Alan Cumming Snaps!

I’ve always had a mad crush on Alan Cumming. Not in a way that I tune into The Good Wife, even if it is a lauded series that everyone tells me I should be watching. And definitely not in a way that has me running out to catch him as a Smurf.

But I love that he can spend a summer going from Macbeth on a Lincoln Center staget to Cabaret with Liza Minnelli on Fire Island. And that he can go from rakish to ah-dorable within seconds onscreen and off, as he did when a mutual pal, Tim Geary of SoHo House, introduced us at Alan’s opening night for his photography at the Paul Smith flagship on Melrose Avenue.

Alan shot the images over the years using whatever phones or cameras he had at hand (a very few are in the slide show here). But he put his favorites through an app to make them square, saturate their color and give them “a gauze of a yesteryear aesthetic,” he told me his in Scottish brogue. As he also notes in his mission statement on this show, which also hits New York, “I don’t like things too clean, too sharp, too HD. My life is a colorful blur, and so I think it only appropriate that the pictures I take embody that too.”

My favorite was the one of him in drag, a self portrait he snapped in his trailer on the set of “The L Word.” Nearly had it bought and already had a place in mind, next to a Scott Nathan pic of Dita Von Teese that hangs in my bathroom. I thought it a perfect pairing to keep me company when I put my own drag on (ie. what I like to call my own beauty ritual, no matter how simple it might be that day!) Alas, Andy put the brakes. While he can handle looking at Dita while in the loo, he didn’t think he could Alan in drag. Hilarious.

No amount of sake at the Japanese pub that we—Andy, little Nina and our pal Joseph Brooks—hit post show would convince him otherwise. Now that’s what I call a drag! Ha!