These Seattle queens are home for the holidays

They're probably two of the most famous members of Seattle drag royalty after being catapulted to stardom by the wildly popular franchise "RuPaul's Drag Race."

But BenDeLaCreme and Jinkx Monsoon were local fan favorites long before that, and have a long history here in Seattle.

Now, they're back for another installation of "The Jinkx and DeLa Holiday Show," which they started in 2018.

The show opens tonight at the Moore Theatre in Seattle.

First, though, they spoke with KUOW's Angela King to open up about their working relationship and their friendship. It all started when DeLa met Jinkx and her musical partner years ago.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

BenDeLaCreme: They were performing at Roy St. Coffee and Tea, which is one of those undercover Starbucks'. They were performing there at like 4 o'clock in the afternoon, and I went into the Starbucks and sat down to watch a free show in a folding chair in the corner of the Starbucks while people were, you know, steaming lattes 10 feet away. And she and Major Scales sat down and absolutely blew me away. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. I hadn't seen another performer in my age group who had the kind of points of reference and the love for this sort of vaudevillian sensibility, this old school of drag. I immediately knew we had to work together.

Jinkx Monsoon: Yeah, it was very immediate. She handed me her paper business card — that's how long ago it was. She handed me her paper business card. I looked at it, recognized the name. I turned to Major Scales and said, "We just met one of the top drag queens in Seattle. We need to make friends with this person, because she's doing what we want to do." Because it could have been a whole Bette and Joan thing, if we hadn't made the very conscious choice to be friends rather than rivals.

Angela King: So DeLa, you were just putting people to work right away?

DeLa: Oh, yeah, absolutely. I was sitting next to a friend of mine, who was a burlesque dancer I worked with at the Can Can at the time, Fuchsia FoXXX, and I said to Fuchsia FoXXX, "I need to become friends with these people, because otherwise we will be rivals."

Well, you both openly credit Seattle with being the place where you truly grew and developed your drag queen personas. Do you feel like you're at home when you're back in Seattle? Or are you so big now, in terms of your stardom, that you can't enjoy the city like you used to?

Jinkx: Oh, absolutely not the latter, because we still employ all our dancers and some of our crew from Seattle. That is really where our chosen family still is primarily congregated.

DeLa: And it's where our roots are. It's where our aesthetic developed, and it's where the people who were alongside us, as that happened, still reside. So, there is a creative force that just buzzes in Seattle, even with all the change in the city, which is why it's so important that we always be in Seattle performing on Christmas Eve and for Christmas itself. I mean, I've performed on Christmas Eve in Seattle for over a decade. That's very much my personal tradition, and I do consider that coming home for the holidays.

Jinkx: We both live in different places. But home is where the heart is. My heart is on this tour, you know, and every year, even though I'm spending the holidays with my performance family, it doesn't feel any less like what the holidays are meant to be. In fact, it feels closer to what the holidays are meant to be than some of my childhood Christmases where all the adults are stressed and freaking out because they had to put on a perfect Christmas. Now, instead of putting on a perfect Christmas, we put on a fun Christmas.

How has the show grown since that very first production?

Jinkx: When the very first production was proposed to me, it was very much said that we were going to sit on stage, chat about the holidays and do some numbers. That was the original proposal. At the time, DeLa and I were co-hosting viewing parties for "Drag Race," and people were really loving just watching us sit around, drink martinis and talk about TV, and we were going to try to find a way to do that for the holidays.

What happens, though, when you take a Virgo and a Libra both with Type A personalities and say, create a new show between the two of you? It's very hard for the two of us to just go, "OK, let's just do whatever." What happens instead is every year we write a brand new play, because, frankly, we're not satisfied with anything else. This year, we even said, very distinctly, we're going to take it easy this year and write a write as simple show. And instead, we wrote an opus.

DeLa: I mean, definitely this year is the most sort of complicated show we've ever written in a really fun way. And when we look back at that 2018 tour, which is when we started it, although it was a huge leap from what Jinkx just described as our intention, it was closer to that than what we do now.

And I've heard "The Jinkx and DeLa Holiday Show" this year described as, quote, "a wild mash-up of 'A Christmas Carol' and 'Back to the Future' that has them traveling back in time to the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s to discover and correct the moment everything went wrong for our world." Fair description?

DeLa: I think that is a fair description. It's very much what we went in with. We've talked about involving aspects of "A Christmas Carol" for many years, just because it's such a fun trope that we haven't explored — and honestly, we've exhausted almost every Christmas trope there is. But we wanted to figure out what we do with it, and it never quite felt like the right time. But with the sort of multiverse craze of the current year with so many films, it seemed like it made sense in our current world — where everyone is so scared of where we're headed and so focused on where we went wrong — to explore this idea through these two tropes.

Jinkx: We do it in a very tongue-in-cheek, satirical way, but something that I've been just kind of grappling with in my own work, is the idea of responsibility for what's wrong in the world, personal responsibility. DeLa's character, especially, goes on a whole journey of blaming herself for everything that's wrong with the world, which I found very fascinating in this time where CEOs are dumping oil into oceans and we're being asked to stop using plastic straws. Now, I don't care about the plastic straw argument, I don't give a shit about straws. I do care that individual citizens are being told that their plastic straws is what's killing the ocean, when every other year, there's, like, a ship's worth of oil dumped into that same ocean. This idea that we individuals are personally responsible, I call it trickle-down guilt.

DeLa: And now that we've made it sound like we do a very grave two-hour lecture — what actually happens in this show is Jinkx and DeLa call upon the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future to help them time travel, and to go to the Jinkx and DeLa holiday shows throughout the decades. So, we get to see the shows that Jinkx and DeLa, theoretically, put on in the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s. We explore how it is they put on shows at that time, while they look for the inciting incident, which may be a wrong step with a sponsor of the era or a current parody of one of the hit songs of 1981 or whatever.

Well, DeLa, you mentioned "A Christmas Carol." Let me ask you this: If the ghost of Christmas past were to pay you a visit right now, what memory would you hope they'd have you relive?

DeLa: Oh, wow. It's probably just because it's on my mind, because we're talking about it, but those early years in Seattle. When, sort of for the first time, I discovered the joy of the holidays, because I never enjoyed the holiday season growing up. I mean, maybe when I was very, very young, but then there was so much sort of division in my family. That was a time that I associated with stress and sad feelings. So, being in Seattle — you know, I moved here in 2006 — and those early years of that, I think, is where a lot of my good memories live. In my heart, I do return there every year.

How about you Jinx? Where with the ghost of Christmas past? Thank you.

Jinkx: Oh, my first thought was one of my grandmother's Christmas Eve parties, which was my favorite day of the year. There was always a point in the night when the kids got to open the gifts, and one year, I was given the "The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time" game for my Nintendo 64. I just remember that being a particularly happy Christmas Eve.

Because my grandma was kind of the Christmas-party planner, when she passed away, Christmases in my blood family kind of fell by the wayside. It was actually quite recently, the year before the pandemic hit, I was able to host my family at my house — that I was able to buy, thanks to the support of my loving audience and my tenacity in my career — I was able to host my first Christmas dinner where the entire blood family came. We had all the generations of moms and kids and the kids of the kids, and it was the first time in a long time that we've all been in one place together. And it was made possible by me being a drag queen. The family pretty much agreed that I get to be the matriarch now, and that was a huge moment of honor for me.

And I'm sure that would mean a lot to your grandma as well, because she is someone you speak fondly of as having shaped who you are, as a queen, as a performer, as just a person in general.

Jinkx: Absolutely. She was the she was the main topic of the evening, because it was our first time getting to kind of recreate what she used to provide the entire family.

So, who gives the better holiday gifts?

DeLa: Well, you know, I think we've only given each other one gift over the last several years, which is our continued friendship and our company on stage and our creation of this thing together.

Jinkx: I will just say, though, I'm, like, not a big holiday gift giver. I'm one of those people who gives random gifts throughout the year, just because I saw something. And so, I take the pressure off of having to give one really good gift at one specific time of year...

DeLa: And just give lots of terrible gifts.

Jinkx: Just lots of little bogus gifts throughout the year, yeah.

So, how about New Year's resolutions?

Jinkx: My resolution is steady as she goes, My resolution is stay the course. I feel like I'm on a really good path right now. So, if anything, my resolution is to stay out of my own way.

DeLa: My resolution is to not work all the time. I am going to take some time off, and I'm going to take some time to write and develop stuff. I'm gonna get off the road for a little while, and as scary as that is for somebody who sort of has the kind of work addiction that we struggle with, it's a little scary. But I'm really looking forward to finding out what this whole work-life balance thing is that I've heard so much about.

Well, finally, I mean, your work relationship as Jinkx and DeLa is one thing, but what makes your friendship so special?

Jinkx: Lots of work. Now, that sounds more serious than I meant it to, but the point is, relationships don't just happen. Good working relationships, good romantic relationships — no two people just get along perfectly without putting in the hard work. And they do, they're lying to themselves.

Any time one of us is feeling off-kilter, anytime we feel out of sync, anytime there's a tension between us whether it's spoken or unspoken, we make the choice, which is not always easy when you're busy with other stuff, to sit ourselves down and talk through it openly, honestly. We are very candid with each other. We know pretty much everything that's going on in the other one's life. That takes a huge amount of trust, especially with a fellow performer who is essentially, for better or for worse, we are collaborators and we also are in competition with each other as two performers. So, we address that, rather than ignore it. We find a way to find a peace within that and feel good and celebratory for each other, even though we also have to look out for ourselves. It's a lot of hard work, but when you put in that hard work, you have one of the best relationships you've ever had in your life.

DeLa: It's been a long journey for us, because what we do is in the public eye. We're taking risks by being artists, by being queer in public, by being highly visible. That mutual support, I think we've both seen the way that that has elevated us as a duo and us individually. It just grows and grows, and honestly, it's has already gone further than I could have imagined. I'm so grateful for it.