A tight-knit group of women gather as Truvy prepares Shelby and her mom M’Lynn for Shelby’s wedding later that day. In the play, we’re in small-town Louisiana in 1987 in a home beauty parlour owned by Truvy. Playwright Robert Harling is gay after all and the characters in Steel Magnolias feel very much like women as imagined by a gay man.

I ran into a pal at intermission who floated a genius idea: cast Steel Magnolias with drag queens.

(Lalainia Lindbjerg, Ranae Miller, Gillian Barber, and Sheryl Anne Wheaton photographed by Damon Calderwood)