What Grief Builds
Updated: 3 days ago
When Nina DiAngelo lost her best friend, she didn’t build a memorial.
She built a stage.
By Jay Miller
Photographed by Jake Armour
There is a moment before a drag queen becomes a drag queen.
The face is half-finished. Makeup covers the table. A wig waits nearby, along with lashes, jewelry, heels and all the little pieces that will soon add up to something much bigger.
Then, piece by piece, something happens.
Not a disguise.
A transformation.
Drag has always understood something the rest of us sometimes forget: transformation isn’t necessarily about becoming someone you weren’t. Sometimes it’s about revealing something that was there all along.
Nina DiAngelo has understood that for more than 30 years.
Her first drag performance was at Club Heat in Buffalo, New York. A Christmas show. Barbra Streisand’s “Jingle Bells.” A black-and-gold velvet number from a thrift store, accessorized with battery-operated Christmas lights wrapped around one leg.
“It was really terrible.”
Thankfully, it was also before the internet. We all deserve the dignity of losing at least a few early creative decisions to history.
But beneath the questionable wardrobe choice, something clicked. Nina loved the process of creating an illusion and becoming someone else onstage.
She couldn’t have known it then, but transformation would become a pattern in her life. A young performer would find a career she never imagined as a kid. A mentor would become a best friend. Friendship would become family.
And eventually, grief would become something with a front door, a stage and a name glowing above it. Roxy’s.
Before Roxy’s, there was Roxy.
Nina moved to Minneapolis in 1995 and met Roxy at the 90’s, where a group of performers was beginning to reshape the club’s drag shows.
Nina. Roxy. Cee Cee Russell. Camille Collins. Tiffany Cartier. Dee Richards.
If you were around Minneapolis gay nightlife during those years, those names may have just unlocked something.
They did for me.
One name led to another as Nina and I started remembering those nights.
“Those days were so fun,” I said.
“They were.”
And for a moment, the interview disappeared. We were just two people remembering.
There are places from our past that become more than buildings. A bar. A dance floor. A restaurant. A stage. We remember where the bathrooms were, what song could fill the dance floor, who stood at the bar and who owned the stage.
But mostly, we remember who we were when we walked through the door.
Places hold versions of us.
The 90’s holds quite a few.
For Nina, it also holds the beginning of one of the most important relationships of her life.
She and Roxy became roommates, first near Lakewood Cemetery and later in Kenwood. They worked together, performed together, created together, lived together and undoubtedly drove each other crazy.
They became family.
Roxy had been performing longer and became a kind of mentor. Nina watched him. Learned from him. Stole a little.
The good kind of stealing.
Even today, Nina can catch herself making a particular move onstage or turning her head a certain way and think, “I definitely got that from Roxy.”
Some people teach us by giving instructions. Others teach us simply by letting us watch.
Wes and Roxy
Onstage, Roxy could do something remarkable.
Almost nothing.
“He could stand in the middle of the stage and not move and do a ballad and be completely captivating and entertaining and make you cry.”
No cartwheels. No sprint from one end of the stage to the other.
Roxy could simply stand there.
And people watched.
That takes something harder to learn than choreography.
Presence.
Offstage, Wes was almost the opposite. Quiet. Unassuming. A bookworm who worked in bookstores for years and amassed a collection his husband, Kenny, still keeps in their home.
Nina wasn’t much of a reader when they met. Wes was always reading something.
“How are you sitting there for hours?” Nina remembers wondering.
The person who could command an entire room with barely a move could apparently be perfectly happy sitting still with a book. Roxy was sexy, regal and magnetic. Wes was thoughtful, intelligent and grounded.
Different expressions of the same person.
But great friendships aren’t built entirely on admiration. Sometimes they’re built on being ridiculous together.
Nina and Roxy could recite entire stretches of The First Wives Club, Drop Dead Gorgeous and Pretty Woman. They made each other laugh, competed, and inspired each other.
And occasionally pissed each other off.
One year they competed against each other at Miss Gay USA. Nina finished second. Technical problems hurt Roxy’s performance, and he finished twelfth.
Feelings were bruised. They barely spoke for months.
Then one night backstage at the 90’s, with alcohol apparently acting as a mediator, they got into an actual tussle.
There were heels involved.
Eventually they stopped and looked at each other.
“What the fuck did we just do?”
Friendship restored.
Sometimes healing takes therapy. Sometimes it takes two drag queens fighting backstage.
Life offers many paths.
“Love you, kid.”
Cancer had been part of Roxy’s life for years. It came, went and came back. And because Roxy had fought it before, Nina believed he’d fight it again.
That’s one of grief’s cruelest tricks. We build our expectations from what happened yesterday.
Until tomorrow refuses to cooperate.
By then Nina was living and working in St. Louis. Plans were underway for her return to Minneapolis and for a new cabaret. Nina and Roxy were supposed to be part of it together.
They called it “the venture.”
There wasn’t a name yet.
Then 2020 arrived.
COVID stopped almost everything. Minneapolis was soon reeling from the murder of George Floyd and everything that followed. Nina and Roxy talked from different cities about what was happening back home, and about the racism and bigotry the moment had exposed.
Then, a few days before Roxy died, Nina’s phone rang.
It was Wes.
Something about the conversation felt different. They talked about things Nina couldn’t quite understand. They talked about the venture.
Nina reassured him there was plenty of time. The project was still a year or two away. Time to get better. Time to come home.
There is always time.
Until there isn’t.
When they hung up, Nina knew.
“He was calling to say goodbye.”
The last words Nina remembers hearing were simple.
“Love you, kid.”
Four or five days later, another call came.
Roxy was gone.
What grief builds
Grief is a strange architect.
Sometimes it builds walls. Sometimes distance. Sometimes a room inside us that we revisit when nobody else is around.
And every once in a while, grief builds something with a front door.
Maybe transformation isn’t always something we choose. Sometimes life changes us first.
The question is what we make from what remains.
Losing Roxy clarified something for Nina.
Home.
“It made me realize that I needed to be around my people more.”
She hadn’t been there when Roxy died. She hadn’t gotten to say goodbye in person. That hurt. But the loss also lit a fire.
Come home. Build the cabaret. Do something.
“Life is a gift, and it can just be gone so quick,” Nina says. “Whatever it is you’re thinking about, do it.”
The cabaret still didn’t have a name.
Nina did.
She just wasn’t saying it.
For weeks she’d been thinking about naming the place after Roxy, but the idea made her uncomfortable. She didn’t want grief to become marketing. She didn’t want anyone to think Roxy’s death had become someone else’s business opportunity.
So she kept quiet.
Then her business partner, Sam Turner, called.
“What if we named it after Roxy?”
Sometimes the thing you’re afraid to say out loud finds another way into the room.
Before anything became official, Nina went to Kenny, Wes’s husband, and to the family. She wanted their blessing.
It came with a simple expectation.
Make it mean something.
Roxy’s now hosts charity bingo twice a week, and Nina says the cabaret has raised more than $250,000 for smaller local nonprofits since opening.
A name became a responsibility.
A place built for drag
Roxy’s wasn’t a restaurant that eventually found room for drag. It wasn’t a bar that pushed away a few tables and figured out where to plug in a spotlight.
It was built for it.
From the ground up.
After decades of arriving at gigs and wondering where performers were supposed to get dressed, how that could possibly be considered a stage and whether anyone had heard of the relatively modern invention called a spotlight, Nina knew what performers needed.
At Roxy’s, those things weren’t afterthoughts.
Because a drag queen helped build the place.
Nina wanted performers to have what she and Roxy didn’t always have: “A professional space where they feel appreciated and know their worth.”
Nina remembers a very different era of drag. There was no YouTube tutorial showing her how to paint her face. No TikTok choreography. No RuPaul’s Drag Race offering a roadmap toward celebrity.
You learned from the queens around you. You watched, experimented, failed, wrapped Christmas lights around your leg and hoped for the best.
And, if you were lucky, you found a Roxy.
Someone who showed you how to turn your head. How to hold a room. How to become.
Building a place for drag also meant deciding who was welcome to walk through its doors.
For Nina, the answer was pretty simple.
Everyone.
She remembers an earlier era when some in the LGBTQ+ community resented straight people coming into gay bars, particularly as drag shows became more popular. Nina understood the desire for safe spaces. She just never believed safety had to mean exclusion.
“Part of what we’re here to do is bring people together and break down walls and barriers,” she says.
Roxy’s, in Nina’s mind, isn’t a gay bar. It’s an entertainment cabaret whose house show happens to be drag.
And the person she may enjoy seeing most is the one who didn’t particularly want to come. The boyfriend dragged along. The skeptic. The person carrying whatever assumptions about drag they picked up somewhere else.
Maybe they laugh. Maybe they cry. Maybe the person determined not to enjoy themselves finally cracks a smile.
Transformation doesn’t always require lashes and a wig.
Sometimes changing your mind will do.
A name in lights
There is no giant portrait of Roxy inside Roxy’s.
That’s intentional.
Nina never wanted a shrine.
There is one photograph.
It’s backstage, on Nina’s dressing table. Beside it sits a small jar containing some of Roxy’s ashes. Around it is the usual evidence of transformation: makeup, brushes and the beautiful mess left behind as Jamie becomes Nina.
Night after night, Roxy is there.
Not center stage. Just nearby.
There isn’t a day when Roxy isn’t part of Nina’s life. His name is in Nina’s email, on promotional materials, in the logo and outside the building in enormous lights.
“There was never a day that I don’t say his name.”
One of the quiet cruelties of losing someone is that their name slowly disappears from everyday conversation. At first everyone says it. Then fewer people do. Life moves. People move. The world gets busy doing what the world does.
Nina found a way around that.
She put her best friend’s name on a building.
The funny thing is, Roxy probably would have thought the whole thing was ridiculous.
Nina and Kenny have talked about it.
“He would never believe this. He’d be like, ‘This is so stupid.’”
For someone who could command a stage, Roxy never quite understood the effect he had on people. Even now, Nina isn’t sure Roxy would believe his life warranted this kind of tribute.
Which may be precisely why it does.
A living museum
Roxy’s isn’t meant to be a memorial.
Nina calls it something else.
A “living museum.”
Every show is another piece of art. Always changing, evolving, becoming.
That’s drag.
What Nina has made is a place designed to stir something in people.
“If I’ve made somebody laugh, or if I made them cry, or even if I just made them crack a smile, to me my job’s done.”
Nina sees Roxy’s as a respite, a place where, for a few hours, whatever is happening outside its walls can stay there. The problems will still be waiting when the show ends.
For now, take a seat. Let someone entertain you. Laugh. Celebrate each other.
Then, as Nina puts it rather perfectly, “go back to the bullshit that’s outside.”
What remains
What Nina misses most isn’t the performances, the glamour or even the laughter.
It’s the camaraderie. The person she called with life questions, relationship problems, creative problems. Her sounding board.
Her family.
Nina’s biological family was back East.
“Wes was my family here.”
Chosen family.
Two words our community knows particularly well.
Sometimes the people who become our family arrive without sharing our name. They simply show up. And somewhere along the way, without ceremony or paperwork, they become ours.
Near the end of our conversation, Nina said something I haven’t been able to shake.
“I miss my best friend every day. But I can’t imagine someone else who misses their best friend, who they lost, who doesn’t have what I have.”
Most of us don’t.
Because losing someone isn’t only about learning to live without them. Eventually, we have to figure out what to do with everything they left inside us.
A laugh we can still hear. A phrase we still use. A recipe we still make. A story we’ve told so many times our friends can finish it for us.
A certain turn of the head that, decades later, Nina still catches herself doing onstage.
Maybe that’s what remains.
Not the person exactly, but the ways they changed us.
Maybe that’s why grief sometimes makes us build things. A garden. A scholarship. A tradition. Something, anything, that pushes back against forgetting and says:
No. You were here.
You mattered.
You changed me.
And I’m going to do something with what you left behind.
Nina did.
She came home. She built the cabaret. She put her best friend’s name above the door.
And every night, people who never knew Roxy walk beneath it.
They take their seats. The room darkens. The music begins.
Backstage, Jamie sits before a mirror surrounded by makeup and brushes. Nearby is a photograph of his best friend and a small jar containing some of his ashes.
Then the familiar ritual begins.
The makeup. The lashes. The wig.
Piece by piece, Jamie becomes Nina.
And if you watch closely, Nina will turn her head a certain way.
She got that from Roxy.
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