There comes a point in every party girl’s life when the body delivers some unwelcome news.
For Monét X Change, that moment arrived about six months ago in New York. After a night out club-hopping in heels, she discovered that staying out past 11 p.m. now came with consequences.
The next morning, getting out of bed was a struggle. Everything hurt. The body that once happily carried her from bar to bar had apparently instituted new operating hours.
“I can’t do this anymore,” X Change remembers thinking. “The body just doesn’t bounce back as it used to. My pussy does, but the rest of me doesn’t.”
That realization provides fertile territory for High Heels, Bad Knees, X Change’s new hour of stand-up, which kicks off its fall run with three performances at Cobb’s Comedy Club (Aug. 21-22).
The show finds the “RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars 4” winner and recent “Traitors” standout confronting the indignities of getting older, the absurdity of adulthood, and the realization that some of the things she couldn’t wait to grow up to do became considerably less exciting when she discovered she had to keep doing them forever.
As a kid, X Change remembers longing for financial independence. Now she has it—and would perhaps like to review the terms and conditions.
“I really have to pay my own bills for the rest of my life,” she says. “I can’t call my mom and ask for money. I have to be conservative, which is really annoying to me.”
There’s also the disconcerting realization that the clubs she once frequented no longer necessarily feel like her natural habitat.
Nothing drives home the passage of time quite like a 22-year-old failing to recognize a song considered foundational cultural knowledge.
X Change points to Britney Spears as a particularly painful example.
Younger generations may know the tabloid and social-media version of Spears, she says, but they didn’t experience the pop star at the height of her cultural power, when millions watched her now-iconic 2001 “MTV Video Music Awards” performance of “Slave 4 U” with a python draped over her shoulders.
“They will never know the prowess that Miss Britney Spears had in her prime,” says X Change. “She really was our pop princess.”
It’s exactly the kind of generational divide that gives High Heels, Bad Knees its comic engine.
But for audiences who know X Change primarily from reality TV or her long-running podcast “Sibling Rivalry” with Bob the Drag Queen, seeing her do stand-up offers something different.
X Change has spent more than a year and a half developing this material and nearly five years figuring out what her voice as a stand-up comedian actually sounds like.
Onstage, she says, audiences are seeing “a more focused version” of her comedy.
“This is an hour of curated material,” she says. “I’m really proud of it.”
The subjects range from aging to parenthood—specifically, X Change’s bewilderment at people who willingly choose to have children—to a story near the end of the show that she refuses to spoil, except to say that it routinely leaves audiences stunned and crying with laughter.
The new show also arrives at a moment when audiences have recently gotten to see another side of X Change.
In Season 4 of Peacock’s “The Traitors,” she made a conscious decision not to rely on drag as armor. After the first day, she largely appeared as Kevin Akeem Bertin, the person underneath the wig.
After roughly 15 years of performing in drag, the experience proved unexpectedly affirming.
Drag can provide a kind of protection, she explains. Ten pounds of makeup, lashes, hair, and costume create a layer between performer and audience. But inside the castle, without that layer, she found people still gravitating toward her.
The experience “helped illuminate for me how magnetic my personality is outside of drag,” says X Change. “It’s nice to know that people see it in and out of drag.”
San Francisco audiences have had ample opportunity to see the many versions of X Change over the years—from drag shows and Peaches Christ film parodies to comedy and musical performances. That history is part of why she is particularly enthusiastic about bringing High Heels, Bad Knees here.
“I love how weird San Francisco people are,” she says.
X Change sees the city as a place where performers don’t have to sand down their edges or anticipate what an audience expects from them.
“I never feel pressure to acquiesce to what I think they want or how San Francisco wants me to show up,” she says. “San Francisco really respects honesty in your art.”
Her assessment of the local drag scene is similarly affectionate. San Francisco queens, she says, combine “a New York street sensibility with a West Coast vibe”—sharp but relaxed.
New York queens might snatch a tip directly from your hand. “San Francisco queens,” says X Change, are “cunty but gentle.”
Her relationship with drag itself has evolved considerably since she first started performing.
X Change was prepared to work a full-time job and do drag on the side indefinitely. Instead, she eventually left that position, became a full-time performer, landed on “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” and built a career whose scope her younger self could scarcely have imagined.
“I just didn’t realize the full, rich life that drag would afford me one day,” X Change says.
That success hasn’t made drag feel any less transgressive to her. As politicians continue attempting to legislate drag and target transgender people, X Change sees simply putting on a frock and challenging conventional ideas about gender as inherently political.
“Daring to be different,” she says, “will always be a political act.”
But not every part of X Change’s life is quite so weighty.
Away from stages, TV sets, and podcast studios, she’s adjusting nicely to Los Angeles life. She rides bikes, recently took up rollerblading, spends time with friends, and plays “a lot of fucking video games.”
And when she gets to San Francisco, there is apparently one other essential stop: a tiny late-night diner whose name she steadfastly refuses to remember.
What she does recall is the food—a baked macaroni and cheese concoction involving chicken and asparagus that she repeatedly finds herself eating in a back booth sometime around 3 a.m.
At this point, forgetting the restaurant’s name has become “a mental protest,” she jokes.
Perhaps that after-hours ritual will survive even as the late-night clubbing fades.
After all, High Heels, Bad Knees isn’t really about surrendering to age. It’s about discovering the comedy in the gap between the person you still imagine yourself to be and the body sending increasingly urgent reminders that circumstances have changed.
But her heels will remain high until further notice, X Change promises, and her knees will just have to deal.
MONÉT X CHANGE: HIGH HEELS, BAD KNEES 8/21-22 at Cobb’s Comedy Club, SF. More info here.
