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RuPaul’s DragCon 2016: Come Meet Serena ChaCha!

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RuPaul’s DragCon is coming May 7th and 8th! And with more than 40 amazing panels and dozens of meet-and-greets, it’s going to be THE TIME OF YOUR LIFE! Do you have your tickets yet?

Every day between now and then, we’re going to be highlighting the wowlebrities that will be in attendance! Today, let’s take a look at two of my favorites:

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Serena ChaCha

Serena ChaCha was born on September 17,1990 in the Republic of Panama, the land of “Butterflies, Trees, and Fish.” Growing up in Panama, Serena always had a deep-rooted passion for the arts propelling her to the top of her class. At the young age of nineteen, she undertook the challenge that drag presented while also pursuing a Bachelor of Fine Arts at Florida State University. In 2012, she graduated from Florida State University while also graduating to a new level of drag by acquiring a coveted position in the fifth season of RuPaul’s Drag Race.

Serena describes her experience in the competition as a culmination of her past exposure to diverse artistic and cultural muses, ultimately personified into a singular movement: DRAG! Her determination to evolve motivates her to keep immersing herself in all aspects of drag, be it the artistry of makeup, fashion as a form of sculpture or theatrics through performance. It is at MAC Cosmetics that Serena was able to hone her competitive makeup skills and grow under their direction for nearly five years. Refusing to settle, her skills grew and flourished into other ventures and soon expanded her brand. Serena owns and created a hand-crafted wigline, ChaCharina Hair, where armed with her gifts from God, she can continue to make people beautiful. From working at the makeup counter helping women look their best to transforming Queens into their fiercest selves, Serena is a goddess among men.

Follow her on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

Watch Serena on Ring My Bell:

And the Official Serena Chacha Music Video for “Cha Cha”

The post RuPaul’s DragCon 2016: Come Meet Serena ChaCha! appeared first on World of Wonder.


#RoyalCards: Prince Charles & Camilla, Kate & Prince William + Hot Prince Harry’s Surprise Christmas Greeting

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It used to be a holiday tradition, but these days you’re lucky if you even get an email. Well, the royals LOVE tradition so, Prince Charles and wife, Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, have sent out their 2015 holiday card, and the couple was photographed by a friend on a private estate in August. The pic of Kate, Prince William, and cutie kids George and Charlotte was shot in October by Chris Jelf, a former soldier, who said in a statement;

“I thoroughly enjoyed photographing a very lovely family, although you have to be sharp as you don’t have long when there are two young children involved! I hope everyone enjoys this photo and I am honored that The Duke and Duchess have decided to share it with the public.”

And ginger hottie Prince Harry used this photograph with Battle of Britain veteran Tom Neil for his Holiday greeting. Aww, sweet. Could we love him any more?

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The post #RoyalCards: Prince Charles & Camilla, Kate & Prince William + Hot Prince Harry’s Surprise Christmas Greeting appeared first on World of Wonder.

Radio DJ Locks Himself in Studio and Plays “Last Christmas” Over and Over and Over and Over Again

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Joe Kohlhofer, a radio DJ in Austria, went a bit off script when he locked himself in his studio and played Wham‘s ubiquitous holiday classic “Last Christmas”  24 times during his breakfast show, while his co-host watched helplessly through the glass partition. HA! The phone lines immediately lit up, as the station fielded dozens of calls from listeners pleading with him to stop. Two hours later, he finally relented when his 4-year-old daughter called in to say she didn’t like it. The station says his stunt wasn’t sanctioned. Deputy director Tommy Schmid told the Kurier newspaper he would face “consequences.”

However, Kohlhofer has posted multiple clippings of the media coverage on his Facebook page, saying he felt “proud.” The Huffington Post reports the station has since made the most of his infamy, and covered the incident in great detail on its own website. So it seems unlikely he’ll be taken off air anytime soon.

Listen to “Last Christmas” as many times as you like below.

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#12DaysOfGiving: Heifer International

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Have a little extra money this holiday season and want to give back? Looking for a charity that needs your help? We’ve got a daily list charitable donations for you to make this Christmas a special one. Today, we highlight the work of Heifer.org, a fabulous organization that helps impoverished families achieve self-reliance by providing them the livestock and tools they need to sustain themselves. This year, I gave a goat in my mother’s name (MERRY CHRISTMAS, MOM!), so that a family in Africa (or Central America or the Middle East) could have milk and cheese FOR YEARS to come! It was only $120! FOR A FREAKIN’ GOAT! How great is that?

From the Heifer.org mission statement:

Heifer International’s mission is to work with communities to end world hunger and poverty and to care for the Earth.

Dan West was a farmer from the American Midwest and member of the Church of the Brethren who went to the front lines of the Spanish Civil War as an aid worker. His mission was to provide relief, but he soon discovered the meager single cup of milk rationed to the weary refugees once a day was not enough.

And then he had a thought: What if they had not a cup, but a cow?

That “teach a man to fish” philosophy is what drove West to found Heifer International. And now, nearly 70 years later, that philosophy still inspires our work to end world hunger and poverty throughout the world once and for all.

HOW IT WORKS

We empower families to turn hunger and poverty into hope and prosperity – but our approach is more than just giving them a handout. Heifer links communities and helps bring sustainable agriculture and commerce to areas with a long history of poverty. Our animals provide partners with both food and reliable income, as agricultural products such as milk, eggs and honey can be traded or sold at market.

When many families gain this new sustainable income, it brings new opportunities for building schools, creating agricultural cooperatives, forming community savings and funding small businesses.

Such a great idea. And you don’t have to just get a goat! You can buy a flock of geese, or a water buffalo, or an alpaca… the list goes on and on. Or you can partner with other people and go IN ON a water buffalo together. It’s all really simple.

Go HERE to learn more about what you can do to help inspire change and transform a family.

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Could There Be Robot Reindeer in Santa’s Future?

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HAS SCIENCE GONE TOO FAR? Terrifying robotics lab Boston Dymnamics (who created the RUNNING ROBO-DOG and RUNNING HUMANOID that will one day hunt us down – 1st Law be damned), has a video of three robotic reindeer hopping in sync as they pull Santa’s sleigh across a lawn, in what is surely a nightmarish vision of Christmases to come. Seriously, if those headless reindeer start flying over MY HOUSE, and landing on MY ROOF – that’s it for me. I’m checking out of this planet. And when Boston Dynamics makes a robot SANTA? It’s OVER for mankind. Just sayin’

Watch the beginning of the robocolypse below:

From TIME:

The robots resemble Boston Dynamics’ dog-like Spot model, but dressed up with antlers and Christmas decor. Spot grabbed the Internet’s attention last February when Boston Dynamics posted a video of it jogging alongside a human, showing a surprising level of speed and agility. The robotic pup even braced itself and was able to remain upright on its four legs after being kicked.

Boston Dynamics, which Google acquired in 2013, is known for creating large animal-like robots. Its Cheetah robot is capable of running 28.3 miles per hour, as the company showcased in 2012.

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Noah from Denmark: WOWlebrity Receptionist of the Day

Kyle Krieger Becomes The Hottest Santa Ever In “Santa Baby” (Dog Version)

#WOWBestOf2015: Randy Barbato’s Favorite Things

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Day 3 of OUR FAVORITE THINGS! All week we’re asking WOW contributors to list the things they couldn’t live without in 2015.  Check out my list below!

RANDY’S FAVORITES:

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– Favorite TV Star of the Year: Trevor Noah

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– Favorite Movie Star of the Year: Emory Cohen from Brooklyn

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– Favorite TV Show of the Year: Rupaul’s Green Screen Christmas

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– Favorite Radio Personality of the Year: Sandra Bernhard “Sandyland” (on Radio Andy)

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– Favorite Color of the Year: Red Dahlia

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– Favorite Pop Star of the Year: Alabama Shakes Brittany Howard

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– Favorite Saturday Night Live Cast member: Leslie Jones

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– Favorite Newsletter: Bob Lefsetz http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/

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– Favorite Instagram: Mathuism


– Favorite Twitter: @Rupaul

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– Favorite Acai Bowl in LA: Naturewell (Silver Lake)

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– Favorite Documentary: TOO MANY!!!

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– Favorite Movie: Inside Out

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– Best Supporting Actor: The Bear (The Revenant)

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– Best Fashion Blog: Fashions By Blog http://fashionsbylily.weebly.com

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HoliGay Stocking Stuffer: Bianca Del Rio’s “Rolodex of Hate” Comedy Special!

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Crowned RuPaul’s Drag Race queen Bianca Del Rio‘s Rolodex of Hate comedy special is available, and would make a fabulous digital gift for all your squirrel-friends!

For those of you who didn’t make it to see the stand-up show in person, the hilarity has been released on Vimeo for purchase or to rent. YAAASS! This show is not to be missed!

Bianca Del Rio, season 6 winner of Rupaul’s Drag Race, is hilariously hateful in this stand-up comedy special. The self-described “clown in a gown” takes the audience on a journey through her childhood, pointing out the experiences that created the “Rolodex of Hate” in her brain. Along the way she takes a few detours to interact with the audience. No one is safe from her lightening quick lashes, but her victims hardly have time to feel the sting before she zips on to the next topic.

This show is not for the faint of heart, so leave the prudes at church. Bianca is foul mouthed and unapologetic, but she points out that she’s the biggest joke of all. The NY Times calls her “The Joan Rivers of the Drag World”, and Joan Rivers herself called Bianca’s humor “So funny! So sharp!”

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#12DaysofGiving: Wanna Get on the Smile Train?

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Have a little extra money this holiday season and want to give back? Looking for a charity that needs your help? We’ve got a daily list charitable donations for you to make this Christmas a special one. I’ve given to this organization over the years and when I was making the big bucks, one year I donated enough to pay for two surgeries. $500 is not nothing, but to change two lives FOREVER? Peanuts. Smile Train‘s mission is simple.

Every year more than 170,000 children in the developing world are born with cleft lip and/or palate. Most can’t afford surgery.

“Smile Train is an international children’s charity with a sustainable approach to a single, solvable problem: cleft lip and palate. Millions of children in developing countries with unrepaired clefts live in shame, but more importantly, have difficulty eating, breathing and speaking. Cleft repair surgery is simple, and the transformation is immediate. Our sustainable model provides training and funding to empower local doctors in 85+ developing countries to provide 100%-free cleft repair surgery in their communities.”

It’s not necessary to pay for an entire surgery, you can donate as little as $20. And they have creative ways to collect $$ too. (You can even send a friend a “Grouchy Carol“.) I’m signing up to give monthly. I won’t notice $20 a month going out of my account, and this time next year, one surgery will be paid for. Life changed. You can go to their website here to find out more.

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Family Guy Classic: ‘Christmastime Is Killing Us’

A Crispmas Memory: Quentin Reading “‘Twas The Night Before Christmas”

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Quentin Crisp

Quentin Crisp was born Denis Charles in Sutton, Surrey on Christmas Day in 1908. I didn’t meet him until about 75 years later in New York City, through my ex boyfriend’s girlfriend. I was working at Vogue at the time and I “courted” Quentin non-romantically, who was 50+ years my senior.

As a young designer at Vogue, I got loads of invitations to screenings, plays and various events and Quentin became my defacto date. (Once we were watching a series of short movies at an avant-guard Gay Film Festival at the Anthology Film Archives and after a particularly obtuse little film had ended, the lights came up, I turned to Quentin. He looked at me and said one word. “Why?”)

I wasn’t aware of it but we must have made a pretty cute pair back then and over the years, after countless “dates”, we became, what I considered, friends. But, I felt, as many times we ate dinner together, chatted, gossiped and talked on the phone together, he was a bit of a sphinx, an unknowable entity, really. One of the sweetest memories of him was eating dinner at his favorite Second Avenue diner, practically in silence – we were at that comfortable stage where he didn’t need to have his Quentin “on”.

I threw a 90th birthday party for him that turned out to be quite the event… John Waters, Rufus Wainwright, Simon Doonan, Penny Arcade, Lauren Hutton, Amanda Lepore and many others – they all came and paid their respects to the great man, whom they truly loved. Allegra Huston penned new words to God Save Our Queen and we all sang it to him. But, sadly, he was gone before he turned 91. I miss him, as though we were actually related – like he were my great gay uncle, on the English side of my family. (Ironically, my mother’s last name after she remarried is CRISP.)

Anyone ringing him up on the phone, the dialogue intro was always the same…

“Oh, YEEESSSSS!

Hi, Quentin. It’s Trey.

Oh, hello, how are you?

I’m fine. How are you?

Oh, I’ve gone on living, in spite of everything…”

I can still hear THAT voice – and so can you, if you listen to the audio of this reading of Twas The Night Before Christmas. So, listen, and look at the style, and soak in one of THE most interesting characters of the 20th century.

Happy Birthday, Quentin.

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“‘Twas the Night Before Christmas” Sung to the Eagles “Hotel California”

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Drag legend Jackie Beat sure is committed to this bit, and it works. It really works. I remember Michael Musto once (spontaneously, walking down the street) sang the words from “Total Eclipse of the Heart” to the tune of “The Greatest Love of All” and it was pretty amazing. But this tops even that.

Also classic: Gillgan’s Island to “Stairway to Heaven.”

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Timeless Christmas Treasure: Bobby Trendy Sings “Silver Sells”

#TheHighLife: Watch a Christmas Elf Wrap Gifts on Cocaine, LSD, and Ketamine

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WARNING: Not for everyone. But, here’s the set-up: Over the course of two days in December, cutie-patootie Sam Briggs ran a gift-wrapping stall raising money for charity. Over that period, he took acid, K, and what appears to be a shit-ton of coke. The people who ran the stall had no idea about his drug taking, and the money raised was genuinely for charity. “DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME,” the video warns. Not at Christmas. Not ever.

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Tune for Today: Greg Scarnici’s “Christmas on the Dance Floor”

Watch Now: Damiana and Tanya Roberts’ Christmas Carol

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Here’s a Christmas Eve video treat to put under your tree – Damiana Garcia and her legendarily shelarious gal pal Tanya Roberts (the brilliant Drew Droege) are back with their brand-new lady adventure, “Tanya Roberts’ Christmas Carol”! During Damiana’s Christmas-time visit to Tanya’s home, the ladies are stricken by a gas leak from an unlit stove pilot. In their carbon monoxide poisoning-induced delirium, they see visions of Tanya’s Christmas Past, Present and Future, which may or may not motivate Tanya to pay Damiana the money she owes her. Merry Damianamas and Happy Tanyakah!!! Be sure to subscribe to the Michael Lucid Presents channel to see more of Damiana’s videos!

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#MerryXmas: The Story Of World’s Most Fabulous Christmas Tree

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This most impressive Christmas tree belonged to silent film actor/ photographer/ renaissance man, Harold Lloyd. His home, Greenacres really sparkled at Christmastime and nothing reflected that sparkle more than his overstuffed Christmas Tree with more than 5,000 glass and handmade ornaments. As the collection grew, so did the tree. It eventually required several trees to be put together along with reinforced branches and stainless steel bolts. His grandaughter, Suzanne Lloyd, told Beverly Hills Resident of her Christmas tree memories:

“It started sometime around Thanksgiving. My grandparents would take me downtown to the train yards where the annual shipment of trees would arrive for the holiday season. We would pick out three large Douglas firs and they would be wired together to make one enormous, fantastic Christmas tree. It sat at one end of the garden room rising 20 feet in the air. It was 9 feet wide and almost 30 feet around. Imagine the amount of presents that can fit under a tree that is 30 feet around!

It took from Thanksgiving until Christmas to decorate the tree. Over the years, my grandfather had collected thousands of ornaments from all over the world. The tree held one-of-a-kind rare ornaments valued in the hundreds of dollars when they were first purchased in the `30’s and `40’s. The tree also held homemade ones that Harold received from his charity work.

I remember a jeweled encrusted ostrich egg, and a sequined football, (a reference to the college football hero Harold Lloyd played in his most popular film, “The Freshman.” I particularly loved a Christmas ball given to him by his friend, make-up artist, Wally Westmore, that was a miniature diorama depicting a bespectacled Harold in a red bathrobe trimming the tree.

One Christmas, I was with Daddy shopping for more ornaments in Saks Fifth Avenue. He plucked more and more ornaments off the store’s white-flocked display tree unable to decide which ones to purchase. Finally, he realized that every ornament on the tree would look nice at Greenacres and quickly decided right then and there to buy them all. Since there was no room on the tree at home, his impulse purchase had to include Saks white-flocked display tree as well! So the 12 foot, completely decorated tree, was shipped off to Greenacres and found a home in our front entrance hall. I have no idea where Saks put their presents that year after Harold left a gapping hole in their Christmas display.

One year we counted over 5,000 ornaments hanging from the tree and we still had enough left over to decorate 3 more trees just as big! Every year the tree grew larger to hold more ornaments; then one year it became a permanent fixture in our home. It was simply too large, too decorated and too engineered to disassemble. So we had it fireproofed and celebrated Christmas every day of the year!”

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(via Beverly Hills Resident)

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#TopThis: This Christmas, Artist Mark Gagnon “Booked” a Dream Job at The White House

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This holiday season, Opening Ceremony founders Carol Lim and Humberto Leon were one of three fashion designers chosen to decorate the ground floor of the White House and they got my old pal, artist Mark Gagnon, to create the seven custom-made tree toppers. This year’s “Timeless Traditions” theme was supposed to showcase long-held customs across the country while highlighting major moments in American history. Carol and Humberto decorated the White House Library, which houses a collection of over 2,700 books and they got Mark to make seven tree-topping book covers. When I saw the pics, I had to find out some more details and got in touch with Mark to ask him some nosey questions.

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Amazing opportunity, Mark. How did you get involved in this project?
Over the years working with David Hoey at Bergdorf Godman, I have become good friends with many of the creative people working there. Johanna Burke and I both continue to contribute to Bergdorfs. She has created her own business doing these kinds of visual endeavors. She knew Su Barber who works for Opening Ceremony and put Su in touch with me.

What kind of parameters were you given?
None really, I just had to work with the quotes given by the White house. I also was asked to look at Olympia Le tan as source for inspiration. They asked for a few of the books to be openly animated. Other than that is was free range and I took advantage of it.

So, what’s your favorite topper…
I actually personalized two of them. The piece with the birds is dedicated to my 95 yr old Aunt. She is a World War II veteran and recently fell and broke her shoulder. She signs every card and letter with this little doodle of a bird. I used her drawing as the image for the cover. The pink book has a silhouette of my mom on it. She has had a few bad health issues as well and I wanted to make her laugh by telling her her portrait is hanging in the White House!

Will you get them all back or do they go in some White House archive?
I think I am getting them back…

…hopefully with a letter from Michelle or Barack!
Would be sweet. Why don’t you contact your friend Michelle and suggest it!

OK. I’ll text her right now…
(J/K)

We were both teasing, but I DID meet the FLOTUS last year and my Facebook profile pic is us together, so my friends are FOREVER reminded of this fact. Check out more of Mark’s fantastic work here and if you’re in New York City, oooh and ahhh over Bergdorf Goodman‘s amazing windows. Chances are Mark has his hand in their creation too.

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#Beardos: Some of the Best Contestants From “World Beard & Mustache Championships”

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