Mudbugs and pig candy: Nuclia tours the Sultry South

My middle nipple is like a diamond. It cuts right through those glass ceilings, getting me places.

Like Rudolph’s red nose, my nipple shines like a red beacon, piercing through the fog. I just never know where it’s going to take me next.

Last month I rode the Delta Airlines sleigh to the buckle of the Bible belt – Jackson, Mississippi. I marched down the streets of Fondren in the Sweet Potato Queens’ Zippity Do Dah Parade. My friend and author, Jill Conner Browne, unveiled her new book, Fat Is the New 30: The Sweet Potato Queens’ Guide to Coping with (the crappy parts of) Life. If you have never read a Sweet Potato Queen book, get thee to an iPad or Kindle and download one now. You will laugh your ass off. And from the looks of some of you, that would be a good thing.

The Zippity Do Dah Festival is a crazy weekend of girls gone wild, if you count your mom as still being a girl. The Sweet Potato Queens have given women in their 30s and 40s and beyond the permission to dress up like drag queens and go hog wild, leaving their husbands and boyfriends at home to forage for leftovers in the back of the fridge.

After a “come on in” drinking party at the Hilton featuring “missicians,”  a Friday Big Hat Brunch on Friday with a Big Hat Parade down the streets on Fondren. And trust me, I had the biggest. That night was the Big Hair Ball and, yes, my hair was be gi-normous. A drag queen’s gotta do what a drag queen’s gotta do. That’s hair-do, y’all.

After a night of big hair and big drinking, we woke up to Amazon’s Bacon, Biscuits, Bloodies And Books for Jill’s book release party. I told you these women were wild. But the pièce de résistance of the weekend (or as they say in the South, peas day wristance) is the Zippity Do Dah Parade featuring the Sweet Potato Queens themselves, all trolloped up in red wigs, wagging oversized butts and boobs stuffed into green sequin dresses. And that is followed by the all-night PJs and Pearls party.

And if that ain’t enough to make ya want to jump up and slap your preacher, Sunday morning featured a bathrobe brunch with pig candy and shrimp grits. What is pig candy, you may be asking yourself? Well, it’s the best thing to jump in your mouth east or west of the fine state of Mississippi. You take your bacon and lay it across some cookie cooling racks, with a flat tray underneath to catch the drippings. Sprinkle the bacon with brown sugar and pecans until you can’t stand it no more. Then bake that mess in your oven until the brown sugar caramelizes and the bacon is crispy. Voila! Pig candy.

This year I took my jumping stilts down to Jackson for the first time – like a gay Tigger bouncing down the streets of Fondren. Jackson doesn’t see too many drag queens, let alone ones on stilts. But thanks to the begging and pleading of Jill Conner Browne for me to be a part of the parade, it’s become an almost annual event. It was a weekend of sequins, boas and big Southern hair. Not to mention the crawfish festival that always seems to be going on when I am down there. I sucked me down some mudbugs, let me tell you.

I went to Jackson with my good friend, Deb Schneller, from Fort Collins. Deb and I met through the Sweet Potato Queen books. On a whim, Deb came down one day to the Colorado Gay Rodeo Association’s Rocky Mountain Regional Rodeo. Deb left her husband and kids back in suburban Fort Collins to hang out with gay rodeo cowboys and a few country drag queens. Deb is one brave soul. We had never met in person before and she had no idea what she was getting herself into.

Jill Conner Browne encourages women to form their own queenly chapters. Deb is a chapter of one up there in Fort Collins and has declared herself “Queen of All Colorado.” So far there have been no challengers to her throne and her title is intact.

But Deb’s true name is “Queen of Kicking the Crap Out of Cancer.” Over the past few years, Deb has fought cancer not once, but twice. I am proud to be traveling with Deb to Jackson this year. We’ll have a lot to celebrate. The most important being that Deb is still here to celebrate. Bless her queenly heart.