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AS New York restaurants focus on takeout and delivery while waiting to reopen their dining rooms, a Queens restaurant is adding a dose of entertain-ment to entice customers: Drag queens will deliver food to your home with a song and dance.

Fresco’s Cantina, a Mexican fusion restaurant in Astoria, hired four drag queens last weekend to launch its “Drag-livery” service in the surround-ing neighborhood and Long Island City. The next outing is planned for May 31, when the restaurant will have the bedaz-zled entertainers deliver your food for US$15 extra if you spend at least US$50 on food — all while donning masks and gloves with a performance at least 6 feet (1.8 meters) away.

“We wanted to remain rel-evant and bring happiness to people,” says Brian Martinez, who owns the nearly 3-year-old restaurant with his hus-band, Adrian Suero.

Before the current crisis, the restaurant hired drag queens to host brunch, bingo nights and viewings of RuPaul’s Drag Race. The queer-friendly space, Martinez adds, is known for its frozen margaritas made with fresh fruit puree. The most popular dish on the menu is the pastelon tacos (smashed sweet plantains with seasoned ground beef and melted moz-zarella; other items draw on inspiration from Mexican, East Asian, Indian and other Latin cultures.

“These queens make every-

one feel better,” says Martinez. “You can’t help but smile.”

Audrey Phoenix, one of the drag queens delivering food, shared his video with Time Out New York.

“I was honestly so nervous,”

says Phoenix, an Astoria resi-dent and graphic designer. “Most drag queens have been doing digital shows. The con-cept for curbside pickup and a number made me think, ‘Is this going to work?’”

The four drag queens per-formed hits from Rihanna, Dua Lipa and Donna Summer during last weekend’s launch. Customers and their neigh-bors would come out on the sidewalk and peek outside their windows for a show — some even joined in on the dancing.

“I think every drag queen has a ton of leopard print,” says Phoenix. “The other girls are really good dancers, but I’m a campy queen. I just had to dress up and wiggle on the street.”

With New York City’s Pride festivities canceled this year, Martinez adds that the Drag-livery will be available every weekend throughout June.

(SD-Agencies)

NY restaurant o�ering drag queen delivery

The performers hired by the restaurant. File photo

FROM her village in eastern India, 15-year-old Jyoti Kumari reflected on her desperate 1,200-kilometer bicycle journey home with her disabled father that has drawn international praise.

“I had no other option,” she said Sunday. “We wouldn’t have survived if I hadn’t cycled to my village.”

Kumari said that she and her father risked starvation had they stayed in Gurugram, a suburb of New Delhi, with no income amid India’s coronavirus lockdown.

Her father, whose injury in an accident left him unable to walk, had earned a living by driving an auto rickshaw. But with all nonessential travel banned, he found himself among millions of newly unemployed. Their landlord demanded rent they couldn’t pay and threatened to evict them, Kumari said.

So she decided to buy a bicycle and, like thousands of other Indian migrant workers have

done since March, make her way home.

As the temperature climbed, Kumari pedaled for 10 days, with her father riding on the back of the hot-pink bike. They survived on food and water given by strangers, and only once did Kumari give her legs a break with a short lift on a truck.

The father and daughter arrived in Darbhanga, their village in Bihar state, more than a week ago, reuniting with Kumari’s mother and brother-in-law, who’d left the capital region after the lock-down was imposed on March 25. Kumari, an eighth-grade student who moved from the village to Gurugram in January to take care of her dad, stayed on.

She said Sunday that she was still exhausted from the trip.

“It was a difficult journey,” she said. “The weather was so hot, but we had no choice. I had only one aim in my mind, and that was to reach home.” (SD-Agencies)

Desperate Indian girl bikes 745 miles home with disabled dad

A MYSTERIOUS figure who picks the locks of Paris parks at night for people who have been cooped up in the city’s tiny apartments has become something of a folk hero.

Parks have been chained up in Europe’s most densely popu-lated capital since the coronavi-rus lockdown began more than eight weeks ago.

Despite the city’s mayor Anne Hidalgo pleading with the government to allow them to reopen if people wore masks, ministers have been unmoved.

But as temperatures nudged towards 30 degrees Celsius this week, an amateur lock-picker admitted that he has been opening parks at night to let hard-pressed Parisians sit on the grass and smell the roses.

A man calling himself “Jose” told the Parisien Daily that he has been liberating parks in the poorer districts of northern and eastern Paris in a series of “Batman”

style nocturnal actions.Two handwritten posters

hanging from the railings of the Parc de Belleville on Friday said “Thank you, Jose!”, seem-ing to show that the phantom locker picker has generated a following.

Discontent with the closure of parks has been rising since France began to slowly relax its lockdown last week, with the police forced to clear the huge open lawns in front of Les Invalides in central Paris of pic-nickers twice in two days.

Officers had earlier dispersed hundreds of people from the banks of Canal Saint-Martin.

Jose, who claims he only picks locks as a hobby and makes an honest living from a “normal job,” said: “Paris apartments are very small. We are supposed to be coming out amid lockdown, but everything is closed.”

Almost a quarter of Paris’s population escaped the city

— often to second homes in the country — during the strictest period of the confinement.

But the city’s poor and essen-tial workers were stuck in often tiny flats during one of the sun-niest springs on record.

Hidalgo, who is fighting a re-election campaign, asked the government to treat parks like the city’s streets and allow people to “stroll through them if they were wearing a mask, which should be obligatory.”

But Health Minister Olivier Veran said the parks should stay shut as long as Paris and its surroundings remain in the “red zone” of infections.

He said the risk of people gathering and not respect-ing social distancing was too great.

But the mayor’s supporters argued that it made no sense to allow Parisians to take metros or crowded suburban trains while denying them the chance of fresh air. (SD-Agencies)

Phantom lock picker of parks becomes folk hero

A SPANISH man has posted a heartwarming video of his reunion with his beloved pet donkey as coronavirus restric-tions ease.

He was finally allowed to see his pet again as Spain entered phase 1 of lockdown lifting.

In the video, the man, Ismael Fernández, 38, can be heard calling to his donkey, Bal-domera, nicknamed “Baldo,” in the hills of southern Spain. The donkey, who appears to have been eagerly awaiting his master’s return, rushes out to greet him.

“Where’s my donkey? Where is she? Where have you been? Better yet, where have I been?”

The donkey then starts braying enthusiastically as the man begins to cry.

“I have also missed you,” Fer-nandez goes on to say.

Huffing-ton Post r e p o r t e d that it has been two m o n t h s since Fer-nandez last saw Bal-domera, the family donkey.

The reunion took place out-side Fernandez’s country home in El Borge. Sharing the video on Facebook, he wrote that he wasn’t embarrassed to be shown displaying tears as a sign of his unconditional love for his pet.

Fernandez was firstly unsure if Baldomera would recognize him after his brother had been taking care of the donkey and other animals on the rural prop-erty for an extended period of time in his absence.

(SD-Agencies)

Spanish man reunited with his donkey after 2-month lockdown

Wedding after lockdownVietnam Airlines’ cabin attendant Tran Le Duyen and aviation sector businessman Nguyen Van Trai are seen during their wedding ceremony after the Vietnamese Government eased the nationwide lockdown for the COVID-19 outbreak, which delayed their original wedding date, in Hanoi, Vietnam, on Saturday. SD-Agencies

Fernandez and his donkey. File photo