BY MICHAEL MUSTO | Making lemonade out of spilled beer, trans star Dylan Mulvaney
has turned her bizarre 2023 experience as the controversial Bud Light gal into a zany and enchanting stage show called The Least Problematic Woman in the World, which she recently brought to the Lucille Lortel Theatre. The show is a manic, sci-fi-influenced look at Dylan’s entire life so far—including gender and sexuality issues—and she explains everything with an insouciant cleverness that even a hater could love. After a performance, I congratulated the high-toned influencer on using humor to undercut any potential heavy handedness or self pitying. “I love to make people laugh,” she replied, “because it shows them we’re not monsters! My main goal is to show trans stories in any way I can. And onstage–like this one– makes me happiest.”
A running gag through the show is the metaphorical twink being eliminated inside Dylan to allow the woman to fully grow. She even leads the audience on a rousing chorus of a song called “Kill The Twink.” “Do you really have a twink up there?” I wondered, quizzically. “Oh, yes,” Dylan responded. “I think we all have a twink up there. You certainly have one.” “Back here?” I asked, gesturing to my delightful derriere. “I thought it was a gerbil!”
BUT SERIOUSLY, FOLKS | The best drag queen out there? She’s the only one with the nerve to make herself older. I’m talking Fulla Regrets, aka Michael Staffieri, with the help of enough old-age filters to make Patsy Stone blanche. In Instagram posts, the elegantly dressed gnome (fulla_regrets) recounts name-droppy stories from her distant past, whether it be Nancy Reagan performing a cucumber party trick or Judy Garland and Fulla “doing lines…RUNNING lines” at Carnegie Hall. Wrapping the insouciance up with a big bow of wit makes Fulla the most delicious raconteur in ages.
Staffieri tells me, “She’s essentially a combination of Elaine Stritch, my grandmother and the best bits of Bette Davis as she was interviewed by Dick Cavett. I owe a great deal to Charles Busch and the late, great Craig Russell as well. I’ve always been drawn to older women and found them comforting, amusing and resilient. I was intensely close to my grandmother and spent a great deal of my youth with my great-grandmother. Tough Italian American women who always seemed to carry on elegantly and with a sense of humor. Over the years, I’ve used Snapchat filters to create characters and bombard my friends with 30-second sketches as a myriad of kooky personas, but recently I married the Fulla character with a Snapchat filter called ‘old granny,’ who looks remarkably like the women in my family!…I started posting the videos and voilà. I hope to bring her to life in some kind of live stage show in the near future.” Oh, goodie. That’ll make my life Fulla.
The Best Music Duo: Former bartenders Elizabeth LeBaron and Jake Zavracky wrap lush, harmonic melodies around hateful or usually just self loathing lyrics reveling in the utter grossness of body fluids. Their deadpan, graffitied faces as they sing stuff like “I hope you’re rotting in hell” are the most strangely uplifting riffs in music today. “I’m Gonna 3D Print Your Vagina” is another certified classic.
BLIND LEADING THE BLIND | Which legendary party thrower’s then-assistant broke into her apartment, screeching, “This is all my intellectual property”? Um, no…Which 82-year-old bi designer is the subject of a four-episode unauthorized tell-all coming to Hulu…Which award winning director is currently making movies about movies—he’s doing a doc about the 1995 “erotic drama” Showgirls and one about the controversial 1980 murder thriller Cruising. Oh, and also a film about the original gay reality star, rocker Lance Loud. Bring on the docs!
What Oscar winning Best Actress recently did an online ad campaign, explaining to a friend, “Well…the parts aren’t coming in”? Which legendary DJ has fallen on such hard times that he’s stooped to selling off his old Harings? And finally: Which BDSM love story will surely be warming hearts and behinds (if not killing twinks) this holiday season? It’s Pillion, a British boot licking romance between a timid misfit (Harry Melling) and a sizzling gang leader (Alexander Skarsgard). The line of the year had been in Kiss of the Spider Woman (“You want to fuck her—but I want to BE her”), but now it’s this gem from Pillion: “Buy yourself a butt plug. You’re too tight.” Yes, we have a winner!
MICHAEL MUSTO | Musto is a columnist, pop cultural and political pundit, NYC nightlife chronicler, author, and the go-to gossip responsible for the long-running (1984-2013) Village Voice column, “La Dolce Musto.” His work appears on ChelseaCommunityNews.comas well as thedailybeast.com, and he is writing for the Village Voice(which debuted in April of 2021) and RAG Magazine (which debuted in October of 2025). Follow Musto on Instagram, via @michaelmusto.
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