• The finale to RuPaul's Drag Race on Monday was not a finale at all—it was a blue-ballsy psych-out. Hometown hero Jinkx Monsoon and tons of screaming fans crammed into Julia's on Broadway for the crowning of "America's next drag superstar," only to see RuPaul announce that she hadn't decided. Gah! Stop what you're doing and vote now for Jinkx by tweeting "@RuPaulsDragRace Jinkx Monsoon #dragrace"! According to sources, Drag Race films three possible endings, so no one knows yet who the winner will be.
• Everyone was shattered to hear that young-adult author E. L. Konigsburg died over the weekend. From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler is the best book about running away from home and living in a museum that any child could read. Celebrate Konigsburg's life by passing on a copy of Mixed-Up Files to a kid in your life today.
• Performed last weekend at On the Boards, KT Niehoff's Collision Theory was touchy-feely dance/theater that insisted on extended audience interaction and built to an explicitly conveyed moral about the value of communicating our stories. Which makes it all the stranger that, during Friday's post-play discussion with KUOW's Marcie Sillman, Niehoff visibly bristled at benign question after benign question, a number of which she refused to answer. Cheers for Sillman's professionalism, jeers for hippie-dippy dance theater with a sour core.
• A recent visit to the Barnes Foundation in its year-old new location on Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia brought many, many, many settings of eyeballs upon Renoirs, since the Barnes has more Renoirs than any other single collection. This confirmed what was previously suspected: Renoir painted fruit very well, and painted many women and girls, but painted women and girls to look like ripe fruit. You have to be a horny straight man or a fool to overlook this kitsch. It was fun to spot the horny straight men/fools in the galleries, especially a fat Frenchman in a business suit, exclaiming and pontificating to a rapt group of American men in business suits.
• Sunday's meeting to determine the future of the Zine Archive and Publishing Project went well, if a little slowly. The group of 50 or so concerned citizens broke out into three discussion groups based on ZAPP's current responsibilities: archiving, community outreach, and event programming. Nothing concrete was determined, but people took on tasks. The next meeting will be in May; keep an eye on The Stranger's readings calendar for details.
• In the textile manufacturing plant that's now the artists live-work space the Bemis Building, there are 30 gorgeous, light-filled live-work lofts, and they have an open house twice a year. The event this past weekend featured resident and visiting artists. The standout has to be Vic DeLeon's taxidermy-and-other-preserved-living-things museum. Contact the Bemis and feast your eyes on a freeze-dried human heart and a taxidermied rat posed like the velociraptors in Jurassic Park.