BERTHA: Grateful Drag at Kennedy Center (drag and Dead, oh, myyyy!)

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The world’s first Grateful Drag band BERTHA performing “Brown Eyed Women" by the Grateful Dead with special guest MC Taylor of Hiss Golden Messenger at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. on December 4, 2024. Video courtesy of the Kennedy Center. This performance was part of a weeklong offering of programming surrounding the 2024 Kennedy Center Honors. BERTHA: Grateful Drag and MC Taylor were invited to celebrate 2024 honorees the Grateful Dead.

From the band's website:

Who is she?


The world’s first Grateful Drag band, BERTHA is an all-star collective of queer and allied East Nashville talent coming together in wigs and full face for a good cause. Fronted by a harmony trio of Berthas and backed by a rocking all-Bertha band, their origin story is said to be as follows:

In the mid 1990’s, just after Jerry Garcia’s tragic and untimely demise, a deadhead janitor working at Area 51 gained access to top secret time travel technology and took it upon himself to retrieve Jerry’s severed middle finger at the moment he lost it in 1946. He thought, if he could just get the DNA to the right scientists, cloning technology might one day be able to bring Jerry back. Breakthroughs in the early 2000’s found that a compound in LSD could activate dormant genes to replicate sufficiently to grow a functioning human body in a lab. The theory was: if they could mix Jerry’s DNA with the original Owsley acid, it could create a Jerry clone that would reunite the Grateful Dead to continue their “long strange trip”. Unfortunately, they mixed up the vials and the first seven clones were the bastard children of Jerry’s finger DNA and the infamous Brown Acid. These pitiful yet beautiful creatures were musical mutants, with the chops of their father but a physical form yet unseen in the jam band world - that of a woman. After being cast out of the lab, and the experiment shut down as a failure, these orphan queens each took the name BERTHA in solidarity with one another and formed a band.

https://www.gratefuldrag.com/about