It would not be the holidays, or at least my version of the holidays—for do we not all invent and revise tradition as suits us?—without a little Mx. Justin Bond involved. “Christmas Spells” was quite irreverently wonderful. Lodged between Bond’s solo numbers, which including his original composition “The New Depression” (and riffs on a meth-addled acquaintance from San Fran who was arrested for serial baby-punching! For real.) was an adaptation of the Kate Bornstein short story “Dixie Belle,” which imagines Huck Finn (aka Sassy Sarah) working in a bordello in post-Civil War New Orleans, writing a letter on Christmas Eve to his old pal Tom Sawyer. Though some among my party found this section alternately boring, ill-conceived or confounding, I thought it worked in a sort of twist on the English Panto, infused with the sort of American can-do, “hey kids let’s put on a show” ethic that is intrinsic to our showbiz aesthetic, but with the requisite pomo twist. If a Kiki & Herb show can be considered a postmodern queer tent revival (at least I’d define it as such), then why should not “Christmas Spells” work as the Bond-ian equivalent of a Christmas pageant, substituting wise men and angels with a gender-fuct band of arty rebels (The Pixie Harlots)?
Regardless, I did at a point shed a tear or two (perhaps it was the only evacuation point for my bladder, reaching up to my tear ducts? Cause lord I should have peed beforehand but could not leave the theater mid-show. Manners, ya’ll!), when Bond sang his titular song “Christmas Spells,” written a year ago as a reaction to the Prop 8 fervor, which he followed by “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” a song he reminded (or informed) the audience was not written for any church, but rather for a movie. And that is a small cross-section of the juxtaposition that Bond mines so well in tackling the holidays, be it as himself or in his previous character of Kiki DuRane, and which I cannot help but but touched by: the knee-jerk sentimentality of however many Christmases underscored by these tunes, the feeling of giving and sharing and love, tempered by the knowledge that we, as outsiders, are not and may not soon, despite the good fight, be wholly accepted by this supposed brotherhood of man.
