The show must go on

Posted 2:26 p.m.

Ryan Barrett was supposed to be in full makeup and onstage lipsyncing a showtune Monday night at Michael’s Outpost on Richmond.

Instead, like so much of Houston, he was stuck at home in Third Ward assessing the effects of Hurricane Harvey.

So Barrett, who performs as Regina Thorne-DuBois, decided to do something.

He got into full drag and began broadcasting live on Facebook to raise money for relief efforts.

And something wonderful happened. People began watching. Other performs joined in on the stream. Donations started pouring in.

“We’re all artistic people here,” Barrett, 22, says. “It started as just a bunch of people who are luckily in a place where we are safe and dry, and we wanted to start helping our city. It morphed into a marathon fundraiser.”

Barrett and friends went for a total of 21 hours, broken into two segments, from Monday night through early Thursday morning. The effects of Harvey in his neighborhood were minimal.

“I’m telling people it’s by the power of Beyoncé,” Barrett jokes. “We lost power for about five minutes during the last three days.”

There were songs from the musicals “Wicked” and “Funny Girl.” Pop hits from Madonna and Christina Aguilera. Raffles and prizes for donations.

Barrett even posted embarrassing photos of his early days in drag when the donation tally hit certain marks.

By Thursday morning, the total was near $5,000. It’s being split between Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner’s Hurricane Harvey Relief Fund and a pair of local LGBT charities.

“I went in secretly hoping for $500. That was it. And I say secretly because I didn’t tell anyone since I was worried that we wouldn’t even make that,” Barrett says.

That original $500 goal was surpassed in the first 45 minutes.

“I said that I wasn’t going to stop broadcasting until everyone stopped watching. And people kept watching,” Barrett says. “The supportive words people gave each other and the stories that we heard from entertainers who popped in were enough to emotionally shatter people, but we kept going.

“It was an escape from the madness of Hurricane Harvey, and I had no idea how many people so badly needed this escape.”