![]() ![]() Only one of them could have given us the indelible image of Divine being raped by a giant lobster. Although he attributes his teenage angst to boredom ('That's why rock 'n' roll exploded and everyone went crazy - it was an implosion of boredom'), Waters channeled it into comic mayhem. They were angry, but they weren't deluded. Waters and his Dreamlanders - the collective name by which his actors are known - were fighting a cultural war, not a real one. The distinctions, of course, are greater than the parallels. ![]() David, with the line, 'How about Sharon Tate? How about that? Had yourself a real ball that night, didn't you?' Pink Flamingos is dedicated to three of the Manson women. In Maniacs, Divine even taunts David Lochary's character, Mr. The comparison is not as outlandish as it first appears, and has since been sharpened by Waters's friendship with Leslie Van Houten - 'one of those notorious 'Manson girls' who shaved their heads, carved X's in their foreheads, and laughed, joked, and sang their way though the courthouse.' In a lengthy, compassionate chapter in Role Models, Waters makes a strong case for her parole, while offering a mea culpa for lampooning the Manson murders in his early movies 'without the slightest feeling for the victims' families or the lives of the brainwashed Manson killer kids.' That mea culpa includes Multiple Maniacs, which he made just before the murder trial, and Pink Flamingos, which he made right after. Was this just a twisted through-the-wardrobe version of his own social circle? He was working at the Provincetown Bookshop at the time and remembers being astonished by the physical resemblance of Manson's gang to his own. 'No matter how nuts I was, my parents made me feel safe, and that - psychologically - is the only thing you can do for your kid,' says Waters, trying to pin down the distance that separates his brand of lunacy from a cult like the Manson Family, whose hideous, theatrical, and deadly spree grabbed his attention in the summer of 1969 and never quite let go. (He did, however, draw the line at watching it.) His mother played her part, too, shuttling her son to Martick's, a bar in downtown Baltimore where he would stand outside chatting to the delinquents and fruitcakes that would later populate his movies. Waters's father, who died last year, even fronted the money for Pink Flamingos, thereby doing more than anyone to facilitate his son's lifelong war on taste. His own parents seem to have spent a good part of their lives abetting their freakish - and freakishly talented - son, even if they didn't approve of his antics. ![]() 'You can bitch about your parents until you're 30 after that, shut up.' 'I always say it's really great to be mad when you're 20, but if you're 60 and mad you're an asshole,' he says. In his new book, Role Models - a series of digressions on people who inspire him - he claims to have been an angry child, but it's hard to imagine anyone less angry these days. John Waters is a terrifically entertaining storyteller, delighted by human foibles, and one of the least misanthropic people you can hope to meet. ![]() 'I'm afraid people think that's what I am when they look in the freezer and don't say anything.' 'He went home with somebody that really was a poppers pig, who came out of the bedroom with a mask on that was hooked to a bottle of poppers so that he could give blowjobs and breathe poppers at the same time!' Waters laughs. 'My friend told me the worst story,' he says. 'Oh, my God, he's a poppers pig!' This picturesque expression prompts another tale. 'It's really embarrassing 'cause I forget when people go to get ice and they see, like, a case of poppers.' He emulates an unsuspecting house guest recoiling in horror. 'I made a giant bottle of Rush for my last art show, and the owner of the poppers company sent me a lifetime supply,' he confesses. 'Would you like some?' he asks, striding over to the kitchen in his Manhattan pied-'-terre and retrieving a bottle of them, the way other people might offer guests a soda. What do you keep in your freezer? Vodka? Coffee? Maybe some ice cream. ![]()
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