Angeria Paris VanMicheals continues to bring Sparta, GA to the world as she returns to the werkroom in RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars Season 9.
VanMicheals spoke with Shadow and Act about how it’s been to go from her original Season 14 to All-Star status.
“It’s been the most wild, life-changing thing ever,” she said. “I couldn’t have imagined going back home and then not only having the full support of my family, but also having the full support of my entire small town. I always grew up in Sparta as one of the popular kids in high school, everybody knew my family, everybody knew me, I was just like a little social butterfly. So while the show was on Season 14, everybody was so supportive…so to go back home and then get so much love, especially being one of maybe two people that this happens to where I’m from, it just has been amazing.”
“Going out into the world and being recognized at airports and wherever I’m at by people that I don’t even know, it’s crazy,” she continued. “It’s really crazy, but it’s also amazing.”
This time, the queens are playing for charity, and VanMicheals’ is the National Black Justice Coalition.
“It’s a civil rights organization that basically fights for the rights of Black and LGBTQ+ people, and it means a lot to me because…I completely feel like it represents everything that I am, which is Black [and] very proud to be queer,” she said. “I feel like there are a lot of organizations that are geared towards Black civil rights, [but] I haven’t seen a lot of organizations that are geared to Black queer civil rights. So I think that’s really cool and awesome. There’s no other charity that I would have wanted to be a part of.”
With this season being about charity, plus no eliminations, you might think that the season would be full of niceties and charm–which it is, to certain extent, since most of the queens know each other well and are friends outside of the show. However, the nefarious minds at World of Wonder figured out how to make the season just as dramatic as any regular Drag Race season by introducing the Ruby Snippers. Each week, one of the two winning queens earns the right to take the ruby pair of scissors and snip one of their fellow queens out of the running from winning a Beautiful Benefactress Badge the following week.
VanMicheals said that this season’s twist was “crazy at first.”
“You know, we all watched All Stars 7 with the platinum plunger and I love that there’s some type of stakes, something aside from winning the money for charity. There’s something thrown in there that makes it like, ‘Oh my God,'” she said. “You know, you still want to do good because you definitely don’t want to get cut off.”
“I didn’t think at first that it was going to feel as scary at first. At first, I was like, ‘It’s fine, we’re not going home,'” she continued. “But when I tell you that you get into the competition and it just starts to sit in and you really do take that serious, it really does almost start feeling like you are going home because the whole point is to win and you will not win if you are getting cut off…it might as well still feel like you’re going home or something because if you get cut off enough, you probably won’t win. So it does still feel very scary.”
The third episode had the queens perform in The Snatch Game of Love. VanMicheals wowed RuPaul and viewers with her southern-fried version of Marla Gibbs. Van Micheals said that her version of Gibbs was supposed to feel like the actress mixed with a southern aunt.
“Snatch Game [means] to bring some type of drag parody in my opinion, so I’m like, ‘I’m going to take what we know about her character,” she said. “You know, RuPaul always says to get it done whoever you can and whatever that means to you. So my way of getting her down was literally channeling one of my aunts from back home and put that into Marla Gibbs.”
VanMicheals also said she chose Gibbs because she wanted to follow some advice RuPaul gave her during Season 14.
“On my season, I did Tammie Brown and then RuPaul told me I should do Marla Gibbs, and she literally said it twice,” she said. “I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, she is really into me doing Marla Gibbs.’ So I told myself in the back of my mind that if I ever did All Stars, I would go back and I would do Marla Gibbs. And I’m also a really big fan of shows like 227 and The Jeffersons and Good Times, all of that. I grew up watching those shows with my parents. So I was already familiar with the character, Florence the maid and all that.”
“I did have so much more fun this time than I did the first time, ’cause you know, they said our Snatch Game was the worst Snatch Game in herstory,” she said, referencing how her season was the first to introduce the Lip Sync LaLaPaRuza Smackdown as punishment for the queens’ Snatch Game performances. “It felt very good at this time to not only be doing a character that I knew she was a fan of, but also something that I could play around with and have fun with, too.”
After All Stars, VanMicheals said that fans will be able to see her back on tour.
“I’m going to be doing the All Stars 9 tour [and] I’m also going to be on the Christmas tour, which is later this year, so lots and lots of touring and opportunities to meet me,” she said. “Hopefully [there’s] more TV and music and, you know, just completely diving into my career more than ever.”
RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars 9 is streaming on Paramount+.
