The very first* variety show Substack
not to be confused with "dom pile" or "switch row"
Hello! We’re Cassidy Dawn Graves and Babz/Comrade Barbie, and we’re the hosts of the Queers N Peers variety show (which is returning 6/5 at Brooklyn Comedy Collective/Eris in East Williamsburg). We also live together. Welcome to our inaugural newsletter.
We very much believe in the spirit of the variety show, and we’d like this newsletter to serve as the written version of a variety show. What does that mean? Has such a thing ever existed before? Well, to a degree we’re still figuring that out, and the content will surely shift and evolve as time goes on.
Babz is deeply knowledgeable about astrology, so expect some nuanced cosmic insight that goes beyond the average sun sign horoscope. We both are big into home cooking, and often collaborate to create nourishing, flavorful, fairly healthy, and often plant-based meals for ourselves, usually made in a semi-improvisational style from whatever we have in the home. We’ll be sharing information about what we’re making lately, partially because I personally love consuming Grub Street Diet-type content, and partially because maybe it’ll help show that even people who have weird schedules and ADHD and stay out late and routinely forget to meal prep can still also cook for themselves in interesting, tasty, and not-too-complicated ways.
In addition to that, we’ll be doing interviews with the performers we have on our show, plus other morsels of content about various subjects that have been on our minds. We hope you enjoy :~)
This first newsletter is free, but future editions will be behind a paywall of either $5 per month or $50 for a year. Your paid subscription will help us pay the performers we book on our variety show (and ourselves), which means for the cost of one latte/beer/fancy pastry/bodega sandwich on a roll a month, you’ll be helping to support many queer artists! Don’t you want to do that?
The Astro Zone
By Babz
I guess it’s only appropriate that I be entirely indecisive about which tastebuds the first morsel of content should hit. It’s Gemini season, and the sign of the twins has always been about multiplicity. As we enter Pride month, we’re often reminded that what is now a celebration of Queer proliferation and achievement began as a Riot. Listen, I don’t wanna spoil anyone’s fun here. We have a ton to celebrate and we should, right down to the last sniff of poppers in the wee hours of July First. Gemini season, after all, often brings on a chaotic-good flavor to our moods. Perhaps chaotic-neutral, if you’re feeling frisky.
But I don’t think it would be hyperbole to suggest that we are entering a period of time where our Uranian achievements are being challenged by a new backlash from an old Saturnian vestige of American society. Marjorie Taylor Greene said it best when she kicked off pride month with claims of a Queer Purge of the Straights (someone call Ryan Murphy, I want the movie version of this starring Elliot Page). Perhaps she was triggered by this instagram post made by the Marines that only a Mercury retrograde could cook up, featuring a row of rainbow bullets and a delightful proclamation: “Proud to Serve.” Jokes aside, the Right thinks we’re at War with them. I don’t know about you, but after the plague years, the last thing I want to do is wage war against someone who does pull-ups like a gorilla on PCP. I’m Tired. From both my lingering COVID-fatigue and what feels like being thrown down a slide in a burlap sack and landing in a new dimension where everything’s a slogging battle. But once more, unto the breach, dear friends.
Pride month occupying Gemini Season is fitting when you think of the Mercuriality of the queer community. I don’t mean that in a volatile sense, but more in the spirit of Mercury’s relationship to words. The number of letters in our ever-growing acronym has become the butt of many jokes. It’s true that as we’ve been given space to parse out our identities, we find more new language to describe who we are, and as we do, more people find their reflection in that dictionary. Even more appropriate, then, that Gemini is a mutable sign. Mutables were called double-bodied by the ancients and represented a doubling of all the things placed within them. The more, the merrier.
This is where I’ll get a bit more technical but there’s a cute joke at the end I swear, just follow me here. Remember what I said about Urianian achievements and Saturnian vestiges? Well, in the sky, right now, Uranus and Saturn are square to each other. If you’re familiar with your own chart, you might know that a square is hard to deal with. The planets tend to fight as one tries to dominate the other. Uranus is a planet that’s evoked by the disruptive, rebellious, and revolutionary, while Saturn rules over the rigid structures of society. They’ve been throwing punches in the same ring since 2020 — and that final bell doesn’t ring until 2023.
Dark, maybe, to suggest that it will get worse for us before it gets better in this country. Astrology asks us to look in the mirror and see what’s there, not what we want to see. But let me offer a bit of optimism to help you through the next few months. Mysterious cosmological forces don’t really pick real winners and losers, its endless cycles only suggest an ebb and a flow like the Moon’s tides. And as we get deeper and deeper into the next year, that Saturnian influence moves into benevolent Pisces, and those two fighting planets enter a long period of cooperation as they move back and forth into a sextile. That Saturnian society may just start to support the Uranian revolutionary dream. This idea has given me comfort as the last couple years have dropped one nightmare after another on us, and it’s the one that I want to leave you with, my dear reader.
So maybe MTG wasn’t so wrong about the Queers and her fifty year timeline of everyone being a little fruity. In fact, by the stars, she’s probably a little late with that prediction.
The Culinary Corner
By Cassidy Dawn Graves
Breakfast
Breakfast can be hard for us. We are often eating “breakfast food” between the hours of like, 11am and 4pm, sometimes because we sleep late and sometimes just because we procrastinate on deciding what to eat. We’ve found some success in keeping easy small foods around, like little skyr yogurts, microwavable oats, and peanut butter toast. I have not regularly eaten cereal since I was a teen, but it was on sale at our local grocery store and we had recently realized the new brand of oat milk we just bought is terrible for coffee (tastes WAY too much like oats; deletes the taste of even our strong homemade cold brew concentrate), so I figured it could be a good way to not let the weird oat milk go to waste and give us another option for quick breakfast food.
Honey Bunches of Oats were on sale, but we decided to check the label of a bunch of cereals to see how sugary these Bunches were compared to other stuff, because we try to care about those things at least sometimes. Turns out, Honey Bunches of Oats are one of the least sweet cereals? Even Kashi was a little sweeter, I think, which I didn’t expect. It seemed the sale cereal was meant to be.
Ultimately we ran into a bit of snag. I am often distracted and sometimes can take forever to finish even one food item. So I would pour my cereal, take three bites and do something else for a few minutes and return to a soggy mess. This happened every single time I ate the cereal, and I would still eat at least some of the sog, which is a mildly humiliating thing to do even if no one is watching you. So I might just stick to oatmeal from now on…… I did finish the last of the box on Tuesday, and was able to finish the bowl before it got soggy. Anything is possible if you believe eat in the kitchen instead of the living room where all the distractions are.
Lunch
Sometimes I spend so much time and labor making a lunch or snack-type dish for later in the week that when I’m done, I am hungry for dinner with no energy to provide myself one. In this case, we went to the big Food Bazaar on Putnam in search of Lao Gan Ma chili crisp (finally acquired after several unsuccessful attempts!) and ma po tofu ingredients. By the time we were done, we were tired and hungry and realized it was Taco Tuesday and decided to get the discount 12-taco platter (half chicken, half veggie) from the place down the street and do the tofu thing another night. With dinner outsourced, I was free to make my snack.
We had two pints of grape tomatoes (they were on sale) that were getting more wrinkled by the day. When this happens, I often turn to Smitten Kitchen’s recipes that involve slow roasting the tomatoes until they’re sweet and sun-dried-esque because it’s easy and uses up a lot of tomatoes. This time, I tried a couscous salad recipe but replaced the couscous with farro. For some reason, making a dressing in the blender always feels very laborious to me but this one, made with roasted garlic and pureed roasted tomato, was very tasty so I’d say it was worth it.
In the end, I roasted the tomatoes while we ate our tacos and did the rest of the salad after that, running over to chop olives and herbs and running back into the living room to watch whatever we were watching, probably Better Call Saul — we’re about to start the new season, and I’m excited about that.
The result was a very huge amount of farro salad with olives, parsley, mint, tomatoes, and massaged kale that wasn’t in the recipe but we had some sad-looking kale I also needed to use. We both tend to struggle with finding time and energy to feed ourselves during the day so it was very helpful to have that around! Shout out to farro for being a pal. You lasted about a week and were a friend til the end.
Dinner
We had this head of cabbage for quite some time now, probably close to a month. The good thing about cabbage is it lasts for a very long time; most of my favorite veggies are like this, which is nice, because I never know what my life or brain will look like and I don’t need things going bad in the blink of an eye.
I kept avoiding the cabbage, because I never had any ideas for it that sounded good, but then was scrolling Twitter (as I do way too much right before bed and also all the time) and encountered a tweet that said “cabbage tastes so damn good when you saute it with ginger, garlic and celery.” It must be a sign… I saw someone had replied to the tweet with a five-minute video about “the most famous cabbage recipe in China.” The comments seemed very positive and five minutes is about the maximum time I’m willing to devote to spontaneous videos, so I gave it a look. It seemed easy with good flavors and simple ingredients so I proposed it to Babz. I wasn’t sure what to serve it with other than rice, but we saw some garlic sesame faux-chicken at the store and tried that.
It was good! We both wished the cabbage was a bit crispier and more browned, a la deeply roasted Brussels sprouts, but that’s not necessarily how stir fries work and also I was afraid of burning the garlic if I cooked it any longer. I also used our Dutch oven instead of a wok due to not having a wok, so maybe that was another factor. The faux chicken was pretty good but in the future I’d toss it in a sauce or something to add some more pizazz and moisture. If you have any cabbage (or quick breakfast) ideas, feel free to let us know!!
Meet the Performers
Mini q+as with the artists gracing our stage on June 5.
What's a tasty thing you ate recently?
Charlie Bardey, comedian: Haribo Peach Gummies. Sooooo transcendent somehow every time.
Miss Bussy, drag performer: That would probably be a Shrimp Burger from Empanada Mama.
Fripp, musician: the Sunshine Burger from Toad Style in BedStuy :)
Nadia Pinder, comedian: I recently ate a pineapple Italian ice and it felt like summer had fully arrived.
Cassidy: Babz’s mom was in town this week and so was our friend Remi’s mom so we went to Balthazar (fancy) and I had grilled trout over a spinach, lentil, and walnut salad and it was not only tasty, but way bigger than I expected.
Babz: Well I ate a whole quart of that aforementioned farro salad so it’s gotta be that. Or maybe that weed gummy that a dear friend got me.
Do you know your sun, moon, and rising sign?
Charlie: I know my sun is Aries – don't know the others because my mom doesn't remember when I was born and isn't into astrology so doesn't wanna look it up.
Bussy: My sun is in Virgo, Moon is in Taurus, and Rising is Libra. An additional fact is that I am a Virgo/Libra cusp.
Fripp: gemini or cancer sun (*right* on the cusp, yet to be determined), aries moon, cancer rising
Nadia: JUST checked my chart again the other day after someone wrongfully accused me of having Aries vibes. Sun: Gemini, Moon: Pisces, Rising: Leo
Cassidy: Pisces sun, Aries moon, Scorpio rising.
Babz: I’ve got a Sun at .03 degrees of Scorpio, a moon at 12 Aquarius, and my Rising is 24 degrees of Libra. That’s for all the nerds out there.
Do you have any upcoming shows, projects, or releases we should know about?
Charlie: I have a show, Exploration: LIVE! at Union Hall, June 11th, 7:30pm (tickets here!) I also host a podcast of the same name.
Bussy: I have Drag Bingo every Monday (at Happyfun Hideaway) and Thursday (at Pink Metal). I will also be doing a pride event with my haus at Frescos.
Fripp: I’ve got another set on June 7th at Bar Freda, and a music video I directed for my pal Mallory Mercer and her song “Two-Faced” coming out later this month!
Nadia: I’m teaching a storytelling class at the Brick in July on campfire stories and everyone should take it.
Cassidy: I’m trying to book a show with my band Boy Howdy! for the first time since covid, so maybe saying that here will help me put the plan into action quicker.
Babz: I’m really excited about an essay I wrote that’s getting published by Triangle House. It’s a retrospective on the history of Western Astrology and its abuse by Imperialist nation-states. It starts with a delightful narrative about Ronald and Nancy Reagan’s use of an astrologer while in the White House.
And that’s it for our first edition! Subscribe, tell your friends, and get a ticket to our show at Brooklyn Comedy Collective on Sunday, June 5.
Thanks!!!
CDG + Comrade
*this may not be the first variety show substack, i don’t actually know