And sometimes it means taking them to a drag show. While our previous students got to experience drag by watching the current seasons of RuPaul's Drag Race, we wanted our new students to take it a step further.

We recently took our foreign exchange students, Marie and Alvaro, along with one of their friends, to Ayesha Voodoo Presents: Magic The Drag Show at X-Ray Arcade in Cudahy, Wisconsin.

For those unfamiliar with X-Ray Arcade, it is one of those wonderfully strange little places that seems perfectly suited for an evening like this. It is part arcade, part concert venue, part bar, and it has the sort of atmosphere where you can play an old arcade game one minute and find yourself standing in front of a stage watching a drag queen the next.

The theme of the evening was Magic: The Gathering, the fantasy card game filled with wizards, creatures, spells, and complicated rules. Fortunately, you did not need to understand the card game to enjoy the show.

The evening was presented by Ayesha Voodoo and featured Portia, Bubblez, Roxy Toxin, Jaharia, and Kraven. Each performer brought something completely different to the stage, which is probably one of the things I enjoy most about drag shows. There is not simply one version of drag. One performer might be glamorous, another funny, another theatrical, another wonderfully strange, and then someone comes along who manages to be several of those things at once.

There were elaborate costumes, dramatic performances, plenty of humor, and the sort of energy that comes from being only a few feet away from the performers rather than watching everything from the safety of your couch.

And yes, we brought teenagers. I can already imagine someone clutching their pearls, given our political climate. They survived. In fact, taking our exchange students to events like this is part of what I think cultural exchange should be. They did not come to Wisconsin simply to sit in a classroom, eat hamburgers, and have their photograph taken in front of a few famous landmarks. They came here to experience what life is actually like. That means experiencing different people, different communities, different traditions, and occasionally something that probably was not included in the foreign exchange brochure.

Milwaukee has a wonderfully varied cultural landscape, and drag has long been part of it. My grandparents told me about accidentally ending up at a drag bar in Racine in the 1970s. They got to experience it a second time when we took them to a drag bar in New York City, where all the other patrons gave them tons of free drinks. I am assuming it is because they do not usually see heterosexual couples in their seventies. It is performance and comedy. It is costume, music, and dance. It is exaggeration and, sadly, sometimes caricature. But, most importantly, it is people getting together in a room and having fun.

There is also something rather fitting about introducing exchange students to America through experiences that do not necessarily fit into the tidy little version of America we sometimes export to the rest of the world. The United States they encounter while living here is much more complicated, ridiculous, diverse, and occasionally glitter-covered than anything they might have seen in a movie. That is part of their adventure.

Every outing adds another little piece to their understanding of the place they are temporarily calling home. And, admittedly, it adds another piece to ours as well.

Hosting has given us an excuse to explore our own backyard in ways we probably never would have otherwise. I have lived in southeastern Wisconsin for years, yet somehow having teenagers from another country living in our house keeps me looking around and asking, “What have we not done yet?” and “What have we not done lately?” Apparently, the answer this week was a Magic: The Gathering-themed drag show in an arcade in Cudahy, and so we fixed it. Another strange little Milwaukee adventure completed, and another memory for the exchange student scrapbook.

As a disclaimer, we spoke with X-Ray Arcade before taking our students in to make sure it was okay. I also reached out to Ayesha Voodoo to make sure the content would not be too risqué for teenagers. Both checked out. The students were on board, and that is that.