Pray Tell tells the story during a ballroom scene—the term can be traced back to Paris Dupree, the Paris of—who used the glossy magazine in her bag as inspiration for posing to the beat in a way that asserted power and defiance.
Aspiration thrums beneath the song’s beat—the dancers striving to impress a global audience, the cachet of "giving good face" on the cover ofthe name-checking and outright imitation of screen sirens from black-and-white film, who even in the 80s and early 90s had a stranglehold on what was considered glamorous and beautiful.
"Madonna is shining a bright spotlight on us," Blanca says in the premiere, suffused with optimism for this mainstreaming of ball culture. She encourages the dancers and models who make up her house—the runaways, streetwalkers, and vagrants that she took in—to pursue their dreams, no matter how pie in the sky. "Everything is changing," she tells her children at the end of the first episode, as "Vogue" plays one more time. "This is just the beginning.