Welcome back to Hot Takes and Deep Dives, and I am here with your favorite cabaret singer.

She is back on stage where she belongs, starting a string of sold-out shows back at 54

below, along with her new Christmas song, What do I Want for Christmas? She's the OG of

Rony. Countess Luanne, how are you? Hi, Jess. Good to see you. I'm great. I'm great. I'm super

excited, you know, and I'm just getting super excited now because it's been like, you know,

I've been in rehearsals. I'm working really hard. I want to bring a great show in my cabaret career.

So it's exciting to be back on that stage in particular and be back with a Christmas show,

especially with what we've been through for the last couple of years. You know, I feel completely

grateful and, you know, overwhelmed with joy that I can come back and come back with a Christmas

show and a song. I want to talk about 54 below, specifically, the venue. So I was actually at

that very first show you did that was filmed for the show. For Real Housewives. Wow, you were

Jess. I didn't realize that. And I don't think people, because it had to be, you know, severely

edited down for television, I don't think people understand how electric that night was,

because you had, well, first of all, all the housewives were there, which already created a buzz.

And I don't think people realize that Bridget Everett performed that night, Rachel Dratch,

Jake Sheerz from The Scissors Sisters. So the cabaret environment that you create is kind of something

where you don't really know what can happen, right? Don't know what happened exactly. And I was

just thinking about that to myself, because, you know, I have kind of an opening kind of thing

that I want to say. And I thought to myself, you know what, I'm probably never going to say what I

want to say in any case that's just going to come out the way it's supposed to. So I mean,

that's what cabaret is all about. It's not, it's not about perfection. It's about being real. And,

you know, sharing sharing yourself with the audience. And that's what I do. And that's why I think

...