Vera's Guide to Being a Drag Queen: The Complete Beginner's Handbook to Persona, Makeup, Wigs, Costume, Lip-Sync and Your First Booking
Paperback
Series: Notions & Albis
Biographies GeneralGeneral Drama
Currently unavailable to order
Please enter your email and a message will be sent to you when this product becomes available on our website.
Publisher: Independently Published
Pages: 126
Weight: 0.30
Height: 0.27 Width: 5.25 Depth: 8.00
Language: English
Everything nobody hands you before your first eight minutes onstage. From a hostess who has done sixteen years of them.
Vera Notions has spent sixteen years hosting Friday nights at Belfast's Velvet Yard, working out in public and by trial most of what is in this book. She wrote down the whole of it: how to build a persona from nothing, paint a face that reads from the back wall, wrestle a wig into behaving, put a costume together without remortgaging anything, get through a lip-sync like you mean it, survive a heckler, and ask a promoter for your first booking without it reading like a hostage note.
This is not a book about one narrow idea of drag. It covers camp, glamour, pageant, horror, club kid and gender-expansive styles, with honest starter budgets, real troubleshooting, and safety guidance written to be followed rather than skipped.
Inside this book:
- A full persona-to-first-booking curriculum across 38 chapters, with checklists and a 30-day starter plan
- A beginner makeup kit you can actually afford, and real technique for foundation, contour, eyes, lashes and brows
- Wigs, padding, tucking, binding and corsetry explained with clear safety limits, never treated as compulsory
- Stagecraft, lip-syncing, crowd work and hosting, built from real dressing-room experience
- The unglamorous parts: money, boundaries, burnout, drag families and staying bookable
- A full glossary and Vera's Ultimate Drag Bag packing list
For anyone who has ever thought about it, and for the beginner standing exactly where Vera once stood: no plan, no training, and a want stronger than any qualification for having it.
Pick a name. Pick a song. Put something on your face. Get out there.
Also from
Armstrong, Kasey
Also in
Biographies General
Bluesland: Portraits of Thirteen Major American Blues Masters
Pete Welding (ED.)
Toby Byron (ED.)
Hardcover
Karl Popper - The Formative Years, 1902 1945: Politics and Philosophy in Interwar Vienna
Hacohen, Malachi Haim
Hardcover
The Children of Athena: Greek Intellectuals in the Age of Rome: 150 Bc0-400 AD
Freeman, Charles
Hardcover
Make It a Double: From Wretched to Wondrous: Tales of One Woman's Lifelong Discovery of Whisky
Sackier, Shelley
Hardcover
The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race
Isaacson, Walter
Hardcover
An Enemy Such as This: Larry Casuse and the Fight for Native Liberation in One Family on Two Continents Over Three Centuries
Correia, David
Hardcover
Agents of Chaos: Thomas King Forçade, High Times, and the Paranoid End of the 1970s
Howe, Sean
Hardcover
Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World
Cooper, Christian
Hardcover
The Secret Life of the Savoy: Glamour and Intrigue at the World's Most Famous Hotel
Williams, Olivia
Paperback
The Badger: The Life of Bernard Hinault and the Legacy of French Cycling
Fotheringham, William
Paperback
Florence Kelley and the Nation's Work: The Rise of Womens Political Culture, 1830-1900
Sklar, Kathryn Kish
Paperback
The Devil's Diary: Alfred Rosenberg and the Stolen Secrets of the Third Reich
Kinney, David
Wittman, Robert K.
Paperback
Seafaring Women: Adventures of Pirate Queens, Female Stowaways, and Sailors' Wives
Cordingly, David
Paperback
Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything
Ehrenreich, Barbara
Paperback
The Butcher, the Embezzler, and the Fall Guy: A Family Memoir of Scandal and Greed in the Meat Industry
Cherington, Gretchen
Paperback
My Own Devices: True Stories from the Road on Music, Science, and Senseless Love
Dessa Wander
Hardcover
Nobody's Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice
Giuffre, Virginia Roberts
Hardcover
How to Be Okay When Nothing Is Okay: Tips and Tricks That Kept Me Alive, Happy, and Creative in Spite of Myself
Lawson, Jenny
Hardcover
Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground
Dohrn, Zayd Ayers
Hardcover
Family of Spies: A World War II Story of Nazi Espionage, Betrayal, and the Secret History Behind Pearl Harbor
Kuehn, Christine
Hardcover
Catch the Devil: A True Story of Murder, Deception, and Injustice on the Gulf Coast
Colloff, Pamela
Hardcover
A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon
Fedarko, Kevin
Paperback
