The actor, host and drag king Murray Hill had just finished rinsing the Dawn dish suds out of his hair in May 2021 when he went to see Michelle Rene Cathey-Casino. Mr. Hill was in the throes of a full-blown hair crisis; Ms. Cathey-Casino, a stylist, was sure she could fix it in a hurry.
Mr. Hill had roles in two TV shows that spring, “Somebody Somewhere” and “Life & Beth.” Both were resuming production after a Covid pause. He hadn’t picked up a box of the Just for Men he favors for the better part of a year.
“I had let my hair go,” he said. “I was a silver fox, a salt and pepper daddy.”
The hair and makeup department preferred his character’s prepandemic look, a wardrobe team member told him. So to lose the gray, Mr. Hill went to see his barber in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, a week before he was due on set.
The inky hair he emerged with cratered the onstage suavity he’s known for: “It was a level of blackness I can’t even describe,” he said. “I freaked out.”
Ms. Cathey-Casino, the colorist whom his friend, the burlesque artist Dirty Martini, recommended, squeezed him in for an appointment two days before the shoot.
Mr. Hill, 54, grew up in Simsbury, Conn. He found his way into drag in the early 1990s by way of photography. At Boston University, where he received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in art history, he started going to queer clubs to document the community. When he arrived at the School of Visual Arts in New York in 1995 to earn a master’s degree in photography, he discovered a whole new world of drag.
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“I had an epiphany my second or third week here,” said Mr. Hill, who lives in Williamsburg but renamed himself after the Murray Hill neighborhood in Manhattan, where he once had a post office box. “I was photographing subcultures and sub-subcultures.”
Drag kings, he noticed, didn’t have much visibility. So when friends started a club night called the 999999’s at the now-closed Flamingo East in the East Village, they invited him to put his knack for improv to work.
“Their first idea was for me to be a cigarette girl,” he said. “I wasn’t too excited about that.” Then a promoter handed him a suit. His persona, he said, is “Catskills comedian.” He’s been cracking jokes and wearing custom three-piece suits with slicked back hair, tinted glasses and a neat mustache ever since.
Twenty-five years later, the 2021 hair catastrophe that landed him in Ms. Cathey-Casino’s chair at Fringe Salon, in Gowanus, Brooklyn, called for a humble entrance, he felt. His scalp was still stinging from Dawn and a baking soda concoction that also proved no match for the dye.
Plus, “I’m always uncomfortable in a women’s salon,” said Mr. Hill, who is transgender. “I remember thinking, I’m going to tone it down a little.” That meant skipping the suit for athleisure and paring down his accessories; instead, he wore an Adidas tracksuit with only one gold chain and two rings.
Four hours later, he emerged with hair a normal shade of brown and a massive crush.
“First, she started doing that thing where they touch your hair,” Mr. Hill said. Then she put her hands on his shoulders. “I melted like a pat of butter.”
Ms. Cathey-Casino felt a tug of attraction, too. “We really hit it off,” she said.
Ms. Cathey-Casino, 59, grew up in Tustin, Calif. She studied art history at a community college in New Jersey, where her family moved when she was 13, but her early career veered corporate.
She worked in I.T. at a medical management company, then went into publishing, where she was hired for positions in human resources and as a business manager. A year after her first marriage ended in divorce, in 2008, she was laid off.
That layoff came with a silver lining. “I realized I was doing soul-sucking jobs and I hated them,” she said. She moved from her marital home in Maplewood, N.J., to Bushwick, Brooklyn. Before the layoff, she had been traveling to Manhattan regularly to dip her toe in a less mainstream occupation.
“I was secretly doing burlesque at night,” she said. At first, it was an exercise in bucking the safety of her comfort zone. “Then I found out I loved it,” she said. In 2019, two years before she took on Mr. Hill’s hair fiasco, both were cast in a music video for “Guaranteed Broken Heart,” a song by the queer country band Karen & the Sorrows.
They chatted between takes during the Brooklyn shoot. Mr. Hill remembered her “sitting in the corner, wearing a cute little outfit,” he said. Ms. Cathey-Casino remembered telling a friend she was on set with Murray Hill, and that she liked talking to him. But “I knew he was seeing someone at the time,” she said.
That changed by the time she was building a reputation for cutting and coloring hair, including their mutual friend Dirty Martini’s.
Ms. Cathey-Casino and Mr. Hill started texting regularly after his appointment at Fringe. In July, after Bridget Everett, who had recruited him to join the “Somebody Somewhere” cast, helped him wrestle down a bout of nerves, Mr. Hill asked Ms. Cathey-Casino on a date. On July 25, they had dinner at Frankies 457 Spuntino, an Italian restaurant in Carroll Gardens.
Before the date, “I thought he was a total lady killer,” Ms. Cathey-Casino said. He was a gentleman instead. At the end of the night, he booked her an Uber home. While they waited for the car, she surprised him with a kiss.
The moment it landed, Mr. Hill was leaning against a bike rack, trying to tame his anxiety about how to end the date. “I was looking around like a total wreck, and then I turned my head to the right and saw this red hair coming at me,” he said. That hair was traveling south. “I’m a short, chubby Italian guy. She’s two feet taller than me.”
A committed relationship mattered little to both until October, when Ms. Cathey-Casino asked Mr. Hill his thoughts about monogamy over the phone. When he said, “Oh, I’m not really into it,” she hung up dejected. He didn’t know she was asking because her feelings for him were deepening. “Sometimes I do dumb guy stuff,” Mr. Hill said.
Regrouping after that conversation was harder than she expected. “I didn’t realize how upset I was going to be,” she said. “But I didn’t want to be like, ‘Oh, you have to date just me.’”
When Mr. Hill invited her over for a talk the next day, she was sure it was to break up. “I couldn’t eat all day,” she said. “I was like, ‘This is it.’”
But Mr. Hill had taken the advice of a longtime friend, the author Jonathan Ames. “Jonathan said, ‘Why don’t you see what monogamy feels like?’” Mr. Hill said. Mr. Ames had suggested that Mr. Hill’s fear of intimacy and of getting burned by relationships was no longer serving him. So “I went to the good deli and got the good flowers — the $8.99 kind, not the $4.99 kind.”
That night, he presented them to Ms. Cathey-Casino and told her he was falling in love with her. When he asked her to go steady, Ms. Cathey-Casino, relieved, burst into tears.
By Thanksgiving 2021, which was also his 50th birthday, most of Mr. Hill’s belongings were destroyed in an apartment fire. His shock and devastation at first seemed too steep a mountain to climb. Then Ms. Cathey-Casino helped him scale it.
“She gave me space when I needed space,” he said. When he needed someone to rummage through what remained of his charred, wet possessions, she put on gloves and started sifting.
Mr. Hill moved to Greenpoint while the apartment was repaired and renovated. In 2024, when he moved back in, he and Ms. Cathey-Casino were engaged.
Their Dec. 20 wedding was a theatrical affair. Since 2000, Mr. Hill has been hosting a Christmas variety show, “A Murray Little Christmas,” that folds his risqué comedy into an evening of live music, burlesque and a slate of surprise guests.
“I started it to basically be kind of a personal Santa for all the misfits and queer kids who had left home, so they would have a place to go for the holidays,” he said.
This year’s show — the 25th — was at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall. Few of the 700 people who bought tickets, many of whom filed into the theater wearing elf headgear and sparkly Christmas get-ups, knew the event would double as his wedding.
But 10 minutes before the show was about to wrap, workers wheeled a rolling altar painted with wedding bells onstage. The drag queen Miss Peppermint, who was ordained by American Marriage Ministries for the occasion, joined Mr. Hill in front of its candy cane arch to welcome Ms. Cathey-Casino as she walked down the aisle.
“Damn,” Mr. Hill said in appreciation as the bride, wearing a floor-length red cape over her 1940s-inspired ivory wedding gown, approached holding a Christmas bouquet.
After a brief exchange of vows — Mr. Hill’s emphasized with a “hell yes” and Ms. Cathey-Casino’s with “absolutely” — Mr. Hill checked his hand to make sure he had room on his ring finger for a new addition, this one a wedding band.
On This Day
When Dec. 20, 2025
Where Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center, Manhattan
Shine On Before curtain call, the couple welcomed the audience to celebrate with them at a reception in the theater’s lobby. But the show wasn’t over until the New York City Gay Men’s Chorus, backed by a band called the Fruitcake Collective, sang “Shine” by Emeli Sandé, chosen by Mr. Hill for its message of acceptance and love.
Winners All Surprise guest performances before the wedding included musical numbers by Sasha Velour, a winner of “RuPaul’s Drag Race”; the Tony winner J. Harrison Ghee; and Mr. Hill’s “Somebody Somewhere” castmate Jeff Hiller, who won a 2025 Emmy for his performance on the show.
Proud Misfits A four-tier wedding cake inspired by “The Island of Misfit Toys” from the Christmas classic “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” had been rolled out onstage before it made an appearance in the lobby. Written in icing was “Mr. & Mrs. Showbiz,” as well as “We’re all misfits!”
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