of drag that shows up in mainstream media isn’t accurate.

“People have always been playing around with genders and sexuality and costuming,” Brown said. “I would say that it’s nothing to do with being perverted. It’s led to being able to be outspoken in many times since Stonewall ( the LGBTQ+ demonstrations against a police raid in June 1969 in New York City). There have been many, many drag superstars that have made a living out of being gender illusionists or drag queens, if you may — people that were in shows such as Tony Marino in Las Vegas. There was Leigh Bowery; Holly Woodlawn was able to do it. But people like Danny La Rue from England, Dame Edna, and there was even an indigenous person, We’wha. … It’s been around forever, and it’s actually part of real American history — you know, real American history, not this whitewashed history that we’re given where everybody speaks English and Spanish and French and Portuguese.”

What: Tammie Brown’s Holiday Sparkle Tour, with Clare Apparently

When: 7 p.m. Thursday

Where: The Capitol, 190 NW Oregon Ave., Bend

Cost: $22 plus fees in advance

Contact: justinbucklesproductions.com, thecapitolbend.com or 541-678-5740

GO! listen to Tammie Brown’s latest album, “Schubert'”