Audience members screamed as if they couldn’t believe their eyes. Phones pointed toward the stage. It was a millennial icon, come back to life.
The blonde opened her mouth and uttered one word: shoes.
It was Kelly, the YouTube sensation whose 2006 “Shoes” musical sketch became one of America’s first viral videos. Nearly two decades later, she was performing the song for the first time in years.
“Like, oh my god, I feel 16 again,” Kelly said after taking the stage to raucous cheers.
When event producers for Precinct, a downtown Los Angeles queer bar, reached out to Kelly’s creator, Liam Kyle Sullivan, asking him to perform at a June 9 Pride event, Sullivan had to overcome some nerves. But he dusted off his Kelly wig (the original) and donned her white-and-red-striped tights.
“It was incredible. So much time has gone by,” he told The Washington Post this week. “I didn’t know that the response would be so positive and overwhelming. … It was a real joy.”
The nostalgic performance took off on social media, with videos on X, Instagram and TikTok racking up millions of views. “Core memory unlocked,” one person commented on an X video that has been viewed close to 7 million times.
Advertisem*nt
“I didn’t know I needed this video so bad,” another said. “I don’t think people truly understand the cultural impact this had,” wrote a third.
The “Shoes” music video, with its simplistic lyrics, flat valley-girl tune and big personality, swiftly turned into a sensation after Sullivan posted it on YouTube, which had been founded only a year earlier. Simply the word “shoes,” said in the right Kelly-esque accent, became a cultural reference for a certain swath of millennials.
Today, “Shoes the Full Version” has more than 69 million views. Showcasing 2000s-era editing and internet humor, the video’s song tells the story of Kelly shopping for shoes on her birthday after failing to receive them as a gift from her parents.
When she expresses dismay that her brother got a car and computer while she got a stuffed dinosaur, her father drones, “Kelly, what are you going to do with your life?” She responds, “I’m going to get what I want!” She heads out to shop for shoes in a montage that becomes increasingly unhinged.
Advertisem*nt
Bringing Kelly back was something that took a little persuading for Sullivan, now 50, who lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two kids and is an editor for web and streaming content. The YouTube success led him to tour with the comedian Margaret Cho, and he continued his acting career before pivoting to editing.
Though he sometimes resurrects his characters — he offers videos as Kelly on Cameo and performed “Shoes” online during the pandemic — Sullivan felt hesitant about returning to the stage. Despite knowing the song by heart, he spent days rehearsing.
The idea was hatched by the organizers of the monthly event, a nostalgic music night called “What’s My Age Again?,” as they tried to figure out what to do for their Pride Month program. One of the producers, Sean Cloutier, reached out to Sullivan online and spent a couple of weeks talking with him about the idea, he said.
Advertisem*nt
“When he said yes, it felt like I won the lottery,” said Cloutier, 41. “I felt like Kelly, on Kelly’s Myspace, put me in the first slot of his Top 8.”
But neither of them anticipated what a huge response the performance would get.
“When Kelly’s little Mary Jane heels hit the stage, … the room exploded,” Cloutier said. “And you could see Kelly just receiving that love. It was emotional. Everyone in this room, we were all transported back to our teens.”
Sullivan first wrote “Shoes” as a stand-up sketch in 2005, when he was pursuing an acting career. He recalled getting dressed as Kelly in the bathroom at the comedy show in Santa Monica, Calif. “I had the wig and the lipstick and the whole outfit, and I remember thinking, ‘Okay, this could either really bomb or be great.’”
The audience loved it, so Sullivan, then 32, turned it into the YouTube video, which was filmed on a Panasonic camcorder and co-starred Sullivan’s actor friends. After Kelly calls her friends — “Let’s get some shoes” — she goes shopping, proclaiming, “These shoes rule. These shoes suck,” about various pairs; tells people who say she has too many shoes to shut up; briefly parties at a pool; decides to buy a $300 pair; and becomes enraged when the sales clerk says her feet are too big.
Advertisem*nt
The video devolves into a fight over the shoes, complete with a fire-ring Hula-Hooper and an appearance by the stuffed dinosaur. “Those shoes are mine, betch,” Kelly concludes.
Sullivan was shocked by the video’s popularity. The idea of building an audience online hadn’t yet existed, and he had just been happy that this site called YouTube had let him upload his material free.
“It was great. It was a little confusing, because I was like, ‘What exactly is happening?’” he recalled. “It was all new. Viral — that word was new, at least for videos. When I took meetings about it, I remember people being kind of confused, like, ‘What are you doing?’”
Now, “Shoes” has gone viral once more. The Precinct performance has prompted other invitations: Kelly is set to perform at another L.A. club this weekend and on the main stage at San Francisco Pride on June 29.
Advertisem*nt
At Precinct, the other performers gathered around Sullivan backstage and recounted their memories of his videos. Cloutier recalled watching them with his siblings while their mother was fighting cancer, finding “a lot of joy and laughter.” Another performer, Cloutier said, told Sullivan that she considered Kelly the first drag queen she had ever seen, a character who had made her feel as if she could be whatever she wanted.
Though the video was a key piece of pop culture in general, it had a special impact on the LGBTQ+ community, given the “shame and guilt” surrounding sexuality in that era, Cloutier said.
“To see somebody who was a boy dressed up as a girl, acting out this song about ‘I’m going to go and get what I want,’” Cloutier said, “as fun and as playful and as humorous as it is, that line, in and of itself, it gives you permission to just live your life and live it unapologetically.”
Though Sullivan didn’t conceive Kelly as a drag character — he considered himself a character actor, doing both male and female characters — he has been moved by the response to her over the years, he said. The ecstatic reaction after the performance, though, left him “in a daze.”
As he took a bow with the drag performers at the end of the night, he teared up.
“I’m so happy that some people see the Kelly character and feel good about themselves,” Sullivan said. “If I’m helping them do that, then that gives me so much joy.”
