Photo: Kelsea & Drag Race Queens | By Lyndsey Parker, Yahoo Music | “I wanted to personally stand up here and share this moment, because on Aug. 21, 2008, I watched Ryan McDonald, my 15-year-old classmate at Central High School, lose his life to a gun in our cafeteria,” Ballerini stated at the start of Sunday’s show.
Country superstar Kelsea Ballerini experienced a night of tragedy and triumph Sunday, when she hosted the 2023 CMT Music Awards in Austin, Texas — cold-opening the show with a tribute to the victims of last week’s shooting at Nashville’s Covenant School and sharing her own personal experience with campus gun violence, then in a much lighter but still impactful moment enlisting several RuPaul’s Drag Race alumni for a presumed protest against Tennessee’s new law criminalizing drag revues.
“On March 27, 2023, three 9-year-olds — Evelyn Dieckhaus, William Kinney, and Hallie Scruggs — along with Dr. Katherine Koonce, Cynthia Peak, and Mike Hill, walked into the Covenant School and didn’t walk out,” a choked-up Ballerini, who co-hosted this year’s CMT Awards with Kane Brown, said at the start of the show. “The community of sorrow over this and the 130 mass shootings in the U.S. this year alone stretches from coast to coast. I wanted to personally stand up here and share this moment, because on Aug. 21, 2008, I watched Ryan McDonald, my 15-year-old classmate at Central High School, lose his life to a gun in our cafeteria. Tonight’s broadcast is dedicated to the ever-growing list of family’s friends, survivors, witnesses, and responders whose lives continue to forever be changed by gun violence. I pray deeply that the closeness and the community that we feel through the next few hours of music can soon turn into action — like, real action — that moves us forward together to create change for the safety of our kids and our loved ones.”
Last year in an interview with Yahoo Entertainment, Ballerini opened up about the cafeteria shooting she witnessed at Knoxville’s Central High School, which “forced [her] into therapy” as a teenager, saying, “I still suffer from PTSD [from the shooting]. Like, I’m a performer and I’m onstage a lot, so I have to be told if there’s pyro around or else it’s, like, not a good day for me.” McDonald’s murder inspired Ballerini’s poem, “His Name Was Ryan,” included in her confessional 2021 poetry book Feel Your Way Through — a writing experience that she said helped her process her trauma.
In a decidedly more celebratory moment at Sunday’s CMTs, later in the broadcast Ballerini was joined by four Drag Race fan favorites — Season 3’s Manila Luzon, Season 7’s Kennedy Davenport, Season 12’s Jan, and Season 13’s Olivia Lux — for a fun, campy, picket-fenced performance of her recent hit single “If You Go Down (I’m Goin’ Down Too),” complete with the queens dressed in retro desperate-housewives eleganza. After the CMTs ceremony, Ballerini tweeted, “If you go down, I’m going down too // Thank you to these iconic queens… for celebrating love, self-expression, and performance.”
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Read the rest of this “woke” and sad story, including Shania Twain’s comments, here:
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/kelsea-ballerini-honors-nashville-shooting-victims-dances-with-drag-race-queens-shania-twain-champions-all-inclusive-country-music-at-2023-cmt-awards-053237106.html
Photo: Kelsea & Drag Queens
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Kelsea Ballerini Honors Nashville Shooting Victims, Dances With ‘Drag Race’ Queens
