Ruby Mae Johnson & Friends’ A Very Ruby Christmas lights a joyful candle in the dark of winter with holiday variety spectacular

For those of you feeling as though your holiday season came down to the wire, Ruby Mae Johnson’s upcoming Christmas spectacular, A Very Ruby Christmas–A Holiday Extravaganza with Ruby Mae and Friends, came together in less than two months. The show takes place this Friday, December 20, at Liberty Hall, and the idea only came to the Lawrence poet and burlesque performer just after Halloween, she explains one chilly evening at Sunflower Cafe and Pub.

“I first thought of the show–roughly Halloween,” Johnson says. “And we got a date for it right before the election, so this is very much an organic process: ‘We’re doing a show!’ Yeah, we’re just doing the thing.”

The show is very Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney, with Johnson and fellow collaborators Kerry Hagner and TG Stephens working equally to bring a cast of characters to the Liberty Hall stage with an amazing amount of can-do spirit. As Johnson puts it, it’s her name on the marquee and all the posters, so this has got to be a capital-letter Big Deal.

“I am putting all the energy into it that I can, right?” continues Johnson. “What do I bring? This is what I bring: I can bring an energy. I can bring a show. I can bring the glitter and the sequins and a pretty solid stage presence.”

Johnson says Stephens is serving an invaluable role in connecting with the people that the trio really need to make it happen, securing lights and sound and, thanks to her connection with Dean Edington at Liberty Hall, securing the date in the first place. Hagner, Johnson says, is a boundless font of creativity for show ideas and finding a way to make it happen.

“I’m good at executing,” confirms Hagner as they join us. “Ruby Mae has great ideas and then I can be like, ‘Okay, I’ll do that thing then.’”

“That thing” is filling a certain void for the fabulous at this time of year.

“I was listening to some Christmas music and remembered watching those TV specials when I was a kid,” recalls Johnson. “Kind of a Rat Pack, Judy Garland, Dean Martin, ‘Oh, hi, I didn’t see you there. Gosh, I love the holidays, don’t you?’ vibe.”

Johnson immediately realized that that was going to be a quick turnaround, so she called Stephens, and asked for some help booking. Originally, Johnson was thinking about smaller venues.

“I was thinking about the Replay, which is near and dear to my heart, or the Bottleneck, or Lucia maybe,” says Johnson of her original plans. “TG immediately said, ‘No, you need to call Liberty Hall and do this there.’”

Stephens agrees with that assessment when we speak with her a little later via Facebook.

“I suggested she email Dean at the Hall because he LOVES Christmas and the atmosphere there is perfect for classic holiday special,” enthuses Stephens, who will also appear in the show as Ruby Mae’s stage manager helping her get everything together to save Christmas. “I’m really excited to be a part of a show that’s not only burlesque or drag–this show has elements of those plus a bit of theater and live music, as well. A true variety show!”

The show will feature not only Ruby Mae as host and emcee but also transmasc draglesque performer RevDaddy, Aleis Noir of Foxy By Proxy, musician Andrew Ramaley, singer Joslyn Rose, drag queen KyKy Mo-Dean, and too many other friends to be named here. That said, the extravaganza does have a limit on participants, despite Johnson’s desire to invite everyone she wants to. One of the things Johnson mentioned when she first told us about this show was the fact that she couldn’t ask all the people she wants to be in the show to be in the show because she needs people to be in the audience, as well.

Backstage at LAC Arts After Dark showcase (l-r) Max Wilcox, Ruby Mae, Kerry Hagner, & Lane Eisenbart. // photo courtesy the artist

“Again, the theater girl ego in me is always saying–95% percent joking–’I need fewer talented friends,’” quips Johnson. “I’m not going to list them because I’ll leave somebody out. One thing about the community that we’re part of is that there are always people saying, ‘Oh, I wanna be in the show,’ and I look around a room full of people that I know and I think, ‘They could do this, and she could do that, and they could do the other thing.’”

Ultimately, though, there’s just a stupid amount of talent among the folks that Johnson knows, and that’s part of what her crew, Hagner, and Stephen want to showcase. As Hagner puts it, “There’s also a lot of very talented folks that perform on smaller stages, and this is an opportunity for them to have a larger stage.”

The whole point of A Very Ruby Christmas–A Holiday Extravaganza with Ruby Mae and Friends is to throw every bit of glitz and glam and holiday-ness at the stage that they possibly could. In this post-Covid, post-election holiday season, it feels like so many people feel a need for lights and pretty, shiny things so that they have something happy and sparkly when it is dark outside.

“That’s what it is,” Johnson agrees. “I’ve got a Christmas tattoo here on my bicep. It’s a cardinal on a pine bough with Christmas lights and has scroll text saying ‘Merry and Bright,’ which are two things that are pretty hard to be, especially now.”

Johnson explains that she’s thought a lot over the years, about the holiday cycle that we go into, starting with Halloween, as the fall comes and it gets darker. On Halloween, we get scared, and on Thanksgiving, we come together and at the solstice or Christmas or any December winter holidays, we celebrate, we push back against the dark.

“We light our candles, and we put glitter up,” says Johnson. “Celebrating against or even in the midst of the dark is important to me.”

It’s worth mentioning here that, despite the fact that Ruby Mae Johnson loves glitter and confetti and would love to put on a giant Christmas show festooned with both, due to the confetti cannons used by the Flaming Lips at Liberty Hall’s anniversary shows several years back, the venue no longer allows either after finding remnants in every nook and cranny for the better part of a decade.

“You know how hard it is for me to put on a big giant Christmas show and have to stop every time I think glitter?” Johnson bemoans. “It’s hard. Fine: no glitter, but sequins, spangles, sparkly stuff, glittery lights.”

The biggest touchstone, though, when Johnson looks at the list of potential performers and numbers (and there is a literal stack of index cards she pulls from her purse) isn’t a specific thing, she says. It’s joy.

Ruby Mae Johnson. // photo by Jen Young

“This is a joyful show,” Johnson says. “We may step back a moment here and there and acknowledge some of the more difficult experiences that folks have had around the holidays or just simply that it’s hard to maintain joy right now. Everything that I said I want to bring more of for the next however long we have to is really fucking exhausting. It’s hard to feel joy, even when it’s the holiday. There’s a reason that we have to light those candles.”

So, there’s going to be sparkly things. There’s going to be performances. There’s going to be joy. As to the plot? Ruby Mae will be your hostess with the mostest, bringing out each and every person and keeping the whole thing going on stage, with the assistance of TG Stephens, while Hagner is there to make sure that Johnson has the space to be a headliner for a show that’s a little spicy, but not too much. You can bring your teenager, but maybe not your eight-year-old.

“The plot isn’t anything more than a thinly built excuse to bring all the talented people I know up on stage,” says Johnson, only half-joking. “The basic framework of the plot is that we have this big Christmas party, we have this big gathering that’s supposed to be glittering and fabulous and wonderful, and then, for plot reason, we’re not ready. We have to put it all together in real-time here in front of Liberty Hall.”

Also, be prepared for a singalong.

“We’ve got a whole Peter Pan moment planned into it,” teases Johnson. “You all have to sing to charge up the Christmas spirit. You’re singing, motherfuckers.”

A Very Ruby Christmas–A Holiday Extravaganza with Ruby Mae and Friends is a very big to-do. As Johnson puts it, “It really is the show that if I weren’t involved in producing it right now, I would need to go see,” and as we wrap up, Johnson wants to make sure to clarify this isn’t all about her, nor her friends, but about community.

“We play, but this is an awful lot of work for me to go through just to get my name on the marquee,” Johnson emphasizes. “I mean, there’s ego to it, right? But the idea that I will, in some way, be part of, or that we will all be part of the fabric of the holiday season and winter right smack in the heart of downtown LFK is huge for me and not just in a way that’s like, ‘Oh, that’s my name,’ but in a way that we’re part of something people need so much.”

A Very Ruby Christmas–A Holiday Extravaganza with Ruby Mae and Friends takes places at Liberty Hall on Friday, December 20. Details on that show here.