2nd & 2nd is the kind of apartment you only get in your twenties: huge, janky, glamorous in a feral way - the kind of place that makes absolutely no sense until you step inside and realize it is the center of the universe. Me, Greko, and a handful of other nut-jobs inhabit the 5th floor walk-up on the corner of 2nd Street and 2nd Ave. Every Friday is “game night,” which has very little to do with games and everything to do with drag, gossip, making out, and doing bits while pretending we are not poor college students.

This is also when an insane band of glamorous aliens adopts us. None of this is planned - it all happens by sheer, drunken coincidence. Breedlove, Darian Darling, MaryAnne Piccolo, Justin Tranter, Lady Starlight… somehow we’ve all been sucked into their wild gravitational pull of dive bars, hotel suites, and questionable decisions. We met them at The Hudson Hotel after Breedlove called me a “prop queen” because I was lighting my cigarettes with a gigantic novelty lighter. I wasn’t offended; I was seen. 

From there, people just… appeared. Breedlove would come straight from painting Elphaba green at Wicked, casually bringing a Broadway star into our living room like it was nothing. Darian Darling’s extensions would be sticking out of a comforter like a horror movie about glamour. Justin Tranter is playing shows with Semi Precious Weapons to huge crowds - they just whisked us to Long Island City for dinner, and I came home with a purse full of municipal sand. Don’t ask, but it sealed the deal. Everyone is teaching me something - fashion, performance, confidence, world-building - not through lectures, but through proximity, osmosis, and the daily absurdity of queer living.

2nd & 2nd isn’t just an apartment; it is the dressing room for the life I am about to stumble into.

And then comes Magic Monday.

Breedlove hosts this performance art party at St. Jerome’s - a pissy little dive bar - that doesn’t start until midnight. So, of course, we spend all evening getting dressed (Breedlove's very strict dress code is Dress to Depress) and then we parade from the East Village into the LES like a traveling circus of sequins and fake IDs. If we’re lucky (and already drunk), we pile into a yellow cab like we’re being smuggled across state lines in full glam. We are a literal traveling party - you feel it snap into place the moment we walk in.

Every couple weeks they all get tight and nervous because their “friend” is back in town. Their fucking friend Lady Gaga. She used to open for them. It’s unhinged. One night we’re down at the gross dive bar with sticky floors, and the next we’re in some deranged uptown hotel with velvet walls and a bottle bigger than my torso. But wherever we go, we go together. It reminds me of what Miss Thing Ann Cvetkovich argues - that queer community becomes an emotional archive, a living record of the nights, bodies, and friendships that teach you how to survive.

Magic Monday wasn’t just a show. It was a way of becoming. A place where I felt, for the first time, in the right orbit - surrounded by people inventing themselves in real time.