After Manila, the RuPaul's Drag Race queen I was most excited to meet was Shangela. The constant knock against her was that she was too inexperienced to even deserve to be on the show. And maybe she should have waited to become the winner or at least in the top three of season 4 or 5 instead of being an also-ran in season 3 and the first one eliminated in season 2.
But that's not what she wanted. And every damn week, Shangela worked her ass off and managed to claw her way to a top five finish.* And she was just as hard-working at the press event; she had the longest line of people waiting to talk to her. (That's me with her in the photo, which was taken by my nondrag superstar, Tony P.)Shangela is determined to make it big. She's already shot a pilot for a show starring Don Johnson that might be picked up by NBC for the coming fall season, though she won't be appearing in drag in it. She's playing a male hairdresser named Snip under her given name, D.J. Pierce.
Shangela told Riot and me that she spent the summer of 2007 in New York and has friends in Brooklyn and the Bronx and her drag sister Sahara Davenport in Harlem, whom she had to unsuccessfully lip-sync for her life** against in the first episode of season 2. She's happy on the West Coast, though. "I love Los Angeles," she said. "I'm a sunshine girl."
