Last weekend, my friend Sam and I went to Savannah. On the drive there, we started started listening to an audiobook of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.
That was a 1994 non-fiction book that stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for a remarkable 216 weeks.
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil consists of a bunch of character studies of various eccentrics who lived in Savannah in the 1970s and 80s. The book cuts through Savannah society, from the rich and established to the poor and fringe.
Among the poor and fringe was Miss Chablis, “The Empress of Savannah.”
Chablis was a black drag queen.
The narrator of the audiobook, who normally speaks with a neutral accent, voiced Chablis, like all other Savannah locals, with a kind of southern drawl.
Except that in the case of Miss Chablis, the narrator, who sounded solidly white and male otherwise, also had to awkwardly act out dozens of draq-queeny, Black-English phrases such as:
“Ooooo, child!”
“Oh, child, don’t you be doin’ that!”
“Y-e-e-e-s, child! Yayyiss… yayyiss… yayyiss!”
I had flashbacks to this earlier today.
I got back to Barcelona yesterday. I checked my mailbox and found a stack of New Yorkers waiting for me.
This morning, I sat on my balcony and flipped open the latest one. The first feature story is about Ru Paul.
“Ooooo, child!” I said, “No more drag queens, honey, please!”
But as I often do, I forced myself to read something I had no inclination to read. I often find valuable things that way.
Today was no exception. I found the following passage in the first page of the article. Jinkx Monsoon, a 36-year-old drag queen who won two seasons of Ru Paul’s reality competition TV show, explained the power of drag:
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It’s armor, ’cause you’re putting on a persona. So the comments are hitting something you created, not you. And then it’s my sword, because all of the things that made me a target make me powerful as a drag queen.
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If you have any presence online, this armor-and-sword passage is good advice. It’s something that the most successful and most authentic-seeming performers out there practice.
I once saw a serious sit-down interview with Woody Allen. I remember being shocked by how calm, confident, and entirely not Woody-Allen-like he was.
Closer to the email world, I remember from a long time ago an email in which Ben Settle basically said the same thing as Jinkx Monsoon above. How the crotchety, dismissive persona he plays in his emails is a kind of exaggeration and a mask he puts over the person he is in real life.
So drag is good advice for online entrepreneurs.
But like much other good advice, It’s not something I follow in these emails.
I haven’t developed an email persona, and I’m not playing any kind of ongoing role to entertain my audience or to protect me from their criticism.
That’s because I don’t like to lie to myself. Like I’ve said many times before, I write these emails for myself first and foremost, and then I do a second pass to make sure that what I’ve written can be relevant and interesting to others as well.
This is not something I would encourage anybody else to do. But it’s worked out well enough for me, and allowed me to stay in the game for a long time.
That said, I do regularly adopt various new and foreign mannerisms in these emails.
I do this because i find it instructive and fun, and because it allows me to stretch beyond the person/writer I am and become more skilled and more successful.
I’ve even created an entire training, all about the great value of this approach.
In case you’d like to become more skilled and successful writing online, then honey, I am serious! You best look over here, child: