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.)

Anthurium nos. 1158 "Joey Arias" and 1750 "Dreuxilla Divine"

This is going to be quick, 'cause I don't have much time and also Friday morning (when I'm writing this) isn't going great for me so far.

So we've got Joey. Not an amazing seedling, but the color is a little more interesting than the default plain red, being slightly purplish,

and it's a decent size as well. And the leaves are nice in a weird way -- really flat, with sharper points on the "ears" than most of the seedlings have. And not much thrips damage.

Plant as a whole could be a little fuller, but I'm willing to at least wait and see how I feel about it later before deciding whether to keep or discard.

Joey Arias is apparently really interesting: friends with Klaus Nomi (and eventual executor of Nomi's estate), performed on Saturday Night Life with David Bowie one time, had a starring role in Cirque Du Soleil for six years, that kind of thing. There's probably some great reading material out there, but I don't have time to look into it.

Dreuxilla is less impressive as a seedling. You can't tell from the photo necessarily, but the inflorescence is small, and red/red is not the most interesting color combination.

As with Joey, the foliage is surprisingly nice: glossy and rounded, with an orange cast to the larger veins,

and without a lot of thrips damage.

The lack of damage is probably partly because it's a relatively new seedling: sown in March 2016, not yet a very large plant. It does take the thrips a while to find the plants, sometimes.

Dreuxilla doesn't hold the record for earliest bud, but at 14 months from sow to bud, she's pretty close.

Dreuxilla is also notable in being yet another seedling from the NOID pink-green that completely lacks all traces of the pink-green's coloration. No green in the spathe, no contrasting major veins in the spathe, no odd saddle-shaped spathes or even decent-sized spathes. Which is disappointing, though I suppose some of those traits could wind up in the next generation of seedlings, if Dreuxilla is pollinated. Which she may or may not get to be; I'm undecided about whether to keep her around, though the foliage is nice, so I'm more likely to keep than to discard, I guess.

The human Dreuxilla Divine is a Puerto Rican comic, performer, and TV show host, and again, there's probably a lot more to her that I didn't have the time or energy to dig into.

Sorry. I'll try to do better on the next post. The next seedling is more interesting than either of these anyway.

Anthurium nos. 0900 "Tessa Endurance" and 1293 "Power Infiniti"

And today, we have two pretty good seedlings with single, glaring flaws. Sort of the same flaw in both cases, in fact.

0900 Tessa Endurance is the first of 0031 Sylvester's offspring to bloom, and it strongly resembles Sylvester: they both have orange / light yellow blooms,

and dark new leaves (though Sylvester's are redder and therefore more unusual).

The huge flaw is that Tessa is apparently just covered with thrips. I mean, I'm not actually seeing them myself, but scars don't lie:

So that's disappointing. The newer growth seems to be doing slightly better, so maybe the seedling will be okay if I give it more time, but this is depressing nevertheless, especially since 0031 Sylvester has been having problems off and on with Xanthomonas and "ghost mites."¹ It'd be nice to have a decent orange / white or orange / light yellow.²

Anyway. So Tessa's fate is undetermined for now; I'd like to keep her, but that will be difficult to justify if the thrips keep going after the leaves like they have been.

I'm pretty sure "Tessa Endurance" is one of the names I came up with, so there's no real-life queen to talk about.

1293 Power Infiniti is not as striking-looking, but she's produced a lot of blooms so far, and the white / yellow combination when the spathes first open isn't bad:

Occasionally the spathes are even a very, very, very light pink, though that doesn't always photograph clearly.³

Like 0648 Bianca Del Rio, the spadix changes from yellow to white over time,

but unlike Bianca, Power Infiniti sometimes then changes again, from white to yellowish-green.

The surprising part, for me, is that the blooms don't always do this. Sometimes they stay white. Maybe the color change only happens if the spadix gets pollinated? Or if it doesn't get pollinated?

In any case. You can see from the scarring on the spathe that Ms. Infiniti also has issues with thrips. I don't know if the thrips are actually worse here, or if they just show up a lot better against the white background, but either way, it's ugly, and I wish it weren't happening. Strangely, the thrips don't seem to bother the foliage at all,

so maybe what I need to do is cross Tessa and Power together and hope their offspring gets the spathe thrips resistance of Tessa and the leaf thrips resistance from Power.⁴

Power Infiniti is the only seedling from 0271 Wanda Reulthemal to bloom to date; Wanda appears to have passed on her floriferousness, spathe shape, and spathe size, but not her coloration (pink / pink).

The real-life Power Infiniti is a DJ and performance artist, and has been performing since the mid 90s, but I had a difficult time finding much credible information about her beyond that. Her Twitter account is mostly arguing about politics, and there are videos on YouTube but the video quality is so bad they're basically unwatchable. I did find a long, detailed (arguably overly detailed, and with some NSFW language) blog post about Power Infiniti here, though it doesn't spend as much time actually talking about Infiniti specifically as I was hoping for.⁵ What little there is makes her sound kinda awesome.

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¹ My own name for a pest that is clearly a mite of some kind but doesn't look or act like spider mites; I first blogged about them in 2014, but they'd been around for a little while before that. Spraying the foliage with soapy water, then rinsing, mostly takes care of them, but splashing water around can spread the Xanthomonas too, so I try not to do it too often. Which means that the ghost mites never actually leave; I just don't see them for a while.
² 0788 Owen McCord is close, but so far seems undecided about what color it wants its spadix to be. Sometimes they're orange.
Though now that I look at the photos, 0031 Sylvester has done that before as well, so possibly Owen's as close as I'm going to get. 0329 Gladys Panzarov was the right color but is already dead, due to ghost mites and Xanthomonas.
³ The pink is likely genetic influence from 'White Gemini,' Power Infiniti's grandparent, which had white / yellow blooms that were sometimes pink near the base of the spathe, especially as the blooms aged.
⁴ Easier said than done; I don't think either seedling produces pollen.
⁵ I mean, it's interesting anyway. It's just so far removed from my personal experience as a gay man in the 90s that I have a tough time understanding and relating to it, and I found the page in the first place because I wanted to know about her, not her milieu.

Anthurium no. 1280 "Milk"

Not the most obvious / appropriate color for a seedling named "Milk," I'll admit: that's how it goes when you assign the names before seeing the flowers. But even if the name doesn't make sense, it's still pretty:

It may not be apparent from the photos, but the color when the spathe first opened was straightforwardly pink (below), which gained a slight lavender tinge as it aged (above).¹ Subtle, yes, but I don't think I was imagining it.

And it's already bloomed twice, while in a 3-inch pot, which earns it a few points for enthusiasm.

Admittedly the foliage could be better. It's not especially terrible, and the new leaves are interestingly colored,

but when you get up close and check it out, the leaves are a lot less pristine than the spathes, alas.

It's still probably a keeper. Not the most fascinating color, but there's genetic potential, the thrips resistance is good, and it's enthusiastic.

Milk is from seedling group DT; only one other DT seedling has bloomed so far, and we'll get to it in about three weeks.

The drag queen known as Milk is forever close to my heart for her involvement in this video, which I find wildly entertaining every single time even though it's dumb and I've watched it like 600 times already:


(Milk is the "Girls! You won't believe it! Guess what?" one.²)

Milk was also a contestant on Season 6 of RuPaul's Drag Race, where she was notable mainly for being unusually attractive out of drag³ and for doing a bit more genderfuck-type looks than Ru and the other contestants were comfortable with. Since Drag Race, she's been all over the place doing various things, and I do mean all over the place -- as I write this, his most recent video⁴ is about preparing to go to Zambia to volunteer with www.africanimpact.com.⁵

So I'd probably be a fan even without it, but the "he went to Jared" video is why I will always love Milk.⁶

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¹ The seed parent was 0234 Ross Koz, which has a purple-pink spathe when it first opens, so it's conceivable that Milk has inherited genes for very weak production of the pigment peonidin (responsible for purple Anthurium spathes, which can be either purple or pink depending on the pH within the cell). This would be exciting if true. I like the purples, and don't get to see them very often.
² The other two are Vivica James and Sick Nasty, collectively "Nasty James." I don't know which is which, because it's disappointingly difficult to find anything else of theirs on-line: searches for "nasty james" return a lot of stuff about people named James, either being nasty or in close proximity to nasty things.
³

(screencap from the show, via Pinterest)⁴ Taking a pronoun clue from the clothing; I have no idea what Milk prefers personally.
⁵ Granted, the video is kinda self-congratulatory and about twice as long as necessary, but . . . shut up, Mr. Subjunctive. You can complain about that when you do something comparable (and/or look that good in a mesh tank top).
⁶ Unless he milkshake ducks me, which is happening so often that I'm starting to think it's a bad idea to like anyone ever. Or possibly it's a bad idea to ever learn anything about anyone you like but don't actually know personally.
(Far as that goes, it's often also a bad idea to learn things about people you like and know personally.)

Anthurium nos. 1220 "Mario Montez" and 1211 "Gina Marie Rittale"

Mario is another one from the DV seedling group; he's pretty similar to 1203 Peaches West. They both have smallish, dark red / yellow blooms, though Mario's spathes are taller than Peaches',

and Mario's foliage is not as good, mostly due to thrips damage. Both Peaches and Mario are beginning to flop over now, as the stems get longer, so there's probably no reason to keep both.

The way things look at the moment, Mario's probably going to be the one to go, if it comes down to a choice between Mario and Peaches. But I'm not necessarily in a hurry to decide.

There was a real-life Mario Montez; he was¹ an actor, and appeared in several of Andy Warhol's movies between 1964 and 1966; besides the linked Wikipedia article, there's a brief but interesting article about Montez at the New York Daily News, which notes that Montez was also a co-founder of Charles Ludlam's "Ridiculous Theatrical Company,"² something the New York Times also mentions in Montez's very interesting obituary.³

1211 Gina Marie Rittale is a contemporary drag queen, from Queens, New York. I kind of like the video Gina Marie Sees A Psychic, which I think should give you a pretty good idea of her shtick.

The seedling has only bloomed once so far, and for some reason the tips of the spathe and spadix were both burnt. I don't know precisely why this happened, but my guess is that the developing bud happened to rest on one of the fluorescent lights, and I didn't notice until it was too late to do anything about it.

It wouldn't have been an amazing bloom even if it hadn't burnt; the color's pretty ordinary, and the thrips damage is pretty obvious on the spathe. Worse, if anything, on the foliage.

Probably going to let Gina try again before making the decision, to see what she looks like when she doesn't burn herself on hot objects, but I'm probably not going to keep her either, since I have plenty of red/yellow blooms already.

Gina's from the DM seedling group, the offspring of 0223 Patty Cake, and sibling to 1209 Raven Samore Holiday and 1212 Sweet Pam. I'm still pretty happy with Pam; less sure what to do with Raven.⁴

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¹ (Montez died of a stroke in 2013)
² Which reminds me that I skipped right over the real-life Charles Ludlam back when he got a seedling. Which is a shame, because he's much more interesting than the seedling, in an avant-garde playwright/actory sort of way. I'm particularly intrigued by the description of Ludlam's play The Mystery of Irma Vep (1984), in which two actors play seven roles through various quick costume changes.
³ The Times describes a scene from Warhol's first film with sound, Harlot, in which "Mr. Montez slowly, silently and seductively devoured banana after banana;" this is of course now on YouTube, for readers who care to see it. I found it a lot less interesting than the description indicates (and unless I'm going deaf, there doesn't actually seem to be any audio on the scene so I don't understand the point of noting that it was Warhol's first film with sound), but then, that's my reaction to most of Warhol's stuff. (Not denying that Warhol was important or genuinely Art or whatever: I just don't like most of his work, and am pretty sure I wouldn't have liked him personally either. Possibly the latter is the reason for the former.)
⁴ Who has now bloomed a second time; the second bloom is taller and more normally-proportioned than the unusually broad first spathe, but it's also considerably more lopsided. First bloom:

Second bloom:

It's less obvious because the second photo was taken at an angle, but the right-hand side of the spathe is about 20% smaller than the left. This happens from time to time, and doesn't usually happen repeatedly to the same seedling, so I'm pretty sure it's an environmental issue, not a genetic one. But it's not a great sign, if Raven keeps producing oddly misshapen spathes.