![]() ![]() In the chapter “Baltimore Heroes,” Waters writes, “The good have no irony about them. Role Models pays homage to Baltimore, Waters’s muse and hometown, whose culture spawned many magnificent oddballs, as well as the bars and barkeeps who nursed his imagination. Au revoir, good taste, Waters sings, and good riddance. “Am I Clarabell? Or Captain Kangaroo?” It was Clarabell whose clownish makeup would inspire that of Divine-Waters’s apotheosis and star, the drag-queen actor featured in many of his films, first celebrated in Pink Flamingos (1972) for eating actual dog shit on a Baltimore street. “Imagine his life, his schizophrenia,” Waters writes of Keeshan. ![]() Thinking about the singer, Waters travels down memory lane and unearths other boyhood heroes, like Clarabell, the clown on TV’s Howdy Doody Show, played by Bob Keeshan, later Captain Kangaroo. “ appeal is broad and wide, something I could never achieve and he can never escape.” ?” Waters once chanced to see the elusive Mathis but didn’t have the nerve to talk to him, and then felt compelled to interview his undoppelgänger. So unironic, yet perfect.” None of these qualities characterizes Waters’s own oeuvre but as he himself asks, “Do we secretly idolize our imagined opposites. “I wish I were Johnny Mathis,” Waters confesses. Take the chapter on Mathis, which kicks off the book. Their stories, intermingled with Waters’s own, comprise a kind of bildungsroman, or even a portrait of the artist as a collage of his influences. ![]() The essays recount actual and imaginary encounters with ordinary but extraordinary people, as well as with celebrities such as Little Richard and 1950s crooner Johnny Mathis. What dances on the surface in this and other Waters films is explicit in Role Models: a concern for art, fun, justice, and people. In Pecker (1998), the eponymous protagonist flees instant New York art-world stardom when his photographs of Baltimore buddies and family subject them to unwanted and unsympathetic attention. A contemporary Lewis Carroll, Waters luxuriates in the topsy-turviness of life, and his somewhat more conventional recent films depend, like most narratives, on the reversal of fortune. Bakhtin’s theory of the carnivalesque nicely fits these films. Snatched.Early in his career, Waters became known for films depicting bizarre characters in outrageous, super-melodramatic situations, as in Desperate Living (1977), a gay/lesbian/cross-dressing murder fantasy set in Mortville, a circuslike shantytown. Girls and Boys - Sex and British Pop ( 4 episodes) as Selfĭisclosure as Edna Turnblad (archive footage)īEAT. The New York Times said of Milstead's '80s films: "Those who could get past the unremitting weirdness of Divine's performance discovered that the actor/actress had genuine talent, including a natural sense of comic timing and an uncanny gift for slapstick." He was also described as "one of the few truly radical and essential artists of the century… was an audacious symbol of man's quest for liberty and freedom." Since his death, Divine has remained a cult figure, particularly with those in the LGBT community. In the 1970s, Milstead made the transition to theater and appeared in a number of productions, including Women Behind Bars and The Neon Woman, while continuing to star in such films as Polyester, Lust in the Dust and Hairspray. These films have since become cult classics. Concurrent with his acting career, he also had a successful career as a disco singer during the 1980s, at one point being described as "the most successful and in-demand disco performer in the world."īorn in Baltimore, Maryland, into a conservative, wealthy middle class family, he became involved with John Waters and his acting troupe, the Dreamlanders, in the mid-1960s and starred in a number of Waters's early films such as Mondo Trasho, Multiple Maniacs, Pink Flamingos and Female Trouble. He was often associated with independent filmmaker John Waters and starred in ten of Waters's films, usually in a leading role. Even so, he considered himself to be a character actor and performed male roles in a number of his later films. Described by People magazine as the "Drag Queen of the Century", Divine often performed female roles in both cinema and theater and also appeared in women's clothing in musical performances. Divine (19 October 1945 – 7 March 1988), né Harris Glenn Milstead, was an American actor, singer and drag queen. ![]()
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