San Francisco Chronicles
How Bette Midler inspired this ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’ winner’s latest S.F. show
By Tony Bravo,
Oct 1, 2025
When Bette Midler gives her your blessing, you hop on a broomstick and fly.
That’s exactly what drag performer Ginger Minj did. A lifelong fan of the Halloween classic “Hocus Pocus,” she first fell under the Sanderson sisters’ spell at 10 years old, biking to her local theater on dollar days. Decades later, the “RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars” Season 10 winner was cast in the film’s long-awaited 2022 sequel, as a drag queen playing Midler’s character, Winifred Sanderson.
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“Hokus Pokus”: 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 5. Tickets start at $62.84. Palace of Fine Arts Theatre, 3301 Lyon St., S.F. www.palaceoffinearts.org
“All three of those women thanked us individually for the drag community keeping those characters alive all these decades,” said Ginger Minj, 41, of her co-stars Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker and Kathy Najimy. “They all said, ‘None of us would be here if it weren’t for the girls like you who have kept what we did alive.’”
Now Ginger Minj is keeping the magic alive in a drag show cheekily titled “Hokus Pokus,” coming to the Palace of Fine Arts on Sunday, Oct. 5, also starring fellow “Drag Race” queens Sapphira Cristál (Mary Sanderson), Jujubee (Sarah Sanderson) and drag king Landon Cider (Billy Butcherson).
And it all truly started with Midler.
“On set, we’re just sitting there, and she goes, ‘I’ve seen a lot of queens do me over the years, and I really like the way that you do me,’” she recalled Midler telling her during the film shoot. “‘I want to see you take this and do something with it.’ And I said, ‘Like what?’
“In true Bette Midler fashion, she goes, ‘I don’t know. A show or something. I don’t have all the f—ing answers. Figure it out for yourself.’ That’s when the seeds were planted for doing this live version of the show.”
The Chronicle spoke to Ginger Minj about her victory on “RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars,” her deep love of her show’s source material and why she thinks witches are hotter than ever in both mainstream and counterculture.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: How does it feel to be a “RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars” winner after four attempts in the past decade?
A: Like everything.
What I didn’t expect was all of the fans that have immediately reached out to me and said, “I feel more invested in your journey than I do anybody else’s because I’ve been with you since the beginning.”
Q: What’s your process like when you’re building a tour and a show like this?
A: I’m one of those people who can’t sleep at night, and that’s when I get at my most creative. I deprived myself of as much sleep as possible, and then I just jot down every stupid joke or every stupid idea that pops into my head, and then try to string it together to make sense.
The show that we have now as opposed to when we opened in Orlando is the same basic plot and songs and a lot of the same jokes, but we have found more nuanced moments that hit better. I tell the girls sometimes onstage, “We’ve got to land this broomstick because we’ve gone off on a tangent.”
Q: Do you remember when you first saw “Hocus Pocus”?
A: I saw it the summer that it came out, but I kept wondering to myself, “Why is this Halloween movie out in July?”
There was something about those three wacky witches being played by three iconic women who were strong, powerful and beautiful in very unconventional ways. And they all approach comedy from a very different perspective. I think that’s what makes watching the three of them work together so intriguing, and one reason it has lasted 30-something years later.
Q: What was it like to be in “Hocus Pocus 2”?
A: When they announced that Anne Fletcher was directing — she had directed me in “Dumplin’” for Netflix — I sent her a text message and said, “Girl, I’ll do whatever you need me to do, I’ll carry the broomsticks in the background.”
It wasn’t until our last day on set when I’m standing on the lawn, holding hands with (co-stars) Kornbread and Kahmora (Hall), and the three witches take off and fly over our head that I just started crying. You could not have told me at 10 years old that was going to happen.
Q: Did you learn anything working with Bette Midler?
A: The second we walked on set, Bette Midler looks at me and goes, “You were robbed!” This was right after “All Stars” Season 6.
My close-up shot was the last shot of that scene, and they wanted to cheat the shot. Bette said, “This is all wrong. Move that light over here, push the camera in from this angle.” She says, “I’m not always going to be here to look out for these things, so you need to start learning how to look out for them yourself.”
I guess Bette Midler is my new drag mother.
Q: Why do you think witches have been so big in pop culture and queer vernacular this past decade?
A: It is because we are feared by the people who don’t understand us.
Sometimes it does feel like there is a witch hunt against the people in the LGBTQIA+ community. I think that’s because we all possess this innate power that we are born with, this power of creating family and culture in a world for ourselves. People who aren’t a part of that don’t understand it. It scares them, like tropes of witches and covens throughout the years.
Being on the outside and having been treated that way, we do have to cultivate our own little covens and figure out what makes us our most powerful. Then we all have to think about how to use those powers together to make the world better for us.
