Ben walked into the restaurant, all smiley and adorable, as he does. “Hi, Adrian!” he said. I jumped out of my fucking chair. All I could do was hug him for five minutes and gush. I think the waiter was getting nervous. 

We were dining in a fancy-schmancy new “concept” restaurant, called Rione XIII. “Roman cooking,” or so they bill it—not Italian, please note, but “ROMAN.” Ben picked the place, as neither of us had ever been. It was quite conveniently located nearby both of our apartments on Capitol Hill. (As it turns out, Ben and I are neighbors! Squee!). I didn’t know what he would be drinking, so before he showed up I ordered us the reliable old stand-by: red wine. In this case, a 2010 bottle of Mark Ryan something-something. It starts out a bit mean and definitely needs a good breathe, and I was sitting there reflecting on mellow notes of cherry and tobacco when OH MY GOD! Ben DeLaCreme! Gush.

Ben graciously and grudgingly accepted my fanboy freakout. He’s always rather shy when he’s a boy, and his famously bouncy and uber-gregarious drag character is remarkably different from the everyday Ben.

When I’d sufficiently calmed my tits, as they say, he thanked me for my enthusiastic, “Condragulations!”  He had just won “Miss Congeniality” on RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 6, as you know, after a stellar season of victories, laughs, shocks, and a smattering of indignant rage. Frankly, he should have fucking won the crown, far be it from me to beat a dead horse. (Screw you, “Ruple!”).

“You are getting a husk version of Ben today,” he said, unnecessarily apologizing for not being in “The Face.” Preposterous! I had exactly zero expectations that Ben would show up to dinner as his drag persona, um, “Ben.” (So many drag queens keep their real boy names as their drag names these days). Drag is fucking hard work, and he’d just barely gotten back into town from several appearances back east. He was all spiky black hair with no make-up or boobs whatsoever. Fine by me.

We scooched our chairs in and sat down to enjoy the lovely plate of Carciofi alla Giudia that the kitchen had kindly sent us, compliments of the house (Thanks house!). The name of the dish apparently translates as “Fried Artichoke and Pangrattato in Aïoli,” or something. (I don’t speak Roman). It was yummy. We’re both fans of artichokes. And aioli. And fried stuff. I still have yet to Google, “Pangrattato.”

Ben, like last Season’s RPDR winner Jinkx Monsoon, was whisked off to appearances and performances from one coast to the other the moment the show was over, and he’d barely had time to bat a beaded lash before being whisked off to everywhere else. We were in fact dining and drinking in the very brief moments before he rushed into rehearsals for his epic annual 4th of July show, Freedom Fantasia, now in its fourth year. I told him that I considered postponing our little dinner, just for the sake of his sanity and sleep schedule. “Ha! No…there’s really no better time. Everybody is just going to have to deal with the dregs of what’s left of me!” he joked. I note, yet again, how deep Ben’s voice is when he’s not performing. For some reason it always surprises me. “But here we are, eating food and drinking wine, and I am definitely into that.” Oh, good! Ben liked the wine. Cheers! Gulp.

For some strange reason we started going on about the old animated film, The Last Unicorn. I’ve always found it to be so serious and dark. (Oh, yeah! I remember! We brought it up because of the wine…that scene in the movie when the creepy, cackling skeleton demands a bottle of wine. Our wine seemed to get better by the second—and at $54 a bottle, it damn well should have. Yeesh).

“I almost rented that movie again the other day,” Ben said. “Recently I rented, The Three Caballeros! Have you fucking seen that as an ADULT? It’s fucking INSANE. It’s like an acid trip.” No, indeed I had not, but now I really want to. Where the hell does anyone rent movies anymore, anyway? I forgot to ask.

“The last time I really had a real TV, I lived in Chicago, actually,” Ben said. He moved to Seattle about seven years ago. “That was back before streaming, and I was SO productive! Now with Netflix and HULU, it’s like forget it.” I get that. I often fall into the sucking black hole that is Netflix. “I KNOW! I get back into Seattle and I’m so excited and I want to see so many people and do so many things, but I’m so exhausted, and I’m all NOPE, and I binge watch whatever bullshit.” We were running out of wine already. Was this bottle shrinking or something?

“But I really do need a lot of downtime…time to myself,” Ben confessed. “I don’t really get that on the road, so it has to be when I come home.” Ben’s idea of “downtime at home” seems practically impossible to me, as Ben is constantly working when he’s in Seattle—new projects and appearances every week.

“Like today, basically I holed up. It hasn’t been too bad. I think the hairiest was when I was getting ready for my show that was opening in New York.” Ben’s show, Terminally Delightful, ran several nights off-Broadway last May, right when his season of Drag Race ended.

“I was preparing for the show in New York but I was flying back and forth to rehearse with Kitten and Lou and flying to other places and doing other things…I probably didn’t sleep that week for two hours total.” Kitten and Lou are Ben’s co-producers and performers in Freedom Fantasia, and the trio’s amazing annual winter holiday show, Homo for the Holidays, and other projects too numerous to mention. “Luckily I have very good friends like Kitten and Lou who understand that it’s my sensitive time and give me space.”

I asked Ben about Terminally Delightful. It’s pretty much his only show I’ve never seen. “It was great! It went really well,” he said. Then the waiter interrupted. “Wait! I wanna figure out what I’m going to eat…” We’d been talking a lot and barely glanced at the menus, which had very Roman things on it like Oxtails ($26), Rabbit ($16), and Remoulade? Hmuh. Remoulade ($12, served on “Albacore,” which is Roman for tuna).

I decided to settle on the Gnocchi alla Romana ($14). I’m Irish. I’m a sucker for potato products. Oh! And more wine, of course. (Another Mark Ryan, please! We seemed to have run dry…) “But I’m really torn because I hear the Pizza here is amazing,” Ben said, “but, I’m kinda feeling a pasta thing.” Pasta! I’m already regretting my choice, what with swimsuit season upon us. But the only other item that was pulling at my appetite was the saltimboca (that’s Roman for “veal”; $36), but eating baby creatures? I’m trying to be a better person. Then the house sent us some Grilled Asparagus! ($11.) Thanks house!

So! Terminally Delightful! I wanted to hear more. It’s a cabaret, right? “Well, yes and no. Basically I didn’t know what I wanted it to be until…I mean, I kept working on it for months, and as I was having this experience of being on Drag Race, the things I wanted to say and the things I was thinking about kept changing. At first I didn’t want to talk about Drag Race, but that is what’s happening in my life, and that’s what’s happening right now, so I just need to make the piece about it and deal with it. It turned into a weird thing—it was the first piece Ben DeLaCreme made about Ben DeLaCreme.”

Cheers! Gulp.

“So it’s basically a cabaret that BenDeLa is doing [the nickname for Ben’s drag persona], but there is this weird undercurrent in which ‘Ben’ is trying to break through in sort of like a weird, peyote trip, shamanistic journey…a ballet, nightmare, ‘pink elephants on parade’ sort of thing. But of course it’s all campy and sparkly.” Of course it is. Brilliant. And I understood exactly what he was saying. The virtues of a 2010 bottle of Mark Ryan something-something and fried artichoke hearts cannot be overstated.

“What people fail to realize about the magic of drag and camp is that the tension exists between the world of the creator and the world of the character—that’s always been true, whether you’re talking about Charles Busch or Varla Jean Merman or Lady Bunny or Dame Edna…so in this piece, Dela is having this journey, but I am the person who hits the peeks, and DeLa is the character who might be oblivious. And I feel that is true in most of the work I make. DeLa could never pull off the things I intend for her to be.” As if you needed any more evidence that Ben is a very deep and thoughtful performer.

Of course, as it must, the conversation eventually came around to Darriene Lake, the evil queen who eventually unseated Ben from the show. Unfairly, some people might say. Humph. (WHACK THAT DEAD HORSE! THUMP, THUMP!)

“She got a really raw deal. She was just a very nice person who was doing her best to play the game we were all trying to play. I think more than anyone, Darriene was in some ways the most wronged by the process. And I think she deserves better than that.”

“Miss Congeniality,” indeed (Thump, whack!).

Ever humble, near the bottom of our second bottle of wine (Cheers! Gulp!) and the very sad end of our dinner, Ben asked me, “Well, who do you think should have won Drag Race, Adrian Ryan?” Well. Of course I blurted without hesitation, “ARE YOU KIDDING!?” I think I’ve made my feeling quite clear on the matter. (Google that shit. Seriously.) Not to beat a dead horse…or anything.

The incomparable Ben DeLaCreme can be seen (courtesy of just Ben) in Freedom Fantasia, running July 2nd and 3rd at The Triple Door in Seattle, and Terminally Delightful will run again off-Broadway at the Laurie Beechman Theatre from August 21st-24th in Manhattan.