Mondays on Bourbon Street are a drag, or at least they were when Mark Lanpher first started working the weekday shift at Oz roughly a decade ago.
He was miserable watching tourists stumble into the typically rowdy gay bar to find an empty dance floor, usually prompting them to turn and leave. And though Oz touts daily entertainment, Lanpher said Monday nights tended to feature the same one or two drag queens telling the same jokes every week.
“I made maybe $50 a night,” Lanpher said.
When Lanpher’s apathy and general lack of sparkle became apparent to his boss, they agreed he should find something to get excited about. A lifelong karaoke enthusiast, Lanpher thought maybe a weekly karaoke event would attract a wider audience and perhaps even some regulars on Mondays.
Monday night “Drag Karaoke” at OZ at 800 Bourbon Street in New Orleans, Monday, June 15, 2026.
He also thought Oz could do more to tap into the Crescent City’s massive pool of drag queens. Fighting drag with drag, he created a roster of queens to host the karaoke night on a rotating basis, like a lazy Susan brimming with rhinestones and wigs instead of pantry essentials.
In 2017, Lazy Susan Karaoke was born. (If you’re thinking Lazy Susan would also be a great name for a drag queen, it’s already taken.)
The weekly event kicks off at 8:30 p.m. each Monday at Oz and features a rotating lineup of attention-loving, snarky hosts in drag. With a roster that was at one time 30 queens long, Lanpher said it draws fans hoping to see their favorite queens perform and vocalists gunning for a chance in the spotlight on a weeknight when most dancefloors on Bourbon sit vacant.
Lanpher, who has since left Oz to attend nursing school, said the event has grown in popularity over the past decade — by the time he left, he was closing his Monday night shifts with $200 to $400 in tips — and has become a way for up-and-coming drag performers to gain valuable exposure and experience.
Joey Olsen, who performs regularly across the city as Debbie with a D, credits Lazy Susan Karaoke, in part, for his meteoric rise to drag queen stardom.
New Orleans drag performer Debbie with a D in New Orleans, Friday, July 25, 2025. Debbie’s real name is Joey Olsen seen here in his costume closet. (Staff photo by John McCusker, The Times-Picayune | NOLA.com)
Olsen landed a Lazy Susan hosting gig about six years ago as a brand-new drag queen. As he honed his skills, he was promoted to a monthly slot — the last Monday of each month — and later went on to become a full-time drag queen, earning Gambit’s Best Drag Performer title and queen of Krewe of Armeinius in 2024.
On Memorial Day, Olsen kicked the event off with a dazzling rendition of “Circle of Life” — yes, from “The Lion King” — strutting in a rhinestone-encrusted pink leotard, and often holding the mic out to members of the audience for impromptu solos. It’s one of his favorite warm-up songs, he said, something everyone knows.
“Sometimes people have great voices, sometimes they have great attitudes,” Olsen said, raising his eyebrows meaningfully. “And either way, it’s fun to interact with people and make them feel good about their moment on stage.”
The great and powerful Oz
Olsen and the crew at Oz work hard to keep Lazy Susan Karaoke decidedly unserious.
Olsen asks participants questions, only to pull the mic away before they can answer. He repeatedly gets up, walks up the stairs to the stage, and then backs away to sit back down at the end of a particularly long-winded ballad. A bartender named Josh belts out “Drift Away” by Uncle Kracker — of all things — from behind the bar while pouring drinks. And the DJ, Andrew Martinez, teases Olsen with well-timed sound effects and fog machine theatrics.
Martinez organizes the set list so it maintains the appropriate banger-to-ballad ratio, finding appropriate lighting for each song and fielding requests to cut the line. It’s a thankless job but vital to the survival of any karaoke event. Hidden in an enclosed DJ booth at the back of the bar, Martinez said he’s well aware his job has certain parallels to Oz’s namesake.
“I’m the man behind the curtain,” he said.
Monday night “Drag Karaoke” at OZ at 800 Bourbon Street in New Orleans, Monday, June 15, 2026.
But something about having a drag queen in the room adds an extra layer of support, too. Olsen encourages attendees to sing along and hit the dance floor, and he leads fervent cheers after every song.
Olsen snapped and cheered as Dee’Jahn Lewis hit all the high notes in “Lose Control” by Teddy Swims, and Lewis blushed as he returned to his seat to raucous applause.
“I was only warming up,” Lewis said, grinning.
He’s been coming to Lazy Susan Karaoke regularly for about the last five months to show off his pipes and meet new people. New Orleans local Josh Farquhar attends karaoke events all across the city, and said he comes to Oz to support the local queens and for the “come as you are” aesthetic.
“Everyone here is so welcoming and really fun,” he said.
At the end of the day, that’s kind of what both drag and karaoke are all about.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.nola.com ’
