Anthurium no. 1594 "Roxy-Cotten Candy"

Before you ask: yes, that's how it's spelled. I checked. (This is actually pretty smart, because although search engines will try to correct the spelling, if you say no, you stupid search engine, I typed it that way on purpose how dare you question me, almost all the results delivered are actually for the drag queen. Imagine coming up with a way to get a search engine to deliver relevant results! In 2017, no less!)

It took me a while to explain the name. I mean, I had a guess just from reading it, but confirming took more time.

First I came up with a Yahoo! Answers (that is, Yahoo! "Answers;" it's pretty clear Yahoo!'s never attempted any kind of quality control¹) page in which I learned that there are some people out there who believe the drug is called "oxy cotton" and/or "roxy cotton."^{2, 3} The source of "oxy cotton" specifically might be a song by Lil Wyte, called "Oxy Cotton," which from the lyrics seems to be basically just "Hello, my name is Lil Wyte, and I enjoy abusing and selling drugs; here is an exhaustive list of the drugs I specifically enjoy consuming, and the forms and quantities in which I prefer to consume them."

Not really fair to blame rappers for the opiate crisis, but . . . I feel like some of them could probably be more involved in finding a solution for it.

So. Yeah. That's kinda depressing. When I posted about Kandy Ho the other day,⁴ I wasn't thinking about this post being up next, or the likely meanings of "Roxy-Cotten," so I feel like I should reassure you that the next few names in the lineup are way less tragic and depressing.⁵

What does Roxy do, personally? Drag queen shit, it looks like. Basically what you'd expect. There's a Twitter account,⁶ Instagram, Facebook,⁷ YouTube channel, blah blah blah. (The weary sighing here is not because any of these things are particularly bad, or because Roxy does them especially poorly; I'm just tired of doing a search for a queen and having everything that comes up being social media accounts. "I'm so happy to be at @place doing #thing with @othertwitteraccount #loveya #sohappy." It looks like connection with other people, and very rarely it might actually be connection with other people, but mostly social media is like when you go into an animal shelter and all the dogs start barking at you, and all the barks reverberate off the walls and floor to the point where there's just this cacophony of barks blending into one another to the point where you can't tell one dog's bark from another. What I always hope to find is an interview where the queen talks about what they do and why they do it and what other things they like and what they think drag is and other things they're thinking about and so forth, but four out of five times, it's "@place is the best! Come meet me at @otherplace tomorrow between 2-5 PM! #iwouldliterallysurrendereverythingthatmakesmeagenuineanduniquehumanbeingtohavemyexistencevalidatedbytheenvyofalargenumberofotherhumans.")

That's harsh. I probably don't mean that. It's been a long week, what with the prostitution and drug use and Ric Ocasek and what have you. Let's move on to the seedling.

So Roxy's first bud had me kind of excited, because it was an odd color. The seed parent, 0330 Faye Quinette, was notable for having flower buds that were sort of a rich, woody brown, which I hadn't seen before. When the spathe actually opened and turned out to be orange inside instead of brown, I was disappointed. I mean, I eventually got used to Faye, and I like her now, but at the time it was a lot more ordinary than I hoped for. Roxy's first bud was an even darker brown than Faye's had been, and unlike Faye also had fairly pronounced blackish veining:

And I was thinking, okay, well, it's probably still orange on the inside, but a dark orange with black veins would still be pretty cool, right? So I was kind of cautiously excited, because I learned nothing from Faye. So then the spathe opened and it was just . . . red.

A dark red, sure. Maybe a little orangey-brown in the red somewhere. Not boring. But nowhere near as cool as the inflorescence I'd imagined, so I was disappointed. The second bloom had less thrips damage and was a little bit more together just in general, with more interesting coloration on the spadix.

And it's worth noting that the foliage is also pretty interesting; I don't know if it's actually genetically inclined to make long, narrow, asymmetrical foliage, but it's done it at least once:

So that's kind of interesting too. And even with red spathe "fronts," the "backs" remain brownish, and retain the contrasting veining, so I'm pleased about that.

And it's now bloomed twice while in a 3-inch pot, so it has enthusiasm in its favor.

The upshot: Roxy gets to stay and be promoted the next time I have a chance to move some plants up to 4-inch pots, 'cause it's weird, and weird is good. We could probably use more weird.

Two other seedlings from the same seedling group have bloomed so far (1589 Anita Waistline and 1592 Maliena B Itchcock), and a couple other seedlings of 0330 Faye Quinette have bloomed too (1634 Helena Handbag and 1679 Madison Adjective); Roxy's probably the most unusual and interesting of the five.

The next seedling's not that big of a deal, but you haven't seen anything like 1419 Maya Douglas and 1103 Valeria T. before. (At least not here.) Valeria's even actually pretty. So hang in there. I'll try not to remind you of social ills, shame you for using social media, or ruin your enjoyment of any 1980s comedians for, like, at least a week.

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¹ Just to underline the point, one of the responses on the linked page, a question about whether there are any dangers of snorting pills, which was apparently posted by a parent who recently discovered that their son had been snorting "pills" (presumably prescription medication?) for two years, was basically he could get a sinus infection; sounds like he wants some attention.
Which, I mean, no shit he wants attention -- it took his parent two years to notice that he had a drug problem. But sinus infections aren't really the headline here: crushing and snorting opiates is a really good way to overdose on them, because they're absorbed faster. Something that none of the answers at Yahoo! even mentions as a possible danger of snorting oxy. Don't get your health care advice from Yahoo! Answers. (As if the name "Yahoo! Answers" wasn't enough of a tip-off.)
² Also homophones continue to be the bane of my existence, or at least one of the banes. I have a lot of banes. Should probably dial back on the banes.
Oxycontin -- notice, oxycoNtin -- is not even remotely the same as "heroine." A heroine is a female hero or protagonist; for the drug you want heroin, no "e" at the end.
It's possible that we can hold Lorde partly responsible for this, though I'm sure people were confused about whether or not to add the "e" before 2013 so it's not all her fault.
Oxycontin (generic name oxycodone) is in fact quite a bit like the no-"e" heroin. Unfortunately.
³ There is a brand name for an oxycodone/paracetamol combination, "Roxicet," which is probably where the "roxy" part comes from.
⁴ Did you watch the video in the Kandy Ho post? Go watch the video in the Kandy Ho post.
⁵ 0886 Zaria Baudit, 1419 Maya Douglas, 1103 Valeria T., 1634 Helena Handbag, 0645 Mabel Syrup, 1721 Leonid the Magnificent. See? Not sad and horrible at all.
⁶ The description for which brags, "Once called the Gallagher of Drag."
Oof. Honey, that was not a compliment. You don't want to be the Gallagher of anything.
⁷ Left unlinked on purpose because fuck Facebook.

More re: Anthurium 1707 "Kandy Ho"

The husband has observed that The Cars released an album (and song) in 1979 named "Candy-O," which is possibly the intended reference, not prostitution. He didn't understand the word "ho" to necessarily indicate prostitution in the first place, even, which surprises me but people use words differently sometimes. So maybe I got all uncomfortable over nothing? Or sort of nothing? Maybe Kandy Ho just really likes late-70s Cars albums?

(It's possible that this well-executed and sad Cincinnati Enquirer article about the heroin epidemic, posted to MetaFilter on Monday, primed me to be more upset about implied prostitution than I would normally be, as I'd read it not long before I started working on the blog post. I mean, we should probably be upset about prostitution to some degree or another all the time anyway, but.)

(Going strictly by the cover art, I'm not, like, 100% certain that "Candy-O" isn't itself a prostitution reference of some kind. The song lyrics aren't, like, crystal clear.)

Anthurium nos. 1707 "Kandy Ho" and 1493 "Kalypso Bang"

Neither of these are very exciting seedlings, so I'm not going to stay on-topic. Not even going to begin on-topic. Brace yourself.¹

I'm not comfortable with Kandy Ho's name. Some of it, no doubt, is that I just don't like to be reminded that there are sex workers out there, period, because it makes me sad that I live in a society where that's a thing some people, particularly transgendered women, wind up having to do because they are prevented from doing anything else.²

I don't know if that's Kandy Ho's intention,³ and whether or not it is, it would hardly be unique, a drag performer making light of an awful thing for a joke. (See: Sharon Needles, Detox, Amber Alert, Meth, etc. One of the drag queen names I came up with is actually a pretty dark joke about abortion which is hopefully too obscure for most people to get.⁴ Roller derby names are this way too: violence, suicide, prostitution, drug abuse, and the occasional Holocaust reference. Making a joke out of horrible things is one way people manage living in a world that contains horrible things.⁵)

The problem is more that over the last year or so, I've gotten a lot more brittle around these sorts of jokes, because all the hypothetical, abstract, distant, or historical bad things I've heard people talk about all my life are suddenly a lot more real and immediate. I feel it all differently. So, once, I would have been like, oh, a 'ho' joke, cute, and now my knee-jerk response is but . . . isn't prostitution actually kinda, you know, sad, and tragic, and something people wind up doing because they don't have better options?

Which doesn't affect my enjoyment of what Kandy does very much. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that RuPaul's Drag Race did a terrible job of showcasing her as a performer: she's actually pretty awesome. The audio on this is terrible because the audience won't stop fucking screaming, but check it out anyway:

I mean, the lip synching is for shit, but the costuming! The choreography! That flip at 2:18! That's impressive dancing. You wouldn't know she was capable of that from watching Drag Race. So I don't have a problem with her. I think Kandy's great; it's just . . . the name.⁶

As for our seedlings, well, Kandy doesn't have the most interesting color.

The foliage is interesting, though: both very shiny and very elongated, with one of the leaves also being oddly saddle-shaped. Might be interesting if subsequent leaves look the same.

1707 Kandy Ho is another one of the seedlings from 0234 Ross Koz that don't resemble Ross at all.

1493 Kalypso Bang has only produced one bloom so far, which may or may not wind up being representative.

The bloom was small, and didn't age very well.

Thrips damage also turns out to be a problem, both on the spathe and the foliage,

so it's probably not worth keeping around, but I will probably still give it a chance to try a second bloom before I make the final decision.

Kalypso's the second of four seedlings from 0245 Sawyer Ad to bloom so far (the first being 0946 Mysti Oldhaze). The third one looks nothing like any of the other seedlings, and I'm pretty excited about it; you'll get to meet it in about a week.

About all I could come up with on Kalypso Bang the queen is that she's in the UK, and her makeup skills are fantastic.⁷ I think based in London, but I can't find the page that would confirm that, so don't take it as gospel.

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¹ This presumes that staying on-topic is desirable, which I'm not actually sure is the case. Personally, I wind up enjoying the posts more when I suddenly find myself talking about Watkins v. United States Army, the "Flower Power" photo or whether faux queens are culturally appropriating gay culture, but I can only do that sort of thing when I have enough time to do all the searches and follow all the links and think about what I found long enough to come up with something to say. Which doesn't actually happen all that often. And sometimes even when I have the time, I don't serendipitously encounter something interesting enough to write about.
² And I don't think every sex worker is in that position. I've read stuff here and there by people who are like, no, actually, I really love being an escort, the money's great and I have flexible hours and I feel safe, I know my situation's not typical but I do actually wake up every morning and choose to do this because I kinda love doing it.
I have no reason to think those people are lying about their experience, so great for them. *shrug* But that small percentage of happy sex workers doesn't make it okay to make light of all the rest of them, is I guess my point.
³ Maybe Kandy picked that name 'cause she's a big Santa Claus fan. Maybe she had a Korean friend. Maybe she's big into model trains, or first lip synched to "Tiny Bubbles" and inspiration struck.
⁴ (Hasn't appeared on the blog yet, according to the site search. The seedling died, so you may never actually see the name: I haven't decided whether to reassign it. I was really proud of it at the time, because it's actually kinda clever, but for reasons coming in the next paragraph I'm thinking maybe the world doesn't need to be exposed to every kinda-clever thought I ever have.)
⁵ We could debate whether joking actually makes the world any less horrible, but I think most of us have at least felt the impulse to make an inappropriate joke rather than feel terrified or despairing or whatever.
⁶ And I'm being careful not to condemn the performer here because I don't know the intent (having good intentions isn't a pass for bad behavior, but we've all, surely, done well-intentioned things that ended up upsetting people, and it's a shitty feeling to realize that's happened) or context (it's hard for me to imagine a context in which this isn't a reference to prostitution somehow, but, you know, I'm a married middle-aged Iowan Anthurium breeder who hasn't been inside any bar for any reason in like a decade; how much do I know about what it's like to be a famous-ish 30-year-old Puerto Rican drag queen who earns a living performing in clubs, or how she talks to the people around her?).
I also don't know what sort of consequences performing under a different name would have -- her ability to draw crowds to a bar is based partly on people recognizing her from Drag Race, after all. Even if she did decide to change the name, club owners would still advertise her shows as "Kandy Ho." At best, "Euphemia Montenegro (formerly 'Kandy Ho')" or something like that. And I'm not going to tell someone that they're a terrible person if they don't do something that might trash their career. I don't even think it makes her a terrible person even if she already knows all this (which she probably does, since, you know, she's spent way more time than I have thinking about it and living with it) and is totally fine with making prostitution a joke.
The point being that I'm trying to go out of my way to not judge or condemn. I am bothered by it, some. The degree to which that should bother Kandy herself is basically zero.
⁷ Maybe not to everyone's taste, granted. But stunning.

Anthurium no. 1727 "Mercedes Sulay"

Mercedes is the first seedling of 0580 Marsha Marsha Marsha (or any of its clones¹) to bloom so far. Surprisingly, although Marsha et al. are all a nice bright orange, Mercedes is slightly greenish, or bronze.

There's actually a weird situation set up where this one of Marsha's seedlings looks like 0330 Faye Quinette,

0330 Faye Quinette (left) and 1727 Mercedes Sulay (right)
and one of Faye's seedlings (1679 Madison Adjective) looks a lot like Marsha.

0580 Marsha Marsha Marsha (left) and 1679 Madison Adjective (right)
Because apparently there are only just so many different directions one can go with orange. This is excellent news as far as I'm concerned, because Faye's had a lot of trouble with Xanthomonas, and I've been worried that it might get bad enough eventually that I'd have to throw her out; knowing that she has an understudy makes that less scary.²

The foliage isn't very abundant, because Mercedes was an early bloomer,³ but it's looking good so far,

and she photographs nicely as well.

I also thought the first bud was interesting; it didn't show up as clearly in the pictures as it did in person, but there was a sort of barber-pole stripe around it before it fully colored-up.

So the seedling's almost certainly a keeper, and Mercedes is almost certain to move to a 4-inch pot in the next round of promotions.

Mercedes Sulay the drag queen is from Rochester (New York); as usual, I couldn't find a decent video. I can tell you she won Miss Gay Rochester in 2014, and that's about it. I mean, she's on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, but the Twitter account seems to be dead for the last couple years and I don't do Facebook. So that's pretty much all I know.

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¹ Pretty sure 0115 Erlene Adopter, 0580 Marsha Marsha Marsha, 0581 Adam All, and 0586 Vera Special are all the same plant, just in different pots, for reasons discussed in the post for Erlene.
² And as far as it goes, it's probably good for the Erlenes to have some backups also; the ghost mites are more of a problem on them than I like, and the thing where some of their minor veins go yellow overnight for reasons I don't understand, which may or may not be a problem but still makes me uneasy, continues to happen to all of them, and only to all of them.
³ First bud at 16 months. (The median for all seedlings is 26 months; record earliest is 12; record latest is 54.)