Neighbours, everybody needs good neighbours...

...and these are some of ours!

From an article By Xenia Taliotis in (bizarrely) The Telegraph two years ago:

"I’m finding rhinestones in places where the sun definitely doesn’t shine. It’s one of the hazards of being Fantasy, but I think the one I found last night doesn’t belong to her.” Fantasy is Tony’s drag queen creation, a gorgeous confection of candyfloss-pink hair, six-inch sequinned skirts, seven-inch spangled heels, and perilously plunging tops. But this particular rhinestone has nothing to do with her.

It’s from a costume belonging to Tony’s brother, Kevin – or more accurately, to his alter ego, Veronica Green, recently seen on television sashaying away from RuPaul’s Drag Race following a positive Covid diagnosis.

Sibling relationships can be fraught at the best of times, but do Tony and Kevin’s dual brother/sister personalities bring twice the strife? “We certainly interact differently when we are in drag than when we’re not,” says Kevin.

“As brothers, we are really similar and while that can be bonding, it can also, at times, put us in situations where we try to outdo one another, even if it’s over something silly like gaming. Veronica and Fantasy are very different – plus they met as adults – so there’s none of the history of competing for parental attention or of being in the same school.”

Kevin says he can sometimes feel intimidated by Fantasy’s audaciousness, while Tony admits to being more deferential to Veronica than he is to Kevin. “She commands – or is that demands – respect. I can be quite snappy with my brother, but when Veronica walks into the room, there’s none of that. I wouldn’t dare.”

Yes! One of our neighbours is indeed Tony aka Fantasy Qween, and as Madam Arcati recently got talking to him/her (thanks to another old gossipy queen who lives in in our road), we received an invitation to go to his/her Quiz Night Cabaret on Saturday!

And so it was we hopped on the bus, ten minutes up the road, to the unlikeliest of environs for a drag show, the rather twee suburb of Southgate [famous for its marvellous Art Deco Tube station, for being built on what was the entrance to the vast Medieval royal hunting-ground of Enfield Chase, for the presence of one of the oldest (and once one of the largest) surviving oak trees in London, for being the birthplace of David Puttnam, Simon Mayo, Rachel Stevens and Amy Winehouse, and, er, that's it], to the venue - what would have been deemed anywhere else as a "workmen's club", but not here; far too middle-class for that - for what turned out to be a fun night!

We didn't win the camp-as-old-tits quiz [but then again, we weren't looking the answers up our phones], and loved the atmosphere that Fantasy managed to conjure up for the packed house; a mix of obvious regulars and "friends-of-the-family"...




...however, as might have been predicted, it was unquestionably Veronica Green who stole the show!

[click any pic to embiggen]

Here's a snippet of her perfomance, taken by the Madam:

Also on stage, not performing but doing the visuals, was the other neighbour, Tony/Fantasy's boyfriend Vangelis - who, it turns out, was a contestant on The Voice in 2016 and was hand-picked by Boy George to become his regular backing vocalist!

Here's Vangelis in full campery, in a video that features all our neighbours:

Vangelis Polydorou - Throw Me

Wow. What a neighbourhood this is turning out to be! I'm waiting for the invitation to the barbecue this summer when we might meet Boy George...