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Don't wear your mask under your nose in front of Kaj-anne Pepper, better known as Pepper Pepper.
"It's an infantile, taunting move," declares the multidisciplinary drag queen. "It's a bid for attention and it's a bid for confrontation—and I'm a big fan of confrontation."
Pepper will soon be confronting—and entertaining—audiences as part of Risk/Reward's Tax Day Telethon. Federal and state deadline extensions be damned, the show will go on this Thursday, April 15, and help to raise money for Pacific Northwest artists.
"Carla Rossi and the Risk/Reward team came up with this idea because Carla thought it would be such a stupid, funny way to celebrate a holiday, which is just so fun," says Pepper. "We're the co-hosts of this bizarre, weird Tax Day Telethon as our characters, Pepper the P-sychic and Carla the Holistic Healing Life Coach."
Before the telethon, Pepper spoke to WW about beloved passions and pandemic-survival strategies, including gardening, dessert and artfully dodging those maddening under-the-nose mask wearers.
1. Proprioception
Even without gigs I'm still a choreographer, so I'm trained to know when someone is exactly 6 feet away from me. I have developed a hypervigilant sixth sense for when someone wears their mask just under their nose, which I find even more offensive than if they just didn't wear a mask at all. I can feel it like a camera, because every drag queen knows when there's a camera around, and I just walk the other way—maybe I even skip.
2. Serenity Prayer
My lesbian mothers told me it was St. Francis the Sissy, so I just kind of rolled with that. We've spent a year glued to our screens even more than before, and sometimes we need a divine intercession to remind ourselves that we are not the interwebs. Goddess, grant me the serenity to acknowledge the opinions I cannot change—and the courage to log off the internet and the wisdom to read a book.
3. My hot pink knockoff Chanel mask
It's a dainty pink cloth face mask with a high-nose ridge and the famous Chanel logo printed all over it, but cheaply. I'm not sure exactly where Cheese & Crack Snack Shop owner William Steuernagel found it, but I know that there's a big knockoff designer brand trade going on. I think it's kind of ridiculous to spend $500 on a mask that doesn't actually work just because it's printed with a designer logo.
4. Ice cream cones with chocolate cowboy hats from Cheese & Crack Snack Shop
They still have them and I like them because sugar is sweeter in the wild West. Cheese & Crack was the first restaurant I went out to during COVID, and it was pure comfort food. That's why it's fresh in my mind.
5. All my hoes—seriously, I'm a gardener now.
I'm an enthusiastic COVID gardener. You know, everyone had to put their energy somewhere. When I got that big slap across the face—which was the pandemic—I just gravitated toward gardening, and it's what I needed to do to stay grounded and service something living.
6. My good friend Pamela, aka Lorazipamela aka Lorazepam, my anxiety medication
I've chosen the holy trinity of self-care, which is gardening, therapy and effective drugs. While it hasn't been easy, it's been worth it to adjust to the shock of what a life-changing, paradigm-shifting virus can bring. I think self-care can be many, many things, and for me it's occasionally some help sleeping at night from my good friend Pamela.
7. Secrets
I'll say it like this: I was at a spiritual event once, and the teacher said, "The coin of the spirit world is attention." To me, that means that if you want something to happen, you pay attention to it—and what you pay attention to has power, and when you have power, you can do something with that power. And when you overshare, like we're trained to do, you're giving away your power. I think if you have a little bit of mystery, people are going to want to get closer to that mystery, and I think that's important.
SEE IT: Risk/Reward's Tax Day Telethon streams at risk-reward.org/event/taxdaytelethon/ on Thursday, April 15. 7:30 pm. Pay what you can, $20 suggested donation.