Nice Girls Don't Wear Cha-Cha Heels

I recently went to LA to see the John Waters: Pope of Trash exhibit at the Academy Museum with one of my oldest friends. We’ve decided to take trips together for fun and random reasons like this, rather than the usual ones, aka weddings and funerals. The exhibit was a pretty comprehensive look at Waters’ films, with a lot of ephemera from his career (including a flyer for a puppet show he put on in his neighborhood as a child), costumes, great stills of actors, a compilation of all of his guest appearances in shows like Law & Order and the Simpsons and a cut of all the dancing in his work in a room with space to join along. You can’t talk about the films of John Waters without including the Dreamlanders, his early cast and crew of regulars, mainly outsiders who found each other early on … Divine, Mink Stole, David Lochary, Mary Vivian Pearce, Cookie Mueller, Edith Massey, Susan Lowe, Paul Swift, Victor Peranio … anyone who is still alive still works with Waters.

John Waters

I was born in Baltimore City and grew up in Baltimore County. John Waters was and is the patron saint of outcasts, especially when and where I grew up. “Female Trouble” was my first John Waters’ movie, I saw it in 1988, the same year the Baltimore Orioles had the worst start to a season in modern American baseball history, 0-21.¹ It’s my favorite, with Divine as the depraved, delightful and derangedl Dawn Davenport, the main character. ² “Pink Flamingos” is his most infamous film from this period, Divine eats dog shit on camera to truly become the filthiest person alive. Waters gained a mainstream audience with 1988’s “Hairspray,” a family-friendly movie that marked a fascinating, intentional change in his work, to do something new and subversive for him, something rated PG!

Divine, Mary Vivian Pearce, Mink Stole, David Lochary, John Waters and Danny Mills on the set of Pink Flamingos. The original, beautiful Dreamlanders.

During my senior year of college, Waters was on a speaking tour. I raised the money for his fee to book him, organized the event, a book-signing and an after-party in my apartment with cheap pink champagne and a cheese board from the supermarket.³ Yes there was Velveeta. I begged the caretaker for the Frank Lloyd Wright House to let him stay there. He said yes, but only because it was John Waters, the King of Filth.

Waters and I both grew up in Lutherville, Maryland, just north of Baltimore. On the drive from the airport in my Dodge Aries K car⁴ to town, we talked about our hometown. In what was certainly a desperate attempt to make conversation and a connection, I told him my family owned Souris’ Saloon⁵, and he said, in his perfect Charm City accent, “Oh honey, I’m sorry to tell you this, but in high school we could always find a drunk outside your dad’s bar to buy us beer.”

At the Academy exhibit, after a few minutes walking around, I started to feel like myself. That’s the honest-to-god phrase that came into my brain, whatever that means. I was immersed in a world I loved and understood, surrounded by things that were meaningful. I have felt this way a few other times, some as understandable as being with old friends or visiting a bar that still stands the same as the first day you went there. If I’m lucky, it’s being in the right kitchen with the right people.

William S Burroughs is the person who deemed Waters the "Pope of Trash." A receipt from the Maryland State Board of Motion Picture Censors where a scene had to be cut from Female Trouble & Waters paid a $16 fine. A picture of Waters and Edith Massey, who most famously played the Egg Lady in Pink Flamingos, I've never seen it before. Me and JW.

This is an element of me, something that has had its hand in my construction. And whatever this thing is, it is vital. And it has been so absent, so missing, that I feel its arrival. This isn’t longing, or pining, it is not nostalgia. It is essential.

Here’s a very brief list of when I have felt this very specific feeling, the times I can recall. We love lists!

Spoonbill and Sugartown Books in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It’s full of zines and magazines and art books and smart books and biography and fiction and notebooks, mental spaces I want to be in, lives I aspire to. But it’s not super fancy or minimal.

Diners, not the giant very shiny ones with lots of plastic plants, 12-page menus and frozen food. I’m talking about the ones where the food is from scratch, (bonus points for sections called From the Greek Isles or Mama Uy’s Specialties) the staff has logged decades and no one consulted on the wood-panelling or tiles, there’s no money guy/influencer/VC investors or reinvention of diner food. I also love a luncheonette, I worked at one inside of my neighbor’s pharmacy in high school. I made salad dressing from scratch on the first day and it blew my mind.

I feel this way when I go to see the band Come with their original line-up at Union Pool. There are other bands, but this one, it is always the one. 

Myopic Books in Chicago, a used bookstore that doesn’t allow cell phones and has space upstairs for you to just sit and read. It has moved a few times, but it always smells the same, like a million old books. Also not fancy or minimal.

Something else is at play … a world without internet. I was a whole human being before we lived online. I made a life with the tools I had at those moments, I found my way about the world and my place in it. I said this wasn’t nostalgic, but it certainly is sentimental about a different immersion into interests, without a computer in my pocket. The algorithm was the people I surrounded myself with, the places I went to, threads I pulled. They weren’t all for me, but when they were, it was forever.

These places and moments, that’s where I cut my teeth. Some are my early intellectual and cultural curiosities, others the things I took to from growing up, the things I liked. They’re a part of me because I chose them. At the Pope of Trash exhibit, I was back in the womb of my obsessions, the movies and mentors I found because the weirdos always find the other weirdos, for survival, for support, for inspiration. A gift.

Cocktail party above the hardware store, Main St, Ohio, 1995

1. The fact that these two things are intertwined in my memory makes all the sense in the world to me.

2. Divine also plays the man who impregnates Dawn when she runs away from home after not getting cha-cha heels for Christmas. That’s called range.

3. My roommate and co-host for this party was the same friend I met for this exhibit.

4.

5. Souris’ was right down York Road from Prospect Hill Cemetery where Divine is buried. She is on the second landing on the south side. Waters and Mink Stole have his’n’hers plots at the same cemetery.