in search of a "special purpose"
how drag artist vape kid jr + other nyc artists are processing our political moment
The bottom fell out.
One day, we looked up and the world changed without us even realizing it. Maybe we didn’t look up until after the 2016 election or during lockdown in 2020. Maybe we didn’t recognize something was off until yesterday. Suddenly, it became apparent that all of the explicit power and implicit ideas of what it meant to be an American felt like they didn’t exist anymore. It was almost as if we were silly for even imagining the status quo of stability and the faint veneer of democracy had ever existed to begin with. Of course, certain segments of our countrymen had lived with this dissonance for years, decades, centuries but since the limited economic opportunity and unease hadn’t yet made its way to Main Street USA, most of the country could shrug, could say, “that’s a them problem,” e pluribus unum flying straight over their heads.
To pay attention to the news in 2025 is to remain unsure whether one is watching what is happening or if instead we’ve stumbled across some poorly written B-movie. We’ve got trade wars and trad wives; recession indicators and Alligator Alcatraz. It is a year in which an official White House X account can post an ASMR video of deportations, and we’ve already forgotten because there’s so much shit flooding our feeds.
Given today’s political climate, I was curious about how this generation of artists is meeting the moment, often to disappointing results.
There was one night back in April – air so humid I could feel its heavy wetness in my lungs – where I stood outside the Brooklyn Academy of Music, chatting to two women in their late twenties who were hoping to catch a glimpse of Suleika Jaouad as she left an event. We made pleasant small talk before they asked about the group of people I had come from further down the street.
“Seems like quite a little scene,” one of the women remarked. “So well dressed.”
The event I had attended earlier was a “collectivist” film festival. The dress code: black tie. But of course, this being Brooklyn, black tie was a term loosely applied and here meant the intersecting aesthetic sensibilities of vaguely bisexual women and a particular brand of straight men who exaggerate their love of bush.
In many ways, the festival embodied the cultural ouroboros we seem to find ourselves stuck in as coastal elites turn their gaze so far inward that their art remains increasingly self-referential and inaccessible. The more I spend time in the Brooklyn “scene” — however peripheral that may be — the more this disconnect between ‘tastemakers’ and their inability to grapple with the challenges of today becomes obvious. The conversation in these spaces feels stale, circling the same few topics but lacking the intellectual rigor, conviction, or interest that would result in anything other than the shallowest of takes.
The films that evening included a pithy mockumentary featuring the type of man who would write multi-verse poems for the female roommate he has an unrequited crush on. There were white women either coming of age or exploring their relationship to social media. A comedy depicting a certain type of Brooklyn man who has recently discovered chess and uses his newfound intellect to manipulate women.
It’s not as if these films weren’t well made, acted, or wonderfully shot. Of course they were. Some were even funny. And yet I also couldn’t help but think, this is how contemporary artists are approaching our modern era? It’s not that every piece needs to have meaning. However, at an event that began with a vague mention about donating a percentage of proceeds to a family in Gaza (a call to political action that was never mentioned again), it was almost comical how performative everything was.
I was beginning to feel concerned about the state of art, about the state of humanity, about whether we had truly run out of things to say or if it was simply a matter of elevating the wrong people to the right positions. But during one particularly hallucinatory moment of miming patriotism on America’s 249th birthday, I started to regain hope.
There are a lot of places one might expect to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. Standing in a darkened theater at a drag puppet show in Williamsburg while Fourth of July fireworks sporadically explode outside doesn’t immediately come to mind. Yet here we all were, most of the audience realizing we still knew the words – ‘and to the Republic’ – while on stage, the Stars and Stripes stroked their flagpole before reaching a patriotic climax.
Welcome to Vape Kid’s Cool Zone.
Presented as a lost recording of a children’s program, the Cool Zone features Courtney, a genetically modified albino pig developed by the U.S. government to become the perfect cop. It’s hard not to instantly fall in love with Courtney’s dopey eyes and faint lisp as he learns valuable life lessons from his handler, Vape Kid, the program’s saccharine host, and an assortment of other characters. But what starts as a seemingly by-the-numbers show, complete with cue cards, quickly turns into a blood bath that sees more than one character dead by the time the ‘network’ cuts the transmission.
The Cool Zone’s creator/performer, Ashley Pignataro, has managed to tap into some of the underlying anxieties of our time around policing, the myth of American exceptionalism, and how our consumer culture promotes these concepts. And she does it all with puppets.
Pignataro, who grew up in New Jersey, always had creative ambitions – early memories include constructing elaborate vignettes in the front yard for Halloween, like a scarecrow conducting an autopsy, with her twin brother – but pursuing that talent never felt like a viable career path. Instead, she decided to focus on medicine, even attending a specialized health and science high school, before majoring in biomedical engineering.
During college, Pignataro started making content on Snapchat, submitting quick videos to a student-run, campuswide account. Following graduation, she fell into hustle culture, working long hours in tech, which left little room for creative pursuits. It wasn’t until a bad mushroom trip upstate – “it was like my skin was being peeled off and I was being scraped away across this infinite corridor” – that Pignataro realized something needed to change.
This tension between embracing one’s ‘special talent’ and how it conflicts with the demands of our capitalist society shows up in the Cool Zone through Courtney’s initial struggle to accept his future.
As a small child, Courtney is still impressionable enough to do anything that will make Vape Kid happy, but cracks begin to emerge. The “Letter of the Day” is a song that is both an introduction to the episode’s theme - everyone has a special purpose - while also teaching the audience to support the state, surveillance, and special forces. While watching the sultry letter “S,” Courtney begins to sing, only to receive a swift punishment from Vape Kid. Pig boys don’t sing. They learn how to become a good cop.
This spin on easily recognizable games from the last half-century of children’s programming is part of the show’s sinister charm. Audience participation takes several forms - a la Dora the Explorer - like chanting, “open the door, Courtney,” each time a character knocks. Another segment, “Eye Spy,” is framed around teaching kids how to profile by spotting “who doesn’t belong,” and includes custom animations for the audience to spot the difference between entirely objective things, like a cowboy and a clown.
The process of building out the show involved a creative team that included other trans performers, including the show’s director, Octavia Leona Kohner. Part of her role was helping Pignataro take the vignettes she had workshopped over the years. Kohner also worked to establish the relationship between the performers and the puppets, of which there are five in the show: Courtney, Officer Opportunity, a green rooster, the letter ‘S,’ and another mutant performer, Sonny.
“The best puppet pieces are going to accept the reality of the puppet being an individual rather than an accessory of the performer,” Kohner said. “There was quite a lot of direction in terms of physicality and movement and the ideology of a puppet’s movement.”
Courtney, originally conceived as a giant teddy bear that would sing screamo, was soon repurposed into his current version. Defining features include multiple rows of teeth, droopy eyelids, and stick legs with stripes. Pignataro learned how to handle and move the puppet through self-taping.
“I kind of had to figure it out on my own what interactions with me from him sell him as a real thing, which is why very early on [in the performance], I tickle his tummy to establish physicality,” Pignataro said. “He’s here. He’s real. He’s a biological thing that can react to stuff I do to him.”
Officer Opportunity’s first appearance is during a ‘career exploration’ segment, teaching Courtney (and the audience) about the wonderful world of policing through a song. Operating the puppet, an orange mutant pig with tusks and exaggerated movements, required the coordination of two puppeteers.
“[His] movements are these big stomps with large waves because it’s like, the state is not graceful,” Kohner added. “It is not beautiful. It is this object of destruction.”
Even during its earliest iterations, Pignataro’s work as Vape Kid, Jr. featured some degree of satire and critique of the U.S. government.
After her mushroom trip, Pignataro started carving out time to explore stand-up comedy and began performing at spots like Purgatory. Since most of the events emphasized drag, she got curious and decided to try it herself, a decision made somewhat easier since she had already started going by the name Vape Kid, Jr. at open mics.
The move from comedy to drag to puppetry wasn’t that big a leap. Muna Mushin, one of the show’s puppeteers, reflected on how each of these sub-communities within New York’s queer nightlife scene tends to overlap “because all of their acts revolve around the reveal.” Expanding into drag opened up new opportunities for Pignataro, including performing with Courtney in the Mx. Nobody Pageant, Brooklyn’s longest-running drag competition.
While initially eliminated during a qualifying round, Pingataro was brought back in the finale as one of three wild cards with the explicit ask that her performance needed to include Courtney. The only problem? Pignataro had just one number at the time and now needed to create something original in less than six weeks. She spent nearly a month writing a space opera around Katy Perry’s “Firework,” but pivoted again after attending a punk show just two weeks before taking the stage.
“They played [this] song that night, which is about eliminating every last cop and looping in that police aren’t just literally the guys in blue,” Pignataro said. “Police are the military, are the politicians. Police are the stockbrokers. It’s the entire system.”
The song, “Every Last One” by L.O.T.I.O.N Multinational Corporation, would become her number for Mx. Nobody. In the competition, Officer Opportunity, as a disembodied voice, reveals Courtney’s origins and what it means to live up to this ‘special purpose.’ Rather than accept his fate, Courtney rebels. The piece was enough for Pignataro to place first runner-up and became the closing number for the Cool Zone production I saw in July.
While getting more involved in the scene, Pignataro met Lorelei Maiorano, who performs under the name Selena Surreal. Maiorano is the co-founder and producer of the Black Cherry Sideshow, the first and only BIPOC, all Trans troupe, and provided feedback during earlier iterations of the Cool Zone.
“[Pignataro] is an incredible political satirist whose objective and space that she is coming from is explicitly addressing anti-fascism within the police state in America,” Maiorano said. “You have to go absurdist, especially for a room full of white people.”
Since Mx. Nobody, Pignataro has continued to explore themes of indoctrination and American exceptionalism. “History Time,” a number involving a School House Rock-esque tune and the Pledge, was one way to involve the audience and show how we are each complicit in perpetuating a system that reinforces capitalism, sexism, and racism.
Deciding to set the show in an asynchronistic period that vaguely resembled the 1980s, drawing from the U.S.’s involvement in El Salvador, Cuba, and Nicaragua, was another intentional decision.
“I thought [the decade] was really reflective of the revisionist history of what the American Dream is [by] overwriting the sovereignty of all these other countries in order to tell them here's how you're going to organize yourselves,” Pignataro said. “We were so afraid of anybody setting up a society that worked some different way or a better way.”
Memory and what we choose to remember (or forget) can serve as a way to uphold a specific ideology or status quo. Part of why “Make America Great Again” is so powerful is that those four words capture a fictional past that exists at both the personal and societal level without having to confront the decades of policies (or the people behind them) that contributed to this sense that something is lost.
“[There’s] this collective imagination about what America was, and it’s never accurate to a specific time period of how it actually was to live in the country,” Pignataro reflected. “It’s just this idea of things were so nice when I didn’t have to worry about all these faggots around on the street, but it was never like that. It was never any of those things.”
Throughout the Cool Zone, the audience follows the various ways in which Courtney is manipulated and indoctrinated by the state. Part of this is achieved through dialogue, but the production also utilizes police academy training videos, as well as curated commercial breaks taken from the 1980s or 1990s that were used to market military and police toys to young boys.
“This is the brainwashing that happens to the people who enter the police state,” Maiorano said. “Even if they are initially good people, through subjection within that system, they eventually become part of the state, and they become part of those gears.”
Our current political woes didn’t happen in a vacuum but instead emerged over time, often at the expense of harming Black, brown, and other marginalized communities. However, that doesn’t mean we are forced to live in the world we inherited. Courtney learns that even if he is influenced by his surroundings or biology, he doesn’t have to remain complicit. And if mutant pig boys can exercise free will, then so can we.
Pignataro’s art is one of the ways she makes sense of our current reality.
“If [I try] to deal with ICE, it’s just absolutely overwhelming,” Pignataro said. “[Vape Kid] is a way that I can process my relationship to what’s happening, and I can even acknowledge the tragedies in a way that’s accessible to me.”
It’s this refusal to accept the status quo that I find most inspiring about not only Pignataro but the other creatives I’ve met over the last few months. The world we seek isn’t handed to us but instead comes through direct action. Maiorano was tired of being the only trans artist of color in sideshow spaces, so she decided to recruit and train her troupe, which now performs every second Saturday at Purgatory and recently celebrated its first anniversary.
“You’re going to see us as brown people and you’ll see us as black people and you’re gonna see us as trans people, “ Maiorano said. “You’re going to recognize us because the world at large is on fucking fire, and I cannot put out that huge fire. I don’t have that much water. But I can make sure that it doesn’t get this fucking close, and I can do that within my community amongst artists.”
It is one thing to acknowledge how overwhelming this moment feels, but it takes a particular type of person to wade through the despair and come out on the other side with a truly engaging and unique piece of art.
Yet I also still wish those in greater positions of power were able to use their voice and platform to reach a larger audience. Reflecting on the role of artists in protest movements, Kohner believes that the democratization of art has also meant the commodification of creativity, which is why we aren’t seeing the same scale of contemporary artists using their platform to advocate for change.
“I think there’s a sort of shamelessness about selling out that previous movements have not had in their counterculture,” Kohner said. “The idea of the counterculture at all has been lost, and now it’s all about co-opting the dominant culture and co-opting the tools of the oppressors that the capitalist class is already utilizing.”
During an era increasingly defined by elitism and generative AI, Mushin feels concerned about artists who are cynical about their approach and view themselves as a failure because their work doesn’t meet preconceived metrics of ‘success.’
“You are not an artist because you make money off of your art,” Mushin said. “You’re an artist because you’re here and you’re alive.”
We are currently witnessing a reshaping of our government and the global order, yet many of us are still acting under a business-as-usual mindset. Unfortunately, these are not normal times. It is easy to want to bury our heads in the sand and make the conscious choice not to engage because we are too tired or overwhelmed or unsure or just trying to focus on making ends meet.
Those are all valid responses, ones I imagine people throughout time have also felt. And yet we have the rights and freedoms we currently have (and are in the process of being stripped away) because people with those same concerns, worries, and weariness also saw something bigger than themselves at stake that was worth committing to
“We can collectively reconstruct what reality is because I think everybody else is at home going insane thinking this can’t be real, almost like society at large is telling you that everything’s normal, nothing weird is happening,” Pignataro said. “[But] we can collectively come together and regain our sanity and see we’re not crazy, see this shit’s happening, and like we have to do something about it.”
You can follow Ashley @vapekidjr and Selena Surreal @selena.surreal + @blackcherrysideshow to stay in touch about upcoming performances.