carson kressley once performed a whole musical for an audience of bushes and the secret service. his review of the secret service: "super hot."

Photo: Carson Kressley, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

via Watch What Happens Live and Entertainment Weekly

Every actor has a nightmare audience. Carson Kressley's was four Bushes and a security detail.

On Thursday's Watch What Happens Live After Show, a fan asked him about the time the Bush family came to see him in a play in Maine. We went through the clip. "I was doing The Drowsy Chaperone at the Ogunquit Playhouse," he said, a role he described as "like 90 pages of dialogue with no interaction." Portland Monthly had him as Man in Chair there in June 2010.

The theater asked if he minded special guests at dress rehearsal. "I said, 'If I'm going to suck, I'm going to suck no matter what.' And they said, 'Great. It's the former president and the whole family.' I was like, 'Uh-oh.'" It was George senior and Barbara, it turned out, plus, Kressley said, one of their daughters and Laura. "The entire theater was empty and all I could see as I'm doing the show was like four people in the middle of the theater and then like a bunch of Secret Service guys. It was very daunting."

And how did it go? "It went great. I made friends with all the Secret Service guys and they were super hot." The studio, briefly, became a Secret Service appreciation society. Kressley would see the Bushes around town afterward, he said, "getting like lobster rolls." His lasting memory of Barbara Bush's style: "she always had a chunky, um, necklace."

EW wrote it up Friday. A gay man performing a musical in Maine for a Republican dynasty, then rating the bodyguards. It is the most Queer Eye thing that ever happened outside of Queer Eye.