How Kita’s kitty is responsible for her drag name
EIGHTEEN months on from winning Ru Paul’s Drag Race Down Under, Kita Mean’s eight-inch heels have hardly touched the ground.
But amid the touring shows, the cameo on the Xena-starring... ahem, sorry, Lucy Lawless-starring My Life is Murder, and preparation for a summer role in a Beauty and the Beast-style pantomime, Mean has also found time to pen her memoir.
Life in Lashes will be released on Wednesday and, if the glimpse that Chatterbox has had of it is anything to go by, it’s going to be an honest, hilarious, colourful romp through the life of someone who was happy to tell the world after she won season one of the Drag Race Down Under: ‘‘I have always been theatrical, have always been a dickhead and I have always had a wild imagination, all of those things create a drag queen . . . It was the best career path for a weirdo like me.’’
In an exclusive extract published in Sunday magazine today, all those awesome traits are fully on show as the book describes how ‘‘Nick Nash was born to be a star – it just took him to find his alter ego Kita Mean for that moment to come to life’’.
Having described how much going out to Auckland bars in drag gave her confidence to talk to people and stand out ‘‘in all the right ways’’, she realised the right name was key to the transformation.
‘‘When I had a wig, heels and my very early excuse for makeup on, I felt unstoppable, like the person I’d always wanted to be,’’ she writes. ‘‘But there was one problem: I didn’t know the name of the person I had become.’’
Things came to a head when another drag queen asked her what her name was and she panicked – immediately thinking of a cat she’d rescued for her Avondale shared flat and which she’d named after a
Macaulay Culkinstarring film in which the characters break into a vet’s to steal the drug ketamine. ‘‘Of course, two queens can’t have the same name in one house, so my beautiful animal companion is now known as Katameow. She’s 14 and getting on a bit, so moving around a bit slower, but still every bit as fabulous. Aren’t we all?’’ The origin story for her drag name has also worked its way into Kita Mean’s patter.
‘‘Years later, on breakfast television, well-known Kiwi broadcaster Paul Henry asked me where I got my name from, and I was very proud to respond: ‘I’m named after my pussy’.’’