Road Trip: Chucktown

We headed off to Charleston on Friday for a weekend packed with good friends, good food, and high-brow arts and culture, in the form of the Spoleto Festival and trashy celebrity autobiographies. Allow me to explain. Enter the Notorious BDC, birthday boy extraordinaire (pictured here in vintage Pucci):

It was his 25th birthday, and he orchestrated the entire weekend for several friends. On Friday night, we saw a pretty amazing ballet called Oyster, inspired by a book of poems written by Tim Burton. Performed by Inbal Pinto & Avshalon Pollak Dance Company, the production featured fantastical costumes, quirky story lines and sheer athleticism. (Can anyone else spot Tim Burton's influence?)

The next day, we saw a marionette production of "Cinderella" by Italy’s Colla Marionette. More than 150 marionettes were used in the production which was topped off with a wedding scene designed by David Tutera, I think.

The birthday boy wanted to go to roadside kitchen 17 North for his birthday dinner, and a good choice it was indeed. If bacon-spiked pimento cheese and smoked salmon and caper deviled eggs are wrong, I don't want to be right.

Following dinner, we all heeded the birthday boy's request to read selections from a variety of (trashy) celebrity autobiographies. The "celebrities" ran the gamut from Bai Ling to Mike Jones (the male escort/massage therapist who outed Ted Haggard) to Marilyn Monroe to Pam Grier to the staple (but not stable) Mackenzie Phillips. However, no one could outshine the birthday boy, who read from RuPaul's bestselling memoir, Lettin It All Hang Out:

Most delightful. Just remember one thing, Boo: we are queens and we should conduct ourselves as such.