Brightly colored makeup palettes are spread across the bathroom counter as Mackenzie Miller puckers her lips while contouring her cheekbones.
“When the makeup is done, you look in the mirror and see the most beautiful thing in the world,” she says. “Nothing can bring you down.”
Among all the ghosts, witches, and superheroes stumbling up and down Commercial Street on Halloween, it’s impossible to miss the true queens of Provincetown.
These aren’t costumes thrown together in one night. They involve months perfecting a character, weeks spent with a hot glue gun in hand, and, finally, hours on hair and makeup. It’s the perfect mix of drag, horror, and glamour popularized by shows like Dragula.
Halloween allows Mackenzie to do something different from her usual neon look and “really horrify it up with blood or extra limbs that can come flying out,” she says. “It’s edgier and creepier.”
Miller finally scored a year-round lease on a place on Nelson Avenue — the most famous trick-or-treat spot in town. A bucket of candy will be placed on the doorstep and “while we hope everyone is respectful, of course, someone will take the bucket,” she says.
She has five events booked for the weekend, from a Halloween brunch at the Post Office Cafe and Cabaret to parties at the Red Room and A-House.
Careful to not give too much away, Miller says she will be transformed into her own takes on classic horror icons, from Freddy Krueger to Chuckie. But don’t worry, she says, you’ll still stop to think, “Damn, she’s pretty.”
“You can’t have something glamorous without the balance of something hideous,” Miller says. “Halloween is a wonderful time where anybody can express who they are and dress how they want. But I also feel a lot of drag queens have been born from this very holiday. It’s often the first chance for someone to say, ‘I want to get in drag.’ ”
For Mahoganny, Halloween is serious business. More people dressed up means more competition. “I really have to outdo my drag,” she says. “It doesn’t matter if there’s sand or water, I don’t take off my heels until I’m back in my room.”
Mahoganny used to hate Halloween because people would throw on dresses from Party City without makeup and call themselves drag queens. “That’s not drag,” she says. “I do drag on a regular basis. You do it as a costume.” Mahoganny makes many of her clothes by hand. She doesn’t call them “looks” but rather “concepts.”
Her pre-show ritual is listening to the theme songs of every 007 movie and taking a shot of tequila and apple puckers.
Mahoganny’s out-of-drag identity is William Whitaker, a Governor Bradford employee. “Mahoganny is the person I would like to be,” she says. “William is very guarded. Mahoganny is not guarded. The drag becomes the armor.”
This year, Mahoganny is joining Mackenzie, Qya Cristál, and Thirsty Burlington at the Red Room for a dance party and costume contest. “We’re coming together from very different areas of drag with very different skills,” she says. One look will involve a Mortal Kombat character, but the rest are under wraps until the weekend.
Toronto-based Miss Conception, performing at the Pilgrim House, is also ready to pull out all the stops for her first Halloween show in Provincetown.
As a costume change artist, she will layer on looks evoking the Bride of Frankenstein, Cruella de Vil, Ursula, Beetlejuice, Hocus Pocus, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
“I change costumes and wigs right on stage and transform into these characters, and it’s all live singing,” she says. She matches the songs to the characters she’s playing.
After a long weekend of performances, Miss Conception plans to come home and strip off her shoes, makeup, and wig so that Kevin Levesque can make it to Sunday’s Halloween tea dance. This time, as a boy.
“It’s fun to dress as something different from what I do in my full-time career,” he says. “The beautiful thing about drag and Halloween is the ability to express oneself freely — to break out of typical bounds and laugh at what’s created in the process.”
