This dissertation is an ethnography of the ballroom scene, an underground, predominantly black, queer performance community, in Chicago and New York. It explores how people strive to imagine and secure existence beyond mere survival within an ordinary haunted by anti-black and anti-queer violences; and it tracks the practices for living that emerge out of performances and presentations that experiment with and against normative US practices and values. I consider how these practices elaborate an alternative narrative arc and structure to the American dream. Where it is widely assumed that the idea of living well is necessarily tied to stability—that the good life is inextricably linked to economic, social, and political upward mobility and/or maintenance—I argue that this community pushes the boundaries of what survival and flourishing mean by shifting the definition of success toward an ethics of self-cultivation. In the ballroom scene, performance and presentation provide members of this community with the language and tactics to rethink their relation to encompassing structures that hold together the world, thereby changing the tenor and pitch of how the ordinary is articulated. In short, this manuscript explores how a community makes the ostensibly rigid structures of contemporary life a little more elastic. While looking at the everyday realities of members of this community in and between Chicago and New York—an everyday often plagued by food and housing insecurity, racial and gendered violence, and physical and mental health concerns—my ethnographic focus explores the relationship between ball members and the increasingly present figure of non-profit organizations who often act as a de facto social safety net for this particularly precarious community. While members of this community create and sustain their worlds in the face of an ever-increasing push to extinguish Black, queer life, I explore how these two communities—non-profit and ballroom—are in an ambiguous conflict over what it means to organize a life as a “good” citizen of the state, and how ball members use normative (and often cruel) standards, criteria, and categories as the source material for experimentation. Each chapter is organized around a particular category in the ballroom scene (Realness, Face, Sex Siren, and Vogue) in order to show how these categories amount to robust strategies for living; and I argue that such strategies mark an ethical turn toward a reconceptualization of flourishing, one far beyond normative languages of social, economic, and political success.