“When John asked me to play Jesus, I was taking so much acid at the time, I thought I was Jesus,” George Figgs, with a mischievous grin, tells the audience after a recent Maryland Film Festival showing of Multiple Maniacs, John Waters’ first talking feature.

Screened in its original 16mm format, the 1970 black comedy holds up surprisingly well. An irreverent, profane commentary on the hippies vs. straights battles of its day—think Woke Left vs. MAGA—the guerrilla film satirizes middlebrow suburbia, sanctimonious politics, and, especially, the sexual mores of the Catholic Church. (“I thank God I was raised Catholic,” Waters once said, “so sex will always be dirty.”)

Figgs, now 78 and pictured above at Beyond Video, actually attended seminary for a year before finding his calling as a Waters’ ensemble Dreamlander.

“Multiple Maniacs is my favorite of John’s films and not because I’m Jesus,” continues Figgs, who acted in 10 of Waters’ movies. “It’s because I participated [while dying on the cross] in one of high-water marks of blasphemy in cinema history.” For those who have not had the pleasure, that “high-water mark” would be Mink Stole’s notorious “rosary job” on Divine in a church pew.

Figgs first met Waters and the other future Dreamlanders, including Susan Lowe and Mary Vivian Pierce—also on hand after the Maniacs screening—at Martick’s restaurant and downtown art-house theaters. They soon shifted to Pete’s Bar in Fells Point, described as “a wino bar” by Waters, with several Dreamlanders moving into a co-op known as the Hollywood Bakery next door.

For his part, Figgs maintained a 20-year, psychedelic folk career amid his Dreamlander roles, cutting a record and touring with T-Bone Walker. He performed at venues like Greenwich Village’s Cafe Wha? while residing at the artist-haven Hotel Albert—where The Mamas & the Papas penned “California Dreamin’.” In fact, we have Figgs to thank for singing and playing “The Streets of Baltimore”—possibly the best song ever about the city—to Gram Parsons, who helped make it famous.

Movies, however, remained Figgs’ first love, if not as an actor, as a curator. In the 1980s, he became a projectionist, handling the rushes for several Hollywood films shot here (see our January cover story, on newsstands now). In 1991, he returned to Fells Point and opened the beloved Orpheum Cinema on the second floor of a converted stable, screening an eclectic mix of noir, B-films, and foreign, cult, and underground classics. For a period, he drove a cab to support the theater, a 10-year mission he calls “the best thing I did in my life.”

To this day, he still helps curate a film series at Motor House. La Strada, All About Eve, On the Waterfront, El Topo, The King of Marvin Gardens, Nostalgia, and The Wizard of Oz, which he first saw in its Technicolor re-release as a kid in Hampden, are on his all-time personal best list.

“My backstory is my mother had a nervous breakdown, and the babysitter next door took me to the movies and left me there,” explains Figgs of his lifelong obsession with film.

“I was in the movies daily at the tender age of 6. It was ‘Lorenzian imprinting,’” he says, referencing scientist Konrad Lorenz’s discovery that geese would bond with and follow the first thing they saw after hatching, often him. “It became my mother. At The Hampden and The Ideal in the ’50s, I saw all the westerns, all the gangster pictures, all the film noirs. It was the regular fare for neighborhood theaters then.

“For that feeling of being enveloped, that transcendent experience, you have to be in a theater,” Figgs says. “It has to be bigger than you, and you have to share that experience with other people.”

Fluff up the feather boa. Locate the leopard-print pants. Pull out the poodle skirt. It’s time for HonFest, when thousands of visitors descend upon Hampden for two days in June to dress up as Baltimore’s favorite icon—the Hon—and pay tribute to working-class women of an earlier era.

Supporters love the glamour of wannabe Hons as they parade along 36th Street in colorful attire, some preparing to enter Baltimore’s Best Hon contest—this year’s 30th pageant—with others just enjoying a chance to put on a costume of sorts.

Bonnie Hockstein—Hon name: Bonnie Marie Shiksakowski—saw HonFest on TV in the late ’90s and knew she wanted to be there. Her mother, Dorothy “Poopsie” Bucci, was the epitome of the women being celebrated. Bucci, who passed away in 2020, had been a longtime waitress at celebrated restaurants of yore like Haussner’s and Obrycki’s and later worked at the Dundalk crab house Ruggiero’s until she was 80.

“I wore her waitress outfit,” Hockstein says. “I did it as an homage to my mom.”

Hockstein, who now organizes the main-stage entertainment for the festival, being held June 10 and 11 this year, sees HonFest as a celebration of the women who worked at service jobs like cleaning houses and waitressing while their husbands and boyfriends served in World War II and the Korean War. If they had kids at home, the women would take in laundry and sewing for some extra income.

“My mother would call it ‘go-to-hell money,’” Hockstein says. “It was the beginning of women’s liberation.”

But not everyone is enamored with an event that seemingly celebrates a white culture in a neighborhood that was once an enclave for white, blue-collar Baltimoreans. Even Baltimore’s beloved “Pope of Trash” John Waters has dismissed the Hon culture that he helped to popularize, telling The Baltimore Sun in 2008 that “it’s used up” and “condescending now.”

At one time, Waters incorporated the Hon image in some of his movies, most notably in his 1988 film Hairspray. The original movie, which later became a musical and then a film again, featured teens and women of the early ’60s wearing exaggerated beehive and bouffant hairstyles. In the movie, the late Baltimore star Divine played the larger-than-life character Edna Turnblad, who delivered the line, “Fetch me my diet pills, would you, hon?”

Over the years, “hon,” a shortened version of the endearment “honey,” has secured a place in Baltimore’s lexicon.

“You used ‘hon’ because you didn’t know everyone’s name,” Hockstein says.

With the right accent, it’s pure Bawlmerese, a dialect that originated among the city’s white, blue-collar residents. Whatever its pronunciation, Waters told The Sun that he’s done with the word and the Hon image: “I used to say, ‘Come to Baltimore and you would see people with those hairdos.’ You no longer see that. They’re dead or in nursing homes.” The years haven’t softened his stance. When asked recently about the Hons, he said, through an assistant, that he feels like he’s already shared his opinion about the Hon phenomenon and has nothing fresh to add.

The Hons are also in a bit of a tussle with Waters. “He thinks we’re appropriating his characters. We think he’s appropriating our characters,” Hockstein says. “We go back and forth. It has never been settled.”

David Puglia, who wrote Tradition, Urban Identity, and the Baltimore “Hon”: The Folk in the City (Lexington Books, 2018), sees Hon folklore as a way for people to have meaning in their lives and create a group identity.

“It arises to meet an inferiority complex,” he says. “Baltimore, in my opinion, is often in the shadows of New York and Washington, D.C. It used to be one of the United States’ major cities. Perhaps not anymore, and so because of that, there appears to be in the celebration of Hon culture a way of calling attention to what makes Baltimore distinct or special.”

HonFest started benignly enough in 1994 when Denise Whiting, owner of the now-closed Cafe Hon, held a small pageant to find Baltimore’s Best Hon during Hampden’s annual Summer Fair. There were six contestants. “I always loved beauty contests,” Whiting explains. “The whole Hon thing harkens back to a softer time. It’s all those good, solid memories you have of growing up and watching your grandmothers and aunts.”

Whiting was also following, as many Baltimoreans were at the time, the escapades of a mysterious man dubbed “The Hon Man,” who would hang a sign saying “Hon” next to the “Welcome to Baltimore” sign on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, so it would greet motorists with “Welcome to Baltimore, Hon.”

Some officials and residents took offense, complaining that the moniker was patronizing to women as well as exclusionary to Black people. Others, like Sun columnist Dan Rodricks, supported Hon Man’s gesture. So did Whiting. “I did a petition to leave it up,” she says. She also put the word “Hon” on coffee mugs and had them delivered to Maryland elected officials. “It was something to talk about,” she says. “It was fun. It was celebrated.”

“THE WHOLE HON THING HARKENS BACK TO A SOFTER TIME.”

In 1996, Whiting, 64, parted ways with the Hampden Summer Fair, which folded the following year, and moved her festivities to Cafe Hon’s back parking lot, branding it HonFest. By 2002, the festival, which was drawing more visitors each year, spread out to Hampden’s main street—36th Street, or The Avenue as it’s known—to accommodate the hordes of people.

Whiting received a lot of support over the years. When city inspectors badgered her to pay a hefty fee to keep the 30-foot pink-flamingo structure on her restaurant building, Baltimore citizens rallied around her in 2009, organizing a protest by staking smaller plastic pink flamingos in the ground at War Memorial Plaza. While John Waters titled his 1972 movie Pink Flamingos, the signature Baltimore lawn ornaments became popular years earlier. Instead of going to Ocean City to vacation, the newly working women of the mid-20th century would use their extra money to go to Florida, bringing back as many plastic birds as they could. They put them in their yards, so neighbors would know they could afford to visit the Sunshine State, Hockstein says.

While Whiting got to keep her giant flamingo, she had another idea that didn’t endear herself to many Baltimoreans. She trademarked the word “Hon,” planning to use the term to her commercial advantage. When word got out in 2010, protestors marched outside Cafe Hon. The restaurant’s business dropped 20 to 25 percent, according to a Sun article. British celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay showed up with his Kitchen Nightmares crew, embarking on a redo of the troubled Cafe Hon and Whiting’s reputation. Whiting eventually offered a teary apology on MIX 106.5 FM and gave up her trademark in 2011. She acknowledged at the time, “Trademarking the word has not only almost killed me but has just about killed the business.”

Despite the unsettling hiccup, HonFest continued that year without repercussions. And even Cafe Hon’s closure in April 2022 hasn’t deterred the annual ode to Hons from proceeding.

“I didn’t realize HonFest was going to happen even though Cafe Hon is gone,” says Mary Rizzo, author of Come and Be Shocked: Baltimore Beyond John Waters and The Wire (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020). “At first, I found HonFest really fascinating because of the contradictions that it represented. I loved the kitschiness and campiness of the people dressing up like Hons and competing.”

But Rizzo, who started going to HonFest in 1999 when she was working on her dissertation about class identity in the United States and how people mold their class identity through clothes and fashion, also found the concept more complicated.

“This was a neighborhood going through a transition, a demographic transition that you might call gentrification,” she says. “As working-class people were being pushed out or were leaving the neighborhood or were passing away, they were being replaced by middle-class and upper-class people, who were then taking on the sort of costume of the working class.”

Rizzo says today’s working-class people in Baltimore don’t fit the typical image of the Hon of the past since Baltimore is not a majority-white city anymore.

“There have been changes to who competes for the Best Hon title and who participates in HonFest,” she says.

Baltimore rapper, songwriter, and philanthropist Anthony Parker—aka Wordsmith—never expected to perform at HonFest in Hampden.

“I never felt like it was a festival where I would be wanted or that I would want to go to,” he says. “Prior years, the Black community has not been represented.”

But this year, the hip-hop artist, who is also an artistic partner with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, is looking forward to taking the stage on June 11. It will be his first visit to the community, thanks to the efforts of Hockstein and HonFest emcee Judy Templeton to make HonFest more inclusive.

“They see that there’s been a void for years in inviting the Black community, and not just the Black community but all of Baltimore to feel welcome to HonFest,” says Wordsmith, 43, who has lived in Baltimore for 25 years. “I see two women who want to do the right thing. They see where we are in America right now, and they’re trying to do what they can to open people’s eyes.”

Hockstein, who doesn’t want to reveal her age, and Templeton, who gives her age as “timeless,” have been working steadily to broaden the festival’s reach.

“When we talked to Black men and women in the community, it turned out they were afraid to come to Hampden because it still had a white feeling that they didn’t necessarily feel a part of,” Templeton says. “We want to start changing that.”

She also realized that the festival had a stereotype of being about only white women. “But women who contributed in Baltimore were many different races and had their own stories,” she says.

Templeton, who grew up in a rowhouse on the west side of Baltimore, attended her first HonFest more than a decade ago and found herself in the Best Hon contest that day. She made it to the top 10 but didn’t win, though she was later picked Baltimore’s Best Hon 2021. HonFest founder Whiting named Templeton and Hockstein, crowned Best Hon 2020, as reigning title holders while the event was on hiatus during the pandemic. “We both share an extreme love for Baltimore,” Templeton says of Hockstein. “We feel as passionate now, because there’s more work to be done.”

One success was convincing Naomi Burrell, an African-American mother of three who was raised in West Baltimore, to come to HonFest in 2017. “That was my first time when I was invited,” says Burrell, who met the two women at the Baltimore Flower Mart. “Everybody was there to have a good time.”

Templeton and Hockstein eventually encouraged Burrell to enter Baltimore’s Best Hon contest. She was resistant for years but succumbed to the two Hons’ pleas last year. “I don’t know what made me agree,” Burrell says. “I guess it’s because I trusted them.”

“PRIOR YEARS, THE BLACK COMMUNITY HAS NOT BEEN REPRESENTED AT THIS FESTIVAL.”

She went on to win the crown in the competition, during which the top 10 contestants are picked on Saturday and then come back on Sunday to perform a talent and discuss their goals to make Baltimore a better place. On the first day, Burrell, inspired by the lemon stick, a classic Baltimore treat, wore a dress splashed with print lemons, accessorizing with a red- and-white headband with a bow and matching gloves. On stage, contestants were asked to say a Bawlmerese word. Burrell’s word was “tin foil” (yes, aluminum foil).

“Growing up in Baltimore, this was a no-brainer,” she says with a laugh. “Tin foil, you wrap your food in it.”

On the second day, she serenaded the audience with Bob Marley’s “Three Little Birds,” wearing a Caribbean outfit that included a grass skirt and lei. She chose Baltimore’s hidden treasures as her platform.

“I’m a Baltimore native, and there is so much here that people don’t know about,” she says.

When the judges announced her name, Burrell, 40, experienced a range of emotions, from shock to joy. She wasn’t the first POC winner—Hockstein says there were two previous winners of color: one Native American, the other from a Black and Italian background—but Burrell appreciated its significance.

“It’s why my win is so important,” she says. “Hons are from all cultures, especially African Americans. I’m grateful we’re getting to a place where we’re being included.”

Chris Riehl, a longtime Baltimore tour guide who also sings at the festival, will be judging this year’s contest for the second time.

“It’s more than big hair and outfits,” he says, describing what he looks for in a winner. “It’s a combination of energy, creativity, spirit, and enthusiasm, and how they will find ways to make Baltimore better.”

Besides the adult contest, two other pageants are held during HonFest: Lil’ Miss Hons for ages 3-7 and Honettes for ages 8-14. The youngest Hons don’t compete for a title. Instead, each youngster is given a crown and a goodie bag.

The organizers were still deciding at press time about whether to select a Honette winner this year. They have in the past, but they feel like the contestants have been through enough after COVID. Still, they look for future Hons among the group—an effort to stave off the belief that the Hon is a dying breed. “We do recruit them,” Hockstein says.

And why should Baltimoreans care that the tradition continues? Well, first and foremost, it’s a fun event, but the HonFest Hons aren’t just about dressing up for two days in June. There is a philanthropic arm called Hon Hive, where participants donate their time and talents to various causes like Baltimore Station, a residential treatment program for veterans; Hampden Family Center, a community program that offers support groups, youth activities, and other services to area residents; and HER Resiliency Center, which helps women between the ages of 18 and 25 who may be facing domestic violence, sexual exploitation, substance abuse, and homelessness.

The Hon Hive also engages in outreach by performing at events throughout the year. “We get to do fun things,” says Templeton. “Our goal is to connect Baltimore, so it’s not just one little pocket here or one little pocket there.”

A criticism that’s been leveled against the Hons is that out-of-towners, who have no connection to Baltimore and Hon culture, are adopting a Hon persona when they attend the festival, which, to some, seems insincere. That accusation doesn’t bother the Hons at all.

“The tourists love us,” Hockstein says. “We invite everyone. We’re diverse and inclusive.”

John Waters has made 16 films and written nine books. His art has been showcased in museums and he’s toured the world as a monologuist. But he’s never written a novel—until now.

Liarmouth, dubbed a “feel-bad romance,” is everything you would expect from Baltimore’s beloved Pope of Trash. It’s funny, it’s outrageous, it’s dirty, it’s wise. Waters is actually a great prose stylist—in between the jokes about fetishes and scoundrels and talking gay penises.

The novel focuses on Marsha Sprinkle, a classic Waters heroine you love to hate (and just plain love). She loathes the human condition and sees herself as above it all. Sex? Food? Defecation? Those things are for mere mortals. She subsists on fancy crackers and contempt for her fellow man. The book follows her on the lam after she and her partner-in-crime, Daryl (he of the aforementioned talking penis) are caught stealing luggage at an airport. An extended road trip filled with eccentrics, mayhem, and sexual hijinks ensues.

We chatted with Waters about his profane picaresque.

Was Liarmouth always a novel, or did you ever think of it as a screenplay?
At one point a long time ago, it was going to be a movie, but I never pitched it, I never had a treatment, it never got far enough for it to be real. So I had it, I knew I wanted to do it—it was about somebody who stole suitcases, but that was pretty much it. Some people say I haven’t written fiction. Well, all the movies are fiction. This one is kind of like a road trip, a family saga, only you hear much more of what the characters feel. You go much deeper in their lunacy than you can in a movie, where you just have to show it or say it.

What drew you to the character of Marsha Sprinkle?
I wanted to make a novel about somebody that was pretty despicable. Someone that, in real life, you would probably run from. But I’m always fascinated by people that believe they’re right and are obsessive and crazy and have their own vision. Even though I don’t want to be around those people, I love to read about them. So I wanted to have characters that would draw you in and make you root for people you wouldn’t otherwise root for.

Marsha’s obviously a horrible person—but is at least a part of her your alter ego?
She’s a horrible person! So no, not my alter ego. But I do resent instinct. I hate that I have to take a shit! But you have to do it. I love that she was such a control freak that instinct was offensive to her.

She only ate expensive crackers.
So she could just have these little pellets. That’s a very ’50s thing, by the way. When we went to summer camp, there was a bowel movement chart right in the middle of the camp that everybody had to check off. Talk about ludicrous. Maybe that’s where that came from.

So another protagonist is Daryl, he of the talking gay penis. Who or what inspired that?
I’m sure the talking penis has been in other books. But I don’t think there was one where the penis turns gay and the head of the person is still straight. It’s a battle. That’s not bisexual. That’s a war between top and bottom. The equator is your waist.

I’m always fascinated by people that believe they’re right and are obsessive and crazy and have their own vision. Even though I don’t want to be around those people, I love to read about them.

Marsha’s estranged daughter is the leader of the “Bouncing Community”—which is exactly what it sounds like: people who want to constantly bounce. Those scenes were the ones I thought, John would have a field day filming this.
That would be a special effects budget. To me, that is the same thing as Edie being obsessed by eggs. It’s about a new cult. I wanted to do jokes on political correctness. That they could be such a minority, that they felt there were “bouncists”—people who hated bouncers. That they were radical bouncers. And I just kept developing the idea more and more. And it came from the idea, you know I do know people who are addicted to running or [stationary] bikes. I think it’s a logical thing. It just goes much further.

Plastic surgery for dogs is another concept that could only come from the mind of John Waters.
There is such a thing! That thing about the fake balls that people put on their dogs? Nuticals? After you’ve had your dog neutered.

That is about the insecurity of the male owner of the dog, right?
I guess. Or a woman that doesn’t want to be a castrater. Plastic surgery on dogs. I’m surprised it hasn’t happened yet.

There’s a part in the book where dogs rebels against their owners.
I’m beyond PETA! I think animals that are kept as pets are in prison, sentenced to a lifetime of human caresses. I certainly understand people’s attraction to dogs. But also I think one day there’s going to be a revolt. They want to be running in packs biting you and that’s where I want them to be!

The fact that at 76 you can make a novel that is shocking and scandalous, I assume you take pride in that?
I do. But I’m also trying to make you laugh. And most of the people who read it said they laughed out loud. That’s the ultimate compliment. It’s easy to shock, but it’s a lot harder to surprise you and make you laugh out loud.

Do you envision this book being discussed in book clubs?
So far, we’ve had an amazing reaction to it. Nice reviews. Lots of attention. Who knows? That’s funny to think about. When I turned in the book, I thought the reaction could go either way. Because it’s pretty extreme. Depends on what kind of book club, I guess. Stranger things have happened in my career, I’ll tell ya.

Most of the people who read it said they laughed out loud. That’s the ultimate compliment. It’s easy to shock, but it’s a lot harder to surprise you and make you laugh.

Will there be more novels in the future?
Yeah, definitely. I have an idea for one. But certainly, I’m not starting it right away. I need a little break. I just came back from London. Sold out a show there so they added a second. I’ve been on the road. Ten cities. I am fried.

You seem to have boundless energy.
I must have some energy because no Geritol for me.

And you’re still delightfully profane.
Thank you. I think that keeps you young. Curiosity about human behavior. And thinking of new ways to startle yourself.

John Waters was not of legal drinking age, which was 18 in Maryland, when he first ventured downtown to the now-legendary Martick’s Tyson Street Tavern. He was still in high school. “My mother would drive me from Lutherville to Martick’s and drop me off in the alley next door,” Waters says. “My mother was kind of amazing. She didn’t understand me, but she said, ‘Maybe you’ll meet people like you here.’ My parents were conservative, upper-middle class. How would she even know about a place like Martick’s?”

In mid-century Baltimore, a lunch-pail city no one yet described as quirky, charming, or artsy, Martick’s was one of few LGBTQ-friendly bars around. Although that term obviously wasn’t part of the vernacular of the early 1960s, when the crowd there included beatniks, cross-dressers, transgender individuals, and poets, artists, and musicians of all shapes and stripes.

His mother’s intuition proved spot on. Waters hung around outside and regulars snuck him drinks. When owner Morris Martick wasn’t around, they’d bring him inside. Waters not only met his tribe at Martick’s, but many of his future filmmaking co-conspirators. Among them: Emmy-winning casting director Pat Moran, who was then studying dance; actor, projectionist, and later Fells Point theater owner George Figgs; and bartender and model Maelcum Soul, who starred in two of Waters’ first films, Roman Candles and Eat Your Makeup and died at 27 of an overdose. “A true beatnik goddess,” says Waters, glancing at a framed photograph of Soul in his home office.

At the same time, Waters became friends with a heavyset, gay, neighborhood teenager named Harris Glenn Milstead, later famous as the 300-pound siren of Waters’ early films and by his stage name, Divine. As Waters’ circle grew, he was introduced to Van Smith and Vincent Peranio, who studied painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art and took up make-up artistry and set designing, respectively. He also met hairdresser-actor David Lochary, and actress Nancy Paine Stole, whom he nicknamed Mink. Childhood pal Mary Vivian Pearce was part of the crew and cast, too, all of whom shared an interest in art, film, and marijuana, and who Waters coined the Dreamlanders.

Notably, it was also at Martick’s where he met Harvey Alexander, who launched the Baltimore Film Festival in 1969. He showcased the fledging Waters’ short film The Diane Linkletter Story in 1970, and two years later, a certain outrageous, funny, sexual, gross, and occasionally banned movie named Pink Flamingos, officially released 50 years ago this month. (On St. Patrick’s Day, a nice coincidence for Waters and his subversive band, many of whom like him were rebelling against the heavy-handed Catholicism of their youth.)

Waters describes the film—made with $12,000 borrowed from his father—as “a terrorist act against the tyranny of good taste,” a pretty accurate tagline. The scandalous comedy was the first in Waters’ iconic trilogy, with Female Trouble (1974) and Desperate Living (1977), earning him the endearing moniker, The Pope of Trash. It was also an immediate underground hit in Baltimore, selling out nine shows over its first three days of screening.

“People who never came out of their closets came out [to see it],” Alexander told The Evening Sun, calling Pink Flamingos “the freak event of the year.”

For those who haven’t seen Pink Flamingos, a quick plot summary is in order. It may be disturbing, but it is not overly complicated. Divine plays an underground criminal femme fatale, who the tabloids have labeled “The Filthiest Person Alive.” Hiding out in a pink trailer on the outskirts of Baltimore County, with, yes, a pair of pink flamingos in the yard, she seeks anonymity (as if such a thing were possible) under the pseudonym “Babs Johnson.”

She lives with her mentally-ill mother, Edie (Edith Massey), wayward son, Crackers (Danny Mills), and companion, Cotton (Mary Vivian Pearce). Meanwhile, a pair of resentful rivals, the Marbles (David Lochary and Mink Stole), who deal heroin to inner-city children and kidnap and impregnate young hitchhikers—selling the offspring to lesbian couples—scheme to usurp Divine’s title. Voyeurism, vomiting, rape, castration, cannibalism, masturbation, murder, and more ensue.

Notoriously, Divine consumes dog feces in the closing scene. One of her birthday party celebrants, played by David Gluck, who remained anonymous until he passed away in June 2020, lip-syncs, if that’s the right term, The Trashman’s hit “Surfin’ Bird” with his anus for a full minute. It was the only movie appearance by Gluck, who became a Social Security computer analyst.

“When we had the 25th anniversary and Pink Flamingos was shown in regular theaters,” Waters told The Baltimore Sun, “he’d go to the movies and when his scene came on he’d tap the per- son on the shoulder in front of him and say, ‘That’s me.’” It is an anecdote as good as any that illustrates the weird but good-hearted humor beneath all of Waters’ films.

If you’re not a Baby Boomer, or Baby Boomer adjacent, you wouldn’t remember the rise of the cult classic and midnight movies, or that Pink Flamingos played a starring role in the 1970s phenomenon, predating The Rocky Horror Picture Show and David Lynch’s Eraserhead by several years. In fact, Pink Flamingos was the second original midnight film ever screened, after Alejandro Jodorowsky’s acid western El Topo, at New York’s innovative Elgin Theater, where the madness got started, and the first to receive national exposure.

Even if that were Pink Flamingos’ only cinematic contribution, it would have been remarkable. Banned in several cities, and several countries, the movie left an indelible mark on the cultural landscape that reverberates to this day. With its DIY ethos, retro, thrift shop wardrobes, neon-haired villains—try finding film characters before Raymond and Connie Marbles with similarly wild dye jobs—it was at once a precursor to the ’70s punk movement and a seminal example of independent filmmaking.

The sets were inexpensive. The furniture was what became known as midcentury modern. The whole thing has an anarchic Technicolor feel. Even the soundtrack blended genres, juxtaposing rockabilly, surf music, and the ’50s doo-wop of Waters’ youth. And with her bawdy, larger-than-life, and at times menacing presence—coupled with a touching vulnerability—Divine altered the course of drag and beyond, inspiring not just current smash hit RuPaul’s Drag Race but Ursula the Witch in The Little Mermaid, a Disney film of all things.

By 1971, a time of great cultural upheaval, there seemingly wasn’t much left to knock down regarding social mores and traditional “values,” one of Waters’ lifelong artistic themes. Whatever mores were left standing in 1971, he took a chainsaw to with Pink Flamingos, brandishing his own personal, peculiar, subversive sense of humor. If “flower power” hadn’t fully shaken suburban America from its slumber and stereotypes, perhaps raw shock would. In Waters’ films, the outcasts—the obese, homosexual, and neurotic—were depicted as family-oriented protagonists worth rooting for long before gay marriage, transgender rights, and body-positive campaigns were on anyone’s radar. Self-righteousness, jealousy, intolerance, cruelty, and pretentiousness were the enemy.

The irony is that several months ago, a half-century after it was derided by so many—in 1974, Variety called it “one of the most vile, stupid, and repulsive films ever made”—Pink Flamingos was named to the prestigious National Film Registry. The Criterion Collection also plans to restore the film and re-release it as part of their acclaimed trove.

“I wish I was from Baltimore,” says Susan Arosteguy of the Criterion Collection, by way of expressing her appreciation for Waters’ films. “It was a time and place that couldn’t happen again.”

“Pink Flamingos was a reaction to everything happening in the fall of 1971 when we made it,” says Waters, who was 25 when he wrote, directed, and produced the film. “Horror and exploitation movies were in theaters. Not just European art-house nudity, but pornography, too. Nothing was illegal. Nothing was against the law. That was the challenge.”

Pink Flamingos is such a part of the film canon, it’s almost impossible to remember how terrified “the squares” were by it. One person never amused by Waters’ films was Mary Avara, the ultra-conservative head of the Maryland State Board of Censors. During her tenure, from 1960 until the board’s demise in 1981, she became a celebrity in her own right for making things miserable for Waters. Once called “America’s Mother Superior of Censors,” she appeared on network TV defending her cultural gatekeeping to Dick Cavett and Johnny Carson, among others. “Waters!” she told one interviewer. “I don’t even want to discuss him. Makes my mouth feel dirty.”

“We really all did love film,” says Pat Moran, an original Dreamlander, who went on to win Emmys for casting on Homicide: Life on the Streets, HBO’s VEEP, and HBO’s Game Change. “We took it seriously. Although I’m not sure why,” she adds with a laugh. “We knew enough to show up on time and know your lines. We didn’t know what a gaffer was or any of the positions. It wasn’t happening in a vacuum, however,” Moran adds.

“We knew Andy Warhol, Jonas Mekas, and Jack Smith and the films they were making in New York.”

Waters, as most of his fans probably know by now, got kicked out of New York University’s film school for smoking pot. In expelling Waters, the university informed Mr. and Mrs. Waters that their son needed psychiatric counseling. Ambitious, smart, gay, artistic, and compulsively well-read, he found that his outrageous films were all the expression and therapy he required. As many Waters admirers also likely know, he was a puppeteer before he was a filmmaker, which he notes is rather common among directors. He served as the primary camera operator on all his films before Polyester in 1981 and refers to his earliest works as “my film school.”

“MY FAVORITE CHARACTERS ARE PEOPLE WHO THINK THEY’RE NORMAL BUT THEY’RE NOT. I LIVE IN BALTIMORE, AND IT’S FULL OF PEOPLE LIKE THAT.” —JOHN WATERS

Less common were his eclectic influences. He took equal pleasure and influence from high-brow, art house films—going to Ingmar Bergman films at Goucher College as a teenager—as well as sleazy exploitation films in downtown Baltimore theaters. “I was attracted to any type of extreme,” he says.

The 50th anniversary of Pink Flamingos has provided Waters the occasion to reflect on its making, which was a grind at times. The kind only possible when you’re young, he says. The outdoor scenes were shot during winter, often on weekends at Divine’s friend Bob Adams’ local farm—and 12-to-15-hour days was the norm. Divine and Van Smith would awaken before dawn to apply Divine’s makeup. At least with Pink Flamingos, no one was arrested during the shooting, as had been case during the making of Mondo Trasho.

“Pink Flamingos is an assault on the senses, but it’s not just an assault on the senses,” says Mink Stole, who would appear in nearly every Waters film over the course of a wide-ranging career. “The set designs, the juxtapositions, the color compositions of everything, the wardrobe—it was also a feast for the senses. I do also find it astounding, and I’m grateful, that 50 years later it is still out there and considered outrageous, and people give a whatever about what we did so long ago.”

Marketing and getting the film screened was another kind of creative process, and also a complete guerrilla operation. Not all filmmakers possess both skill sets, but Waters always has. Initially, that meant screenings in church basements, on college campuses, at art galleries, and tiny independent theaters. The goal in those days was simply making enough money to keep making films.

“With Pink Flamingos, I got the University of Baltimore to rent me directly the whole auditorium, and we had the premiere there,” Waters recalls. “There were posters and everything. It was Friday, Saturday, and Sunday shows at eight, 10, and midnight. And all three were filled out every night, and I could tell from the reaction that it worked. But then it took me years really to find the real distributor to put it out.”

The official trailer for the film eventually put out by then-new New Line Cinema remains a treasure. There’s not a single clip of the actual film, just reaction interviews on afterward with people leaving the theater in various states of shock, disgust, and delight.

Meanwhile, the censorship battles along the way were in real courtrooms with real judges and juries. As late as 1990, an Orange County, Florida, grand jury indicted a local video store for renting it to a 14-year-old. Inevitably, those episodes tickled Waters, well, pink.

“We never ever won a case, even though the Museum of Modern Art bought a print right in the beginning, which was pretty amazing,” Waters says. “I thought when they bought it for the permanent collection it would get us off with every jury.

“[Juries] weren’t impressed, because as I’ve said forever, but it’s really true: At midnight, with a group of people, Pink Flamingos is joyous. At 8 a.m., when you are being sworn in with strangers for jury duty, it is most definitely obscene.”

You study U.S. history. What struck you about Baltimore’s identity in particular that made you want to write this book?
I’d been studying HonFest for a few years when I got the idea for this book. About a decade ago, I was being filmed for a reality TV show pilot about a group of Baltimore Hons, which was a surreal experience. But even though the show never got picked up, it made me realize that Baltimore had a cultural meaning. It meant something to people, even those who had never been there. Culture was part of what defined that.

This was solidified for me in 2016 when former Baltimore Mayor and Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley ran in the Democratic primary. It seemed like someone at every debate and interview asked him about The Wire, a fictional TV show about Baltimore’s drug trade. This cultural text about Baltimore had become the image of the city, so much so that it affected national politics. I wanted to dig into how that happened historically.

How did you get involved with HonFest?
I learned about HonFest through a documentary film about social class in America called People Like Us in 1999. At the time I was in grad school, studying class identity and culture and was fascinated by HonFest. I went that summer. Back then, HonFest was more a regular neighborhood festival, rather than the behemoth it is now. But it still had the Best Hon competition in which women dress up as Baltimore Hons, or white working-class women of the 1960s. That year, and for a few years after, I interviewed Hons, business owners, neighborhood residents, and people on the street, trying to understand this phenomenon of reviving this kitschy history while Hampden was gentrifying.

While I’m critical of how HonFest simplifies Baltimore’s history to make it palatable for tourists, through this research I got to know some of the Hons, like Rita Moore, Heidi Moore Trasatti, and Charlene Osborne, who are lovely, generous people, and who dress up as Hons with a great deal of respect and love for their family history.

Why was it important for you to look at Baltimore’s history through the lens of the arts, rather than, say, business/industry, ethnic customs, neighborhoods, or other factors that play into a city’s identity?
The arts are connected to all those things. We often think of art as a separate sphere unsullied by the base concerns of the world, but the arts have been connected to politics, the economy, and racial, ethnic, and neighborhood identity in Baltimore for decades. In fact, it’s the deep relationship between politics, the economy, and the arts that makes it an important lens to see Baltimore’s history through. I argue that starting with Mayor William Donald Schaefer’s administration in 1971, the arts explicitly became a way to create an image of Baltimore to draw visitors and new residents and an economic force in their own right. From the Charm City PR campaign in 1974 to Artscape today, the city government has made art and image central to the city’s renaissance.

In what ways can the arts can be more effective than politics in ushering in new movements?
Look at John Waters’ early movies. In Pink Flamingos and Female Trouble, he’s got these great scenes of Divine with full makeup, dress and heels, sashaying through downtown Baltimore like she’s on a fashion runway. Those are real people reacting to her, not extras. Imagine what it was like for queer kids around the country to see someone so unabashedly and visibly queer walking on public streets in the middle of the day. At a time when a gay rights movement was still cohering, Waters’ films had a pretty radical vision of gender and sexual non-conformity. I think you can draw a line between those films and what trans and gender nonbinary activists are doing today.

You, as well as others, write about Baltimore being a city divided. Do you see ways in which people or ideas are bridging that gap, or do you see it widening?
One of the points I make in the book is that Baltimore is a microcosm. Its problems are the problems facing all medium-sized cities in this country. Baltimore’s problems are America’s problems.

I’d like to be hopeful, but I don’t see substantive, positive change happening in our current political climate, either locally in Baltimore or nationally. It’s not just a republican versus democrat issue. It’s an issue of promoting policies that will benefit average people, not just those at the top. For decades, Baltimore prioritized its image to outsiders over the needs of its people, which exacerbated divisions by pumping money into downtown areas to spur gentrification and displacement. That needs to change.

Art has a role in this, by the way. Artists have big imaginations. They can help us understand the problems facing the city in nuanced ways, like David Simon does in The Wire or Theo Anthony in Rat Film. They can also help us come together to find solutions. I’m so inspired by the young poets I’ve met through Writers in Baltimore Schools and DewMore Baltimore who definitely have the vision to help us map out a better future if we listen.

Can you talk a little about the Chicory magazine you discovered during your research for this book, and why you were inspired to make it available online?Chicory was a magazine published by the Enoch Pratt Free Library from 1966 to 1983, thanks to two librarians, Evelyn Levy and Thelma Bell. Using money from the War on Poverty, they hired local poet Sam Cornish who worked with kids and teens in East Baltimore, one of the poorest neighborhoods in the city, to create a poetry and art magazine.

What made Chicory special was that it wasn’t edited. What people submitted was basically published as is. They even published what the editors overheard as a kind of poetry called “Street Chatter.” For a historian, this is an amazing peek into what regular people thought about the world during a tumultuous time in the city’s and country’s history. People wrote about local and national politics, from the 1968 riot to police suppression of the Black Panther Party. They also talked about their daily lives. This magazine was the voice of black, working-class Baltimore in its time. And some people who published in it went on to become well-known writers, like poet Afaa Michael Weaver, Terry Edmonds, the first African American presidential speechwriter, and journalist Rafael Alvarez.

Because its content is still relevant, I wanted to make sure that it was accessible to folks today. I worked with Pratt to digitize the collection, which is now online through Digital Maryland. You can also follow on Instagram, where we feature poems and art from the magazine.

Read our review of Rizzo’s latest book, here.

It was just a matter of time before the law caught up with John Waters—Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, that is.

This month, the Baltimore-based writer, filmmaker, and sometimes-actor will have a guest-starring role on the police procedural, created by Dick Wolf. It will be Waters’ first appearance on the NBC-TV series, now in its 21st season.

Waters said in a phone interview that he has a brief part in the episode and doesn’t want to give too much away. He said he got a call about the show from his agent and the filming took place in the studios at Chelsea Piers in New York City. “I was thrilled to be asked to be on it,” he said.

According to a synopsis by TheCinemaholic.com, a website for TV and film buffs, the SVU detectives will investigate “a case of sex-trafficking at a performing arts institute, wherein a bunch of male ballet dancers are recording the female dancers in their moments of passion and are using the videos to blackmail them.” The episode also involves a case that could force one character, Chief Christian Garland, “to put his friendship aside and arrest a corrupt pastor,” the website says.

NBC recently released a trailer for the show, which will air on March 19 at 10 p.m.

“A case of online extortion,” an announcer intones, ominously. “John Waters guest stars in a new SVU.”

The trailer features a distraught-looking Waters, confronted by the detectives. “Nothing disappears from the internet,” he tells them. “The male dancers are secretly recording the women having sex,” reveals actress Mariska Hargitay, in her role as Captain Olivia Benson. “This isn’t just blackmail. We’re looking at sex trafficking.”

Dum-dum.

The ballet-blackmail storyline is reminiscent of a real-life 2018 scandal involving the New York City Ballet, which fired two principal male dancers after they were named in a lawsuit for allegedly sharing sexually-explicit photos and videos of ballerinas.

The incident was an early test case of the limits of disciplinary action in the #MeToo era, and an arbitrator later ruled that the male dancers must be reinstated if they receive counseling. Since it began in 1999, the Law & Order series has been known for its ripped-from-the-headlines plots.

Waters’ role is one of the first scripted TV appearances that he has had since he had his head chopped off by Jessica Lange when he portrayed movie director William Castle in a campy 2017 performance on the FX series, Feud: Bette and Joan.

In addition, he’s been on The Blacklist, as well as Real Time with Bill Maher, Late Night with Seth Meyers, and other talk shows. He also contributed to the latest Hollywood Vampires album with Johnny Depp, Alice Cooper, and Joe Perry.

In 2017, FX kept Waters’ Feud appearance a secret until a few days before the show aired, but NBC is doing the opposite. Waters said Law & Order: SVU is the kind of mainstream show he likes to be in, where his appearance is unexpected: “I’m proud to be exploited by NBC,” he said.

Does he play a bad guy on the show, or a victim? He won’t say exactly, but he offers a hint: “I’m an unsympathetic, unsavory character. Typecast once again.”

Charm City Django Jazz Fest
Feb 21-22. When Michael Joesph Harris hopped off the Creative Alliance stage in 2014 after playing a successful concert of tunes inspired the legendary jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt, he could tell by the energy in the theater that Baltimore audiences wanted more Gypsy jazz. Fast forward two years, and Harris, left, who is the founder of local groups Ultrafaux and The Hot Club of Baltimore, opened the doors to the first Charm City Django Jazz Fest, which hosts Gypsy jazz musicians from across the world for performances, jam sessions, and workshops. Harris says that the festival (this year from February 21-22) has helped revitalize the finger-plucking community within the city’s arts scene. “Keeping the legacy of Django Reinhardt and that sense of originality rooted in tradition alive is a big part of what we’re doing with the festival,” Harris says. 3134 Eastern Ave. 8 p.m.. $28-75. —KP

The American Craft Show
Feb. 21-23. Calling all crafters! This annual weekend-long event is known for being a DIY haven, and this year’s lineup of more than 600 vendors from across North America will not disappoint. Browse through the Baltimore Convention Center’s vibrant marketplace to shop for everything from jewelry and clothing to furniture and home goods. Whether you leave with new baskets or necklaces or a dress, stop by to snag some thoughtfully made pieces. Baltimore Convention Center. $14-36. Time varies.

Ornamenta
Feb. 1. Every winter, the Baltimore Jewelry Center—known around town for its hands-on workshops and classes—hosts Ornamenta, the nonprofit’s fundraiser to benefit its educational and studio rental programs. For one night only, take in breathtaking works by local artists, rub elbows with up-and-comers in the city’s arts scene, and celebrate the success of this Station North staple by donating to this worthy cause. Impact Hub, 10 E. North Ave.. $100-575. 7-11 p.m..

Wicked
Feb. 12-March 8. The Hippodrome Theatre keeps the Broadway sensations coming with this four-week run of Wicked. Travel to the Land of Oz (before the days of Dorothy and friends) as two witches form an unlikely friendship: one bubbly and popular and the other smart, misunderstood, and green-skinned. Experience the iconic story of how they grew to become Glinda the Good and the Wicked Witch of the West during this bucket list production. Hippodrome Theatre, 12 N. Eutaw St.. $70-246. Time varies.

A Date with John Waters
Feb. 14. Can you imagine a better Valentine’s Day date than an evening with Baltimore’s own Sleaze Supreme, John Waters? Devoted fans will rub shoulders with Waters noobs at Baltimore Soundstage during this evening with the venerable filmmaker and cornerstone of Charm City pop culture. Who can say where Waters will take his ever-evolving one-man show? All we know for sure is that no holds will be barred. 124 Market Pl.. $44. 8 p.m..

R. Eric Thomas
Feb. 20. Join Elle senior staff writer, nationally recognized playwright, and Baltimore native R. Eric Thomas as he reads from his newly released memoir, Here for It. With a daily humor-politics column, Thomas has had plenty of practice using words to reconcile his identity, religious faith, and the recent social shifts within our country. After reading through our profile of this laugh-out-loud author on page 70, make plans to join fellow fans for this reading at Enoch Pratt’s Central Library. Enoch Pratt Free Library. Free. 7 p.m..

Small Foods Party
Feb. 8. Whoever coined the term “the bigger, the better” clearly never attended this teeny snacks party at the American Visionary Art Museum. At this 15th annual bash/competition, bring your appetite (and a tiny silverware set) to sample a smorgasbord of bite-sized eats made by local home chefs and makers. Don’t miss this weird and wonderful opportunity to taste itty-bitty bites of fan-favorite foods such as crab cake sandwiches and cinnamon rolls and help crown this year’s “Bad Idea” award. American Visionary Arts Museum. $5-20. 7 p.m..

Celine Dion
Feb. 24. If you weren’t planning to catch legendary performer Celine Dion’s “Courage” world tour at the Royal Farms Arena, think again. After a more than 10-year hiatus, this world-renowned pop powerhouse is back on the road, and she’s sure to enchant Baltimore with classic hits such as “My Heart Will Go On” and “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now.” Snag tickets early to experience a night of belting out high notes and worshipping at the feet of the queen of adult contemporary, which is almost guaranteed to help your heart go on a little longer. Royal Farms Arena. $150-849. 7:30 p.m..

Frozen Harbor Music Festival
Feb. 28-March 1. Not even the icy weather could stop this party. Now in its fourth year, this frozen music festival will take over nine rock venues across downtown, including Rams Head Live! and Mosaic Night Club and Lounge, for three days of nonstop sets by more than 100 rising acts. Make plans to hop from venue to venue to catch performances by hip hop, rock, and rap groups in the heart of the Inner Harbor and don’t forget to grab a picture with the party-animal polar bear Mascot, Koasty, before the end of the weekend. Power Plant Live! 34 Market Pl.. $20-225. Fri 7 p.m.-Sun 1:30 a.m..

Fake Wedding
Feb. 29. Back by popular demand, this fake-wedding party, hosted by local nonprofit action network Volunteering Untapped, is one of the winter’s can’t-miss affairs. After “celebrating” the matrimony of two randomly selected guests, pop the champagne, throw away the vows, and then spend the rest of the night dancing like nobody’s watching. Head to downtown’s Columbus Center for this (fake) ceremony between a (fake) bride and groom, and enjoy (very real) food, drinks, and a night of fundraising for a do-good cause. Columbus Center, 701 E. Pratt St.. $75-800. 7-11 p.m..

Through novels, memoirs, essays, and poems that hit shelves this year, we’ve taken journeys both near and far and learned more about our world and city.

We uncovered secret, historical letters sent to and from Baltimore, and we took quiet walks through Pennsylvania forests while watching the natural ecosystem change each year. We traveled alongside the much-talked-about figure Wallis Simpson to lavish parties at Buckingham Palace, and we dove head-first into the depths of heroin addiction in a 1990s Baltimore spun out of control.

We learned more about systemic racism, mass incarceration, the modern-day art world, immigration, and how to make public spaces safer and more inclusive. We also quieted our minds to take in zen-like poetry and moments in nature worth savoring.

Here’s a look back at our favorite reads of the year, all of which have ties to Baltimore.

The Master Plan: My Journey from Life in Prison to a Life of Purpose
Chris Wilson with Bret Witter (G.P. Putnam’s Sons)
After reading 400 pages of Chris Wilson’s memoir, one word stands out: endgame. He shares the sometimes heart-wrenching, occasionally heartwarming account of growing up in a violent Washington, D.C. neighborhood, catching a life sentence for murder at 18, and the creation of his “Master Plan.” As he grows from boy to man, we see him check off each item on that list—get a high school diploma, eat no junk food, get an AA degree—while continuing to add bigger dreams. Beating all odds, his sentence is reduced, and he eventually arrives in Baltimore as a free man with the objective to help other “returning citizens.” We see him go from sleeping on a friend’s couch, traveling by borrowed bike, and mowing lawns for a living, to starting his own business (Barclay Investment Corporation), sharing his story with people all over the country, and becoming an active, positive member of his community. It’s a story of perseverance, hope, and redemption. And he also sets forth a challenge for readers: what is our endgame? And how are we going to get there?

The Real Wallis Simpson: A New History of the American Divorcee Who Became the Duchess of Windsor
Anna Pasternak (Touchstone)
This colorful biography peels away the layers of one of the most talked-about—and perhaps misunderstood—figures in modern history: Wallis Simpson, the twice-divorced Baltimore native who stole the heart of the Prince of Wales and, so it’s been said, ultimately caused his abdication of the throne after he became King of England. Anna Pasternak aims to set the record straight and, in some ways, rewrites history. What people call a fairytale love story between WE (Wallis and Edward’s shorthand for themselves) was, in many ways, a tragedy, and though Wallis was often blamed for King Edward’s abdication, it’s evident—through letters, as well as testimonies of close friends—that Wallis did everything in her power to stop him. Details about Wallis—her impeccable sense of style, her sensitivity and nervous temperament behind a cool and confident exterior—bring us closer to the reality of who she was. The book also tells us a good bit about Edward—that he had a secret love of crocheting, that both he and Wallis struggled with insecurities about their sexual identities. A touching moment comes in the epilogue, when we see Pasternak’s personal connection to the story and the lives of both the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

Mr. Know-It-All: The Tarnished Wisdom of a Filth Elder
John Waters (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
John Waters’ flair for writing and his laugh-out-loud humor had us flying through his “tarnished wisdom.” And what wisdom it is: Learn public speaking; “go Hollywood,” if given the chance; be willing to change everything, he tells us. Juicy anecdotes from his career—fighting in court for his Pecker film title; possibly being the only director who didn’t cast Brad Pitt after an audition, people whispering “demented forever” when passing him on the street, how he was asked to be celebrant for Johnny Depp and Winona Ryder’s wedding but convinced them not to wed—run alongside his thoughts on religion, politics, gay rights, art, sex, drugs, even death. And what his restaurant would be like, were he to open one. This collection of essays is a must for all John Waters fans but also for young, aspiring filmmakers and artists who could use a little help from this larger-than-life personality.

Snowballs for Severance
Richie Frieman (The Omnibus Publishing)
This picture book would be great fun for readers of any age, were it simply about a 9-year-old boy who changed a century-old law in his hometown to allow snowball fights. But this story is even more remarkable because it’s true. Through research and interviews with town hero Dane Best and his family, Richie Frieman wrote and illustrated this quirky tale, complete with direct quotes and cartoonish versions of the characters who make up Severance, Colorado. He includes a short questionnaire with Dane and photos at the end, though Dane is written so true to character, by that point, we feel like we already know this child activist.

Fake Like Me
Barbara Bourland (Grand Central Publishing)
Baltimore-based Barbara Bourland raises a magnifying glass to the contemporary art world in this brilliant satire. A cast of familiar-yet-eccentric characters plays out multiple storylines—a bizarre mystery (why did the young and famous New York artist Carey Logan drown herself in a lake?), a love story (really, a few), an artist’s coming of age—but at its core, it’s a penetrating, insightful discourse into what it means to be a practicing artist navigating the cut-throat art world. It’s a must-read for art scholars and students, who will appreciate all the practical and existential questions the narrator faces—from taking on an impossible deadline after two years’ worth of paintings are lost in a studio fire, to pondering the gray area between being an artist and being a commodity. And your jaw will drop more than a few times throughout Bourland’s story, which is painted with rich imagery, exquisite details, and sensual delight.

We Speak for Ourselves: A Word from Forgotten Black America
D. Watkins (Atria Books)
D. Watkins is a master at his craft and has seemingly endless stories to share about Baltimore and the wisdom he’s gleaned from living here. The New York Times best-selling author of The Beast Side: Living and Dying While Black in America and The Cook Up: A Crack Rock Memoir is back with another fresh take on life in East Baltimore and how his own life has changed since he’s seen success as a writer. Here, the University of Baltimore professor aims to round out the stories being told about black culture in America. His down-to-earth, casual writing style allows us to easily enter his world, and his sense of humor tends to balance some of the heavy subject matter. Some passages—including one in which he repeats the phrase “black lives don’t matter” alongside horrifying examples to prove his point—are painfully chilling. This book transcends memoir when Watkins offers solutions, including a checklist that breaks down systemic racism and allows us to think more deeply about how we can effect positive change in our communities.

Intrusive Beauty
Joseph J. Capista (Ohio University Press)
Contemporary poetry rarely has a melodic cadence, as rhythmic poetry is somehow considered unsophisticated. But Joseph J. Capista doesn’t shy away from the joys of rollicking through language’s innate richness of sound, as he weaves narratives about Baltimore, life as a husband and father, and the elegance of the natural world. The Towson University professor has the ability to see beauty in all places, and through his observations, he allows us to see it, too.

The Long Blink
Brian Kuebler (Behler Publications)
In WMAR News’ investigative journalist Brian Kuebler’s first book, he delves much deeper into the true story of a Baltimore family torn apart by tragedy after a trucker falls asleep at the wheel and kills Ed Slattery’s wife and leaves his son disabled. We watch as a stunned Ed grapples with his new life in the wake of such a horrific event and how he moved through his grief to help heal not just those closest to him but others affected by trucking accidents. He rises from victim to activist, going to Capitol Hill to fight for safer trucking laws. But underneath his fight change, this is a story about how one man survived devastating trauma and used his pain to help others. The Long Blink is the epitome of a page-turner. Once you pick it up, don’t expect to put it down until you’ve reached its very shocking and explosive end.

Chasing a Flawed Sun
Daniel McGhee (Phoenix Rising Publishing)
Perhaps you’re thinking we don’t need another memoir about the opioid crisis. But each experience through addiction is unique, yet universal themes connect all these stories. From page one, Daniel McGhee races down to the depths of hell on Earth and drags the reader along with him, every inch of the way. As painful as this memoir is to read—one horrifying, self-destructive story after the next—one can only imagine how painful it must’ve been to write, much less live. McGhee grew up a white, middle-class kid in Baltimore County, and in this gut-wrenchingly honest narrative, he takes us down the rabbit hole into his heroin addiction—but not before years of drinking every day and getting high on cocaine, Special K, and ecstasy (and selling them all, too), while constantly instigating fights, jumping people, pulling guns on people (seemingly nothing was off limits) and finding himself in and out of rehab—and prison. When retelling his story, he sometimes interrupts his own train of thought to comment on how ashamed he is, how lost and clueless he once was. Many addicts don’t find themselves living the happy ending, but this book serves as some hope. It’s a story every addict must know deeply, and this book would certainly resonate with them. But perhaps its greater gift lies in showing people who have not experienced addiction firsthand what it’s like—physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually—and why addicts keep “chasing a flawed sun.”

Father’s Day Creek: Flying fishing, fatherhood and the last best place on Earth
Dan Rodricks (Apprentice House Press)
Baltimore Sun columnist Dan Rodricks’ writing seems at ease in this collection of anecdotes and reflections on years spent fly fishing at a magical stream in Pennsylvania that he’s named Father’s Day Creek, in honor of visits with his father-in-law each year for the holiday and stopping by the natural respite while there. It’s a place he calls his “spirit-home,” and he insists that everyone should have one. As its subtitle suggests, Rodricks provides spectacular notes on the art of fly fishing, the devastation and regeneration of natural waterways because of various ecological factors, as well as the complexity of fatherhood, including father figures whom he calls “male mothers” and cultural changes that have altered the role of fathering. He also inevitably weaves together the connection between fatherhood and fishing. Worth noting: the forward was written by fly fishing legend Lefty Kreh just a few weeks before he died. In all, the book is a tribute to the simple yet sacred moments in life, and his honest, laid-back style of introspective storytelling feels reminiscent of a day spent in the woods, casting a line into the water, and forging a connection—be it with fathers, sons, nature, or yourself.

Writer, director, producer, visual artist, the newest male face of Nike.

Add that last one to the list of achievements by filmmaker and Baltimore icon John Waters, one of three celebrities chosen to be in a new joint promotional campaign for Nordstrom department stores and Nike—the world’s largest supplier of athletic shoes and apparel.

The campaign, which is called “No Cover” and launches this month, touts a collection of five classic Nike sneakers, each reimagined with new prints, colors, and materials. It also includes 16 apparel and accessory pieces. Nike and Nordstrom have collaborated before, but this is the first collection designed for Nike by Olivia Kim, Nordstrom’s vice president of creative projects and a luminary in the fashion world.

Instead of going with all athletes to represent the collection, Nike and Nordstrom enlisted a more diverse team of celebrities. Aside from Waters, the list includes Megan Rapinoe, co-captain of the 2019 World Cup champion U. S. Women’s soccer team, and supermodel Leona Anastasia “Binx” Walton.

“The collection, in a sense, very much matches the personalities of these people who inspire me,” Kim says on Nike’s website. “It’s amazing to have Megan Rapinoe, John Waters, and Binx Walton as faces of the campaign.”

When addressing why Waters was a good fit for the project, Kim said: “I’ve always been inspired by John, because he’s always pushed the boundaries in his work. He tells simple stories in a humorous, thoughtful, and provocative way.”

Nordstrom x Nike shops are in New York City, Seattle, Los Angeles, Chicago, Vancouver, and Toronto. Sales will expand to other Nordstrom locations, including the store at Towson Town Center, on November 8.

Initial photographs released for the campaign depict a rave set in 1990s New York, and the three celebrities are all participants seemingly caught mid-pose. In one photo, Waters is shown with his head encircled by a garland of what appear to be silver Christmas tree bulbs. Walton is lounging in a blue chair with her legs crossed, and Rapinoe is crouching like a tigress.

According to Nike, the collection is meant to evoke “90s New York street fashion” and free-spirited nightlife at a time when some clubs had no cover charge.

“The assembled pieces form a perfect confluence of classic Nike and Jordan designs and Olivia’s style—which is rooted in the rave and hip-hop styles defining 90s New York,” the company says on its website. “The collection’s name, ‘No Cover,’ is somewhat of a double entendre to a cover charge one would associate with New York nightlife. In Kim’s eyes, this collection is meant for everyone—men and women, the young and the old—in order to promote no judgments and no rules.”

At the heart of the collection are Kim’s remakes of Nike’s Air Force 1, Air Mowabb, Air Footscape, Air Max 98, and Air Jordan IV models. No Cover is one of the first Nike promotions since the company’s 2018 “Believe in Something” campaign featuring Colin Kaepernick, the former pro football quarterback who became famous for protesting systemic oppression by kneeling during The Star Spangled Banner.

It places Waters, Walton, and Rapinoe in a pantheon of celebrities who have represented Nike, including Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan, Jackie Joyner-Kersee, Serena Williams, Lebron James, Derek Jeter, and Kobe Bryant.

Waters, 73, who just completed a speaking and book-signing tour in Australia, declined to comment about his new role as Nike pitchman, saying in an email that he’d need to check with the company first. Although he isn’t generally recognized for his athletic prowess, he is known for wearing sneakers on late night TV appearances and even the cover of his latest book, Mr. Know It All: The Tarnished Wisdom of a Filth Elder.

He has also weighed in on sartorial matters in his films and books, such as raising the issue of whether it’s proper to wear white after Labor Day, in Serial Mom. In his latest book, he advises men above a certain age to stay away from T shirts. “A T-shirt on any man over forty only makes him look fifty,” he warns. “Avoid the T-shirt look even if the temperature outside is ninety degrees.”

It was a 52-foot, 10-ton object of controversy, curiosity, and for the most part, derision, when it was installed in front of Penn Station in 2004. A Baltimore Sun editorial described the aluminum, five-story Male/Female work at the time of its placement in the city-owned plaza south of the station as “oversized, underdressed and woefully out of place.”

Sun columnist Dan Rodricks wrote that artist Jonathan Borofsky’s intersecting male and female silhouettes resembled the robot Gort from the sci-fi, horror movie The Day the Earth Stood Still. A local cabbie, who regularly picked up fares at the station, called it “an abomination” in one story. Several times, City Paper readers voted the massive sculpture—a $750,000 donation from the Municipal Arts Society— Baltimore’s “Best Eyesore.”

Almost immediately, it prompted chatter about moving it from its prominent position outside the 1911-built Beaux-Arts style station.

And now, oddly enough, just as the city seems to have finally grown accustomed to it, the fate of long-controversial Male/Female may be in doubt.

In order to handle the new generation of high-speed Acela trains, as well as the expectation of more passengers in coming years, Amtrak has pledged a $90 million overhaul of Penn Station. Those plans include a transformation of the historic station into a more pedestrian, bicycle, bus, and cab-friendly transit hub—and, if developers can raise more funds—a new mixed-use development in the surrounding area.

No official has said the giant sculpture needs to be moved to remake Penn Station. No one has indicated it will stay. There is simply is no sight of the 52-foot statue in current renderings and maps. Bill Struever, CEO of Cross Street Partners, one of the developers and planners on the Amtrak project, noted in an email that indeed the sculpture had engendered strong feelings over the years. He also stated he “is staying agnostic on the statue.” Ultimately, Struever says, he expects a resolution on the development of the south station plaza—and thus the statue—will grow out of a community planning process.

The current working proposal calls for moving the taxi/drop-off area to Charles and St. Paul streets, which will serve a new Lanvale Street rail concourse on the north side of the station. That plan, Struever says, creates an opportunity to rebuild the south station plaza into a more pedestrian friendly space with the potential for events and programming.

In the meantime, however, the statue has grown on at least some Baltimoreans over the last few years. As Baltimore magazine contributor Ed Gunts noted in a short piece in 2015, one early defender of the Male/Female statue was Bill Griffith, creator of the Zippy the Pinhead comic strip, in which the sculpture has appeared. John Waters has said he likes it, too. Rebecca Hoffberger, founder and director of the American Visionary Art Museum, noted several years ago that even “The Eiffel Tower was detested” when it went up.

Asked again last week about the statue, Hoffberger said she wished “there was something that was more in tune with the station’s history as a link that gave homage.”

“It’s there and I think there are people that love it,” she says. “I don’t know how thematically it was decided on. There’s a bigger issue—the front of Penn Station is really historic and iconic to Baltimore,” adding the structure may be obscuring that. “I’m very big on preserving older architecture particularly of iconic sites.”

Baltimore architect and artist Jerome Gray said he believes the size of the statue overwhelmed city viewers at first, but since its installation people have become accustomed to it. He added the sculpture’s provocative intersection of the male and female forms—and its colorful, single, pulsating heart, widely visible at night—personally appeals. “I love weird things,” he says. “And I like anything that challenges you. In that way, it’s great. It makes you think.” (Initially, the sculpture’s beating heart was to be red, but it was switched to blue-magenta at the city’s request out of concerns the color red would be seen as a reminder of the city’s tragic homicide rate.)

Gray adds that it’s not unprecedented for the city to move works of art. The Orpheus statute, for example, at Fort McHenry was shifted from its original location. Others around Druid Hill Park have been moved in the past.

In 2015, City Paper contributor Michael Farley called the statue an “accidental monument to a consideration (or lack thereof) of gender identity and sex that’s distinctly Baltimorean.” He nominated it “the kinkiest artwork” in the city.

Borofsky, for what it’s worth, never liked to comment too much about the themes in his own work, preferring to leave it for the viewer’s interpretation. His public projects, including other large scale human forms, can be found around the world.

Eli Pousson, formerly of Baltimore Heritage, moved to the city a few years after the installation of the statue, but quickly became aware of the criticism of work. “It was abstract, difficult to categorize in terms of explicit meaning,” Pousson says. “It wasn’t your normal, marble famous guy. It plays with the [traditional] masculine and feminine forms, which also probably invited some of that response.” It’s interesting, Pousson continues, that today more people seem to respond positively to the statue as gender, sex, and queer identities and norms evolve in the eyes of society.

“Personally, I’m a fan,” Pousson says. “I’d suggest rather than spending money to take down public art, the city and developers use the money to put up more public art.”

You may have heard that Baltimore has been disparaged recently. Here at Baltimore, we’ve spent 112 years celebrating this city—and we’re not about to back down now. Take a look back as we revisit some of the many reasons why Charm City lives up to its name. Here are some highlights from our archives:

We’ve got Otterbein’s.

The sacred sugar cookies of Bawlmer.

And the best crab houses in the country.

From Captain James, Oprah’s favorite, to the James Beard Award-winning Schultz’s Crab House.

Photography by Scott Suchman

Oprah Winfrey got her start here on WJZ.

Recently, she made a local news appearance on WBAL to defend Baltimore’s honor. “This charming city is anything but full of rats,” she said.

Illustration by Anita Kunz

We have sports legends.

The Iron Man even beat The Iron Horse’s streak!

Photography by Mike Morgan

Our chefs win James Beard Awards.

Woodberry Kitchen’s Spike Gjerde is a farm-to-fork pioneer. Even former First Lady Michelle Obama eats here.

Photography by Mike Morgan

We have some of the best museums in the country.

Among them are the first-of-its-kind National Great Blacks in Wax Museum, the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African-American History & Culture, and the Baltimore Museum of Art—which is expected to unveil its upcoming Matisse center by 2021, making it the premier place to study the French artist and his works.

Some of the most iconic artists hail from here.

John Waters, Blaze Starr, and Joyce Scott. (Need we say more?)

-Bryan Burris

We have the largest free arts festival in the country.

Local legends (Ethel Ennis) to national names (TLC) have stepped up to the stage here.

Our symphony is home to conductor Marin Alsop, the first woman to head a major American orchestra.

In an era when symphonies around the country are closing their doors permanently, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra is one of only 25 of the 800 or so U.S. orchestras to have been around for more than 100 years.

Photography by David Colwell

We invented just about everything.

Hyperbole? We think not. Read on.

Sean McCabe

In an unprecedented verbal assault on the citizens of an American city by a modern U.S. president, Donald Trump called Baltimore “a disgusting, rat and rodent-infested mess,” and the “Worst in the USA,” adding “no human being would want to live there.”

Lashing out in a tweetstorm, first on Saturday—then doubling down Sunday—Trump added the nation’s 29th largest city, Rep. Elijah Cummings, and Maryland’s 7th Congressional District to his growing list of black and brown targets. By Sunday afternoon, Trump was referring to Rep. Cummings, one of the most respected members of Congress and the son of sharecroppers who grew up defending himself against racist bullies who tried to stop the integration of the Riverside Park swimming pool, as “racist Elijah Cummings.”

Baltimoreans, in turn, fired back all over social media, standing up for their beloved city against the president’s vitriol and racist-tinged attacks by posting photos of Charm City—from Artscape, Fort McHenry, and the Inner Harbor to stoop parties, crab feasts, Patterson Park, and the Gwynn Falls. They also highlighted figures like Divine and Gervonta Davis, who, by coincidence, successfully retained his world super featherweight title Saturday night before a packed house at the Royal Farms Arena.

By Saturday evening #WeAreBaltimore was trending across Twitter.

Perhaps no one responded more poignantly than Victor Blackwell, weekend host of CNN Saturday and a Baltimore native, who quickly, and correctly, put the president in his place.

“You know who did [live in Baltimore], Mr. President? I did,” Blackwell said, struggling at times to hold his emotions in check. “From the day I was brought home from the hospital to the day I left for college, and a lot of people I care about still do. There are challenges no doubt, but people are proud of their community. I don’t want to sound self-righteous, but people get up and go to work there. They care for their families there. They love their children who pledge allegiance to the flag just like people who live in districts of congressmen who support you, sir. They are Americans, too.”

In particular, Blackwell highlighted Trump’s use of the word “infested” in reference to majority-black Baltimore—a term of art the president often deploys when talking about people of color—whether in regard to Mexican and Central American migrants and asylum seekers, the Ebola-crisis in Africa, or certain female members of Congress.

“’Infested—that’s usually reserved for references to rodents and insects, but we’ve seen the president invoke infestation to criticize lawmakers before,” Blackwell said to viewers. “You see a pattern here? Just two weeks ago President Trump attacked four minority congresswomen. ‘Why don’t they go back to the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.’ Reminder, three of them were born here; all of them are American. Infested, he says.”

Blackwell noted that Trump had also previously described longtime civil rights activist—and congressman—John Lewis’ Atlanta district as “crime infested.”

John Waters, never one to shrink from a fight—or cover up the city’s challenges—responded to Trump by saying: “Give me the rats and roaches of Baltimore any day over the lies and racism of your Washington, Mr. Trump. Come on over to that neighborhood and see if you have the nerve to say it in person!”

David Simon, not one to pull punches, either, reacted in similar style: “There’s a block party today on my southside street. This is a city of good Americans who deserve more than a grifting, hollow and self-absorbed failure of a man as their president. @realDonaldTrump is a permanent stain on our land.”

Trump’s twitter fire at Baltimore residents apparently was prompted by a “Fox & Friends” segment Saturday morning that was critical of Baltimore. That segment came on the heels of Cummings’ tough questioning of Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan during a hearing on conditions and child separations at U.S. border facilities.

Saturday afternoon, Baltimore leaders and elected officials gathered at City Hall to formally condemn Trump and his remarks.

“It’s completely unacceptable for the political leader of our country to denigrate a vibrant American City like Baltimore, and to viciously attack U.S. Representative Elijah Cummings, a patriot and a hero,” Mayor Bernard C. “Jack” Young said in a prepared statement. “Mr. Trump’s rhetoric is hurtful and dangerous to the people he’s sworn to represent. As the Mayor of Baltimore, I won’t stand for anyone, not even the alleged Leader of the Free World, attacking our great City or our representative to Congress. Mr. Trump, you are a disappointment to the people of Baltimore, our country, and to the world.”

Brian Stelter, host of CNN’s Reliable Sources and a Maryland native and Towson University alum, pointed to the factual errors in the president’s tweets on his Sunday show. He described them as “petty” and “a distraction” from other important issues as well as “racist and ridiculous stereotyping of a part of the country [which] is damaging to the country as a whole and that must be covered that way.”

Lest anyone mistake Trump’s rhetoric for actual political dialogue, this is what Red Maryland, the state’s conservative blog, had to say:

“First off, typical of his tweets, President Trump shot his mouth off before his brain was loaded. The problems with his tweet are extensive, but it boils down to two big problems.

• The 7th Congressional District includes only half of Baltimore City. Large chunks of the district are in Baltimore County and Howard County. Some of Maryland’s most affluent areas i.e. Columbia, Clarksville, and parts of horse country are part of the district; and,
• There is a racial component of the implication is too obvious to miss.”

Trump, on Sunday, continued his attacks on Baltimore and Cummings, who chairs the powerful House Oversight Committee, tweeting “. . . Congressman Elijah Cummings has done a very poor job for his district and the City of Baltimore. Just take a look, the facts speak far louder than words!”

For good measure, Trump subsequently went after the Baltimore-born Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, and her district, also describing it as“failing badly.” Later, Trump said he was, “Waiting for Nancy and Elijah to say, ‘Thank you, Mr. President!’ for the declining unemployment numbers among African-Americans nationally, a trend, of course, that had been established, along with overall unemployment decline, under the Obama Administration.

Cummings addressed Trump on Twitter directly, describing his work ethic and mission as an elected official, which one can only assume will be completely lost on the president.

“Mr. President, I go home to my district daily,” Cummings wrote. “Each morning, I wake up, and I go and fight for my neighbors. It is my constitutional duty to conduct oversight of the Executive Branch. But, it is my moral duty to fight for my constituents.”

A pair of gold statues sits prominently on Pat Moran’s desk in her Canton office. Amidst the clutter of paperwork and stacks of DVDs, the figures of a winged woman holding a globe aloft are instantly recognizable as Emmys, the television industry’s most prestigious award. But look closely and you might notice that one of Moran’s Emmys—the one she received last year for casting HBO’sGame Change—has a busted wing with a Band-Aid affixed to it. And its globe is dented.

“It took a header on to the floor,” says Moran, her voice rising with each word.

Until recently, the Emmys sat atop pedestals in the upstairs living room of her Mt. Vernon home. That is until a strong wind gusted across Park Avenue, dislodging a painted screen that toppled the Emmy and nearly gave its recipient a coronary. “I almost had a heart attack,” says Moran. “But if it had happened 25 years ago, I would have flipped out and gone ballistic. I’m a lot better now than the lunatic I used to be.”

The wounded Emmy is indicative of how Moran, a longtime presence in the local film community, has changed. Around town, she has long been known for her flame-red hair, sharp demeanor that doesn’t suffer fools, and keen eye for talent. She has, of late, risen to the pinnacle of her profession and, dare it be said, mellowed somewhat in the process. Moran’s longtime friend and confidant John Waters, who’s known her for almost 50 years, says that “her rage level has gone down, and she seems happier than ever.”

Why shouldn’t she be? She’s cast nearly every film and television project that’s come through town, including Waters’s films, Barry Levinson’s Avalon and Liberty Heights, NBC’s Homicide: Life on the Street, The Wire (recently cited by Entertainment Weeklyas the best TV show of all time), and the HBO comedy series, Veep, starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus (who’s featured in this month’s Best Of story). She’s been nominated for seven Primetime Emmys, won twice, and earned respect throughout the industry.

David Rubin, casting director of blockbusters such as Men in Black and The English Patient, sponsored Moran for membership in the Casting Society of America. He marvels at her ability to “recognize talent on the fringes of the mainstream and understand the inner life of characters on a script’s page.”

Jane Love, associate executive director of the Screen Actors Guild’s Washington-Mid Atlantic local, calls Moran “a treasure”; The Wire creator David Simon says she’s “a mad genius”; and Veep producer Stephanie Laing floats the L-word—“Pat Moran is a legend,” she says.

But Moran will have none of it. “A legend is Cecil B. DeMille,” she says. “That’s what I think of as a legend, not me.”

She tips her head back, sniffs the air, and adopts a tone of privilege. “Oh, could you pass me that?” she says to some imagined minion, and then smiles demurely, blinks her eyes, and points to herself. “Legend.”

“Could I have that seat?” she asks, pointing to herself again. “Legend.” She quickly snaps out of it. “Are you kidding?” she asks. “My whole career has been one big accident. I’m just lucky to have gotten out of Catonsville.”

“My whole career has been one big accident.”

Moran grew up in Catonsville, in a Civil War-era house at the corner of Beechfield and Frederick avenues. Her grandparents had emigrated from Ireland and lived nearby, over a grocery/liquor store run by her parents. Moran’s father worked nights as a musician, leading the Johnny Moran Orchestra, a local big band known for playing midnight cruises on the S.S. Tolchester. The oldest of five children (she has four younger brothers), Pat learned to identify Benny Goodman songs but never learned to ride a bike; she knew of big band leader Si Zentner but didn’t know how to swim, which was fine by her. “I never wanted to be a child,” she says, “and I never cared about the things most kids did.”

Moran preferred hanging out with her mother, Grace. She admired her smarts and keen instincts, which her mother attributed to being born on Friday the 13th with a “veil” over her face. The veil—actually, a portion of the birth membrane called a caul—was surgically removed and sold to a local seaman who, like superstitious sailors for centuries, believed that possessing it would prevent his ship from sinking. “That always gave my mother a kind of spookiness,” says Moran, “and she felt she had sort of a sixth sense because of it. Fifteen people could be in a room, and she could immediately tell you who was good and who was bad.”

“I’m the same way,” she continues, “if there’s a situation, I go with my gut feeling. John [Waters] says I have ‘a contempt prior to investigation,’ but why investigate? It usually turns out to be exactly what I thought at the very beginning.”

Moran graduated from Mount de Sales Academy, an all-girls Catholic school, “at a time when women weren’t supposed to have opinions or any bits of creativity,” she says. “If you could balance a teacup on your knee, that was great.”

Though she received an excellent education and developed a cultured confidence that dovetailed with the manners she learned at home, “it was dullsville,” says Moran, who longed to escape. She had read about beatniks and wanted to be one.

She happened to meet Barry Narlines while working as a clerk at the Social Security Administration in the early 1960s. He remembers it well. “Pat stood out, and she was a notch above everyone else,” says Narlines, who was a supervisor at the time. “She was sophisticated, had the most amazing sense of humor, and wasn’t afraid to speak her mind. We just clicked.”

Narlines was gay, lived in Mt. Vernon, and was interested in opera, theater, movies, music, fashion, art, and current events—“everything I loved,” recalls Moran, who began hanging out with Narlines at Leon’s, a gay bar on the corner of Park Avenue and Tyson Street.

Her mother was appalled she was going downtown, but approved of the friendship with Narlines because Pat felt safe and comfortable around him and his friends. “They introduced me to a whole new world of style and taste,” says Moran. “Gay men liberated me from Middle America.”

“Gay men liberated me from Middle America.”

Moran eventually migrated to Martick’s, Baltimore’s premier bohemian hangout on W. Mulberry Street, where she befriended another tribe of colorful characters and, sometimes, worked as a cocktail waitress. One night, she ran into an aspiring filmmaker from Lutherville hanging out in the alley adjacent to the bar. In 1964, John Waters wasn’t old enough to get into Martick’s—in fact, he was still in high school—but some of the regulars snuck him drinks. Like Moran, he was a refugee from the county, and they became fast friends. “We had both ventured downtown and found the world we were looking for,” Waters says. “Pat may have worked at Social Security by day, but she was a beatnik goddess at night.”

They hitchhiked to New York together, discovered the underground films of Andy Warhol and Jonas Mekas, and hung out with similarly spirited misfits like Divine, David Lochary, and Mink Stole, who all contributed mightily to Waters’s early career. But no one did more than Moran. “She was so professional and set a really good example,” says Stole, before lauding Moran’s resourcefulness, determination, and fierce loyalty.

“At first, it was just me and her,” says Waters. “Pat did whatever was needed,” which meant everything from finding actors and securing locations (Divine’s steak-stealing scene in Pink Flamingos was shot inside her parents’ store) to playing Dr. Coathanger’s Secretary (in 1969’s Mondo Trasho).

Moran also left Social Security for a series of jobs downtown: selling tickets at Center Stage, briefly operating a hot dog stand on Read Street, opening a vintage clothing shop called Divine Trash, and, later, running The Charles Theatre. She exhibited a savvy resourcefulness in those jobs, as well, and Waters recalls the time a candle accidentally set a customer’s hair on fire at the shop. “Pat didn’t even apologize,” says Waters. “She just sold her a hat.”

But as Waters’s productions grew bigger, Moran focused exclusively on casting and found she had a knack for putting real, authentic-looking characters on screen. And as his reputation soared with films like Hairspray and Cry-Baby, her stock went up, too.

She accompanied Waters to film festivals—he calls her “the perfect fake wife”—and remembers walking the red carpet at Cannes, spotting heroes like actress Jean Moreau, and exchanging “Can you believe this?” looks. At one point, Moran leaned into Waters and quipped, “It’s a long way from Martick’s, isn’t it?”

Besides working with Waters, she worked on films like Her Alibi and Clara’s Heart, and when NBC and Barry Levinson brought the TV series Homicide to town in the early-1990s, they tapped Moran for casting the extras. “I’d worked with Barry before, but the network didn’t have any relationship with me,” says Moran. “At that time, I was just a maniac known for working with a tribe of lunatics.”

As the show progressed, Moran earned the network’s trust and was given the additional responsibility of casting day players and other speaking roles. By the time Homicide wrapped in 1999, she’d won her first Emmy and had a career in show business.

“John Waters showed me how to make movies,” says Moran, “and Barry Levinson legitimized me.”

On a Wednesday afternoon in June, Moran’s office is packed with aspiring actors. She’s auditioning roles for an indie docudrama about British spies during World War II. Moran’s husband, Chuck Yeaton—they’ve been together since 1970 and have two grown children—summons them one-by-one to “the box.” Named after the interrogation room in Homicide, its walls are lined with memorabilia, signs (including one reading “Moran’s Wacko Ward”), and headshots of stars who’ve worked with her, including Johnny Depp, Ricki Lake, and Whoopi Goldberg.

A procession of actors sits in front of Moran and her assistant, Scott Goergens, who records each audition and reads dialogue as needed. Over the course of the two-hour session, Moran exhibits unflagging energy, giving the actors background information about the plot and offering spirited, no-nonsense direction about how a scene should be played. Her disarming suggestions seem to ease tension and calm actors’ nerves.

Veep’s Stephanie Laing, who’s been in “the box” with Moran, notes how she “takes more of a lead than most casting directors. Her casting sessions are a show in itself, because she’s so hands-on trying to bring out the best in an actor.”

Moran intently watches each audition on a flat-screen TV, giving feedback on practice takes and offering advice.

“Keep in mind that you’re not playing to the back row. The camera picks up everything.”

“Try not to punch the last word.”

“Pump your volume up and don’t make it so sinister.”

“Never start a scene that big, unless it’s one where you’re getting murdered.”

After the recorded take is complete, she’s all business. “Okay, that’s all we need,” she says in a clear, clipped voice. “Thank you. Bye bye.” There’s no opening for conversation, as she makes notes on a clipboard in her lap. Each audition lasts about five minutes.

Between actors, she whispers her impressions to Goergens, observations like “Great look, but I didn’t believe a word he said,” or “If we go wider [in our search], and I think we should, he gets a call back.”

It’s that confident, nearly instant, evaluation of talent (her mother would be proud) and ability to match someone with not only the role they’ll play, but the space they’ll occupy, that’s become Moran’s calling card. That’s why Baltimoreans recognize themselves inHomicide and The Wire, arguably her two greatest accomplishments.

“It’s not that she’s merely a good judge of talent, it’s that she’s an exceptional judge of Baltimore,” says David Simon. “There were times when people would walk into auditions with faces, bodies, demeanors, or accents that any other casting agent in America would say, ‘How do I put this [peculiar] fella in front of a camera?’ And Pat would think, ‘Now, this is Baltimore.’

“Invariably, she would be right. She’s not interested in making the world prettier, shapelier, cleaner, or less idiosyncratic than it is. She’s interested in replicating the world that we all know.”

She understands, as fellow casting director David Rubin will tell you, that when a character with only one line has their moment in the center of a movie screen, 30 feet tall, they are the star of the film.

“When I read a script, I see people in those roles, all the roles,” she says, during a break. “And when someone walks through that door, I want to give them a job. It makes my life easier.”

With that, the break is over.

“Next!” Moran hollers, and another actor makes his way to “the box.”

Hollywood has a Walk of Fame for movie stars. Nashville has a Walk of Fame for musicians. Louisville has one for baseball sluggers.

Now Baltimore has its own version of a Walk of Fame, complete with gold stars in the sidewalk. John Waters Star Walk is the name of Baltimore’s attraction, which is located in Hampden and was officially inaugurated by the Hampden Village Merchants Association on May 25.

It was created to mark locations where John Waters shot his 1998 movie, Pecker. It comes with a map that can be used to take a self-guided tour of real places that became fictional settings in the movie: The Sub Pit where Pecker flipped burgers, lesbian strip club The Pelt Room, and an alley where two rats have a “love scene.”

The walk was introduced on the same day that Waters appeared at Atomic Books in Hampden to sign copies of his newest book, Mr. Know-It-All: The Tarnished Wisdom of a Filth Elder, which includes a chapter about the filming of Pecker. The kickoff came two weeks before one of Hampden’s biggest festivals, Honfest, which will be held on June 8-9.

“I think it’s great,” Waters said at the book signing. “In Japan, they have a map of Baltimore that shows locations where The Wire was filmed and the spot where Divine ate dog shit in Pink Flamingos. That’s the entire map. There hasn’t been anything like this in Baltimore.”

The movie, starring Edward Furlong, tells the story of a young photographer from a poor Baltimore neighborhood whose amateur photos of his eccentric family and friends make him a hit with New York’s arts intelligentsia. In his book, Waters calls Pecker his “nice movie” and says it got made “mainly because Japanese teenage girls loved Edward Furlong and he had agreed to star in the title role.” It was so nice, Waters says, that it was rejected by the Cannes Film Festival for being “not offensive enough like your other usual stuff.”

The Star Walk was created by Nolen Strals, co-founder of design studio Post Typography; Ben Claassen III, creator of the Dirtfarm comic strip; and Samantha Claassen, owner of Golden West Café. In all, eight stars are spray painted on sidewalks (and one alley) around Hampden and include Waters’ signature and icons that represent different scenes in the movie.

The walk takes less than an hour to complete, and the most out-of-the-way star is the one representing the rats’ love nest. Although they were only recently painted, the stars have a faded look, as if they’ve been in place for some time. They’re reminiscent of the guerilla sidewalk art that can be found all over Baltimore. The symbols—which will make sense for those who have seen the movie—include a bra, a beer bottle, two rats, and a tube of Preparation H.

Hampden also has a strong merchants association that understands the value of initiatives such as this. The maps are available for free at Atomic Books, but you can read about the specific locations below:

• 3853 Falls Road, home of the Puptrait Studio now, site of the Pelt Room in the movie.
• 3838 Falls Road, home of Service Photo now, site of the Claw Machine, the bar owned by Pecker’s dad, in the movie.
• 1101 W. 36th Street, home of Philly’s Best sub and pizza shop now, site of The Sub Pit, where Pecker worked, in the movie.
• 1017 W. 36th Street, site of The Food Market restaurant now, site of the Hampden Food Market, where Pecker and Matt shoplift, in the movie.
• The alley behind the 3500 block of Hickory Avenue, a residential area now, site of the rats’ love scene in the movie
• 908 W. 36th Street, site of Holy Frijoles restaurant now, site of The Bargain Hut thrift store, owned by Pecker’s mom, in the movie.
• 800 W. 36th Street, home of St. Luke’s Church on the Avenue now, site of the voting booth scene with Mink Stole in the movie.
• 3401 Keswick Road, most recently the home of Padma salon, site of the Spin ‘n’ Grin laundromat in the movie.

Some sites weren’t included, such as Pecker’s family home, which was destroyed in a fire, and the Fudge Palace, a bar for which scenes actually were filmed at what is now The Penthouse (formerly, the Atlantis) on the Fallsway.

In Mr. Know-It-All, Waters writes that critics thought Pecker’s story was autobiographical, but it wasn’t. He said the story actually was inspired by the lives of photographers Diane Arbus and Nan Goldin.

As if Hampden’s Star Walk isn’t enough attention for Pecker, there’s even more news about the movie. For more than a year, a group in New York has been exploring plans to remake the movie as a musical comedy, “updated for the Instagram age.” The idea is to take the film and adapt it for the stage, just as Hairspray and Cry-Baby were.

A group led by producer Chris Fink recently held an industry reading in New York to test the script and music for the possible production. The reading was held at The Theatre Center in New York earlier this month. According to a press release issued about the project, participants included Nicholas Barasch from She Loves Me as Pecker, and Sumi Yu from Call Me Madam and as his laundromat manager girlfriend Shelley, played by Christina Ricci in the film.

Fink declined in an email to discuss how the theater adaptation might vary from the film. Waters, who wrote and directed Pecker and controls the rights to it, said the press announcement about the industry reading went out prematurely and cautioned that many more steps are needed before a musical version of Pecker becomes a reality.

“It’s way too early,” he said. “This was not supposed to be announced yet . . . I should be talking about this in a year, if it’s going to happen.”

For now, the filmmaker doesn’t have to look very far to see his name in lights, as his work is fittingly immortalized on the sidewalks of Hampden.

If you grew up in Baltimore during the 1950s, you may remember Betsy, a chimpanzee from the-then Baltimore Zoo who could paint with her fingers. Dubbed the Paintin’ Primate, Betsy was a highlight of This Is Your Zoo, a weekly program on WAAM-TV (now WJZ) whose host was the inimitable zoo director, Arthur Watson.

Seeing Betsy in her smock (and sometimes a beret) dash off painting after painting might have made you think that all apes could paint, and that you had better get on the ball and do something to keep up with them. For those long-ago, black-and-white TV days, it was a weirdly inspiring, bizarrely Baltimore story.

At least one Baltimorean remembers watching Betsy on TV and the lasting effect it had on him.

In his new book, Mr. Know-It-All, filmmaker John Waters paints Betsy as a star of the airwaves and shares his memories of her brush with greatness. He was about 12 when she made her TV debut. In a chapter entitled “Betsy,” Waters recounts her brief but colorful life, from her arrival in Baltimore from Liberia at the age of 2, to her rise to the pinnacle of the animal artist world, to her tragic death following a painful encounter with Spunky the Monkey, and the pioneering but ultimately unsuccessful surgery that failed to save her life.

As Waters tells it, Betsy was so popular with her finger painting at the zoo, now known as the Maryland Zoo in Baltimore, that its “hambone” director decided to make her a star on his local TV show, and the zoo reaped the benefits.

“After a contest on the show to select a name, Betsy made her debut and was an immediate hit,” Waters writes. “She painted on live TV. Her local publicity got so big that she had to go national. Realizing that he had a star that needed exploiting, Dr. [Arthur] Watson took Betsy on the road. Wearing a white bonnet and carrying a pink suitcase, she arrived in New York City for a round of appearances, including The Garry Moore Show on CBS and Tonight on NBC. Her work was already selling, too, raising much needed money for the zoo animals’ fund back at home.”

According to a report from the zoo’s archives, Watson was experimenting with ideas for entertaining children on his weekly show when he first put Betsy in front of an easel.

“After tasting a bit of magenta and yellow paint and chewing on a paintbrush or two, Betsy began to smear paint on paper with enthusiasm,” the zoo document says. “Her moods influenced the type of paintings produced,and her production varied from four to twelve paintings in an hour. Utilizing tempera paint on paper and a technique similar to finger-painting, Betsy also used her palms, elbows, feet, and tongue to produce paintings . . . that were compared to the works of abstract expressionist painter, Willem de Kooning.”

Watson coaxed other chimps to paint, but no one could perform like Betsy. Soon, other zoos attempted to get their animals to produce paintings, Waters writes, and in 1957 there was an international rivalry between Betsy of Baltimore and Congo the male chimp from the London Zoo, who worked with oil and even “used an actual paintbrush or two.”

Seeking to add a spark of romance to Betsy’s storyline, Waters notes, Watson fixed her up with a “public boyfriend,” but that led to her downfall. After a suitor named Dr. Thom didn’t work out, Watson used money raised from Betsy’s paintings to bring in Spunky the Monkey and made him Betsy’s sham paramour. Unfortunately, Spunky had no interest in painting (or playing the piano either, despite Watson’s best efforts.) Beyond that, he fell on Betsy one day and broke her leg, sending her into shock.

“Betsy was rushed to a human hospital and given emergency treatment including open heart surgery but, alas, she passed away,” Waters reports. “Betsy’s obituary appeared in Time magazine and one Baltimore paper in a front-page story remembered her as the Picasso of the Primates.”

Waters sums up the saga as “an artwork horror story to rival Jackson Pollack’s fatal car crash.” And yet, he says, “for a monkey who lived only nine years, Betsy certainly left her mark in art history.”

Waters uses Betsy as a starting point to write about all the other chimps, gorillas, and orangutans who became animal artists in the second half of the 1950s, which he calls “The Golden Age of Monkey Art.” (Chimps are not the same as monkeys, but both are considered primates, as are humans, according to the Jane Goodall Institute. Most monkeys have tails, while chimps and humans don’t.)

Besides Congo, who was billed as the “Cezanne of the Ape World” and who could draw circles as well as hold a brush, Waters’ list includes Achilla the Gorilla, Alexander the orangutan from the London Zoo, Sophie the gorilla from the Rotterdam Zoo, Dzeta, a pygmy chimpanzee from an animal farm in Belgium, Charles the gorilla from the Toronto Zoo, and Peter the ape from Sweden’s Boras Zoo.

But Waters keeps coming back to Betsy, the “Frida Kahlo of finger painting.” He reports that Betsy brought in $4,500 in second-hand sales of her paintings (her creations typically sold for $40 to $50 each, according to the zoo) and he believes the time is right for a Betsy revival.

Waters heard somewhere that the zoo may have a stack of unsold Betsy paintings lying around and believes now is the time for the zoo, and art collectors everywhere, to cash in. He writes that the zoo gave him a painting by Betsy for his 70th birthday—he calls it his “monkey masterpiece”—but confesses he wasn’t exactly sure how to hang it because he couldn’t tell which side was supposed to be up.

“Oddly vaginal, the work on paper strikes an uneasy balance between the cliché blue of boyhood, and the hackneyed pink of femininity,” he writes, in his best critic voice. “Yes, it is a conflicted vision—alarming and even violent in the middle, but Betsy’s unhesitating gestures, her nuanced marks and digital stabs at clarity, turn a mere finger painting into an arduous monkey version of Gustave Courbet’s scandalous ‘L’Origine du Monde.’”

Jane Ballentine, senior director of development and communications for the zoo, said there are two Betsy paintings stored away for safekeeping, and she’s unaware of any others still there. But she doesn’t deny that Betsy was a star and an inspiration to others. In fact, she says, the zoo even today has an annual “art auction” at which it sells works by animal artists, including Christmas ornaments and other items featuring markings made by penguins, snakes and ostriches.

Waters, who just turned 73, said that he wrote about Betsy “for all the obvious reasons I talk about” in the chapter: she provides a window into the art world, her paintings represent potential investments for collectors, and she was a local hero who achieved “true stardom.”

He said he hasn’t spoken about Betsy in public before, and his book is the first time he has gone into any detail about her in his writing. He keeps the painting he got from the zoo at his home in Baltimore.

“I had been living with a love of Betsy ever since I started collecting art,” he confides. “But selfishly kept her to myself so I could be her biggest fan in the privacy of my own home.”

While writing about Betsy brought back fond memories, “everything in the book brings back fond memories,” he added.

Part of the advice Waters gives in the Betsy chapter is that now is the time to buy monkey art, especially by Betsy. “There’s only so much work available,” he says. “Once a market is established, the prices will get ridiculous. Betsy’s not around to object.”

But there’s another lesson from the chapter that has nothing to do with investing in art. It’s about following your dreams and living up to your potential. Waters doesn’t come right out and say it, but watching Betsy when he was young seems to have lit a fire under him and inspired him to make his own art. It showed him the power of having a skill and turning it into a brand. If Betsy could find a calling, he seems to say, why can’t we all?

Mr. Know-It-All: The Tarnished Wisdom of a Filth Elder

John Waters (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Waters’ flair for writing and laugh-out-loud sense of humor had us flying through his “tarnished wisdom.” And what wisdom it is: Learn public speaking, “go Hollywood” if given the chance, “be willing to change everything.” Juicy anecdotes—about his fight in court for his Pecker film title or how he was quite possibly the only director who didn’t cast Brad Pitt after an audition—run alongside his thoughts on religion, politics, gay rights, drugs, and death. This collection of essays is a must for fans, but also for aspiring filmmakers who could use a little inspiration from this larger-than-life “elder.”

Intrusive Beauty

Joseph J. Capista (Ohio University Press)

Contemporary poetry rarely has such melodic cadence, as rhythmic poetry is somehow considered unsophisticated. But Joseph J. Capista doesn’t shy away from the joys of rollicking through language’s innate richness of sound and meter. In his debut collection, the winner of the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize weaves narratives about Baltimore, being a husband and father, and the elegance and wisdom of the natural world, with little gems of insight and deep reflection sparkling throughout. The Towson University professor has the ability to see beauty in
all places, and through his keen observations, he allows us to see this beauty, too.

Volunteering Untapped Fake Wedding
Feb. 23. The Baltimore Museum of Industry. 7 p.m. Prices Vary. On a Saturday night last February, John Magiros jumped in front of a crowd of dressed-to-the-nines party-goers at the Baltimore Museum of Industry and called out, “Who’s single and wants to get married tonight?” Magiros then ushered two volunteers forward, gave the “groom” a top hat and the “bride” a veil, and “married” them using Mad Lib-style wedding vows in front of hundreds of strangers. And while the wedding was fake, the mission of the party—to support the local nonprofit network Volunteering Untapped—was very real. At this year’s Black Tie Baltimore Fake Wedding on February 23, the VU leadership team including Jeremy Raichle, Teddy Davidson, Brittany Fowler, and Magiros, will cut out the obligations of attending a wedding—no presents or plus-ones required—while keeping the drinks flowing all night. “It’s all the fun of a wedding with none of the commitment,” says Magiros. “What more could you ask for?”

Grateful Dead Tribute for Kids
Feb. 2. 800 Key Hwy. 9 a.m.-11 a.m. Free-$50. Deadheads, rejoice! If you’ve been looking for a way to introduce your kids to the mother of all jam bands, you’re in luck: the American Visionary Art Museum and local radio station WTMD are hosting a Saturday morning celebration of all things Grateful Dead. Local cover act Ed Hough’s Dead Collective will perform kid-oriented favorites in the museum’s banquet hall, with plenty of snacks, drinks, and art to go around.

Jim Gaffigan
Feb. 7-8. 140 W. Mt Royal Ave. 7 p.m. $35.25-204. Whether it’s in his scene-stealing TV roles, his bestselling books, or his four Grammy-nominated comedy albums, Jim Gaffigan always manages to earn a laugh. The family-friendly comic, who launched his Quality Time tour in January, is known for finding humor in the mundane, such as doctor visits, food, and fatherhood. Get your tickets quickly—his show is almost guaranteed to sell out.

Lunar New Year Celebration
Feb. 10. 600 N. Charles St. 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Free. Across Asian cultures, the lunar new year marks the beginning of a new calendar year. To ring in the Year of the Pig, the Walters Art Museum is throwing a free, family-oriented celebration in their sprawling Mt. Vernon complex. Visitors of all ages can explore the museum’s expansive and much-lauded Arts of Asia exhibition, followed by a chance to create their own Asian-inspired works. Make sure to catch the traditional lion dance performance, which is believed to bring good luck in the new year.

Creature Feature
Feb. 12. The Senator Theatre, 5904 York Rd. 7 p.m. $15-$23. Whether you love them, hate them, or are allergic to them, there’s no denying that animals have a special connection with humans. This month, the Stoop Storytelling Series invites locals to get onstage at the Senator Theatre to share the good, bad, or the ugly about their relationships with four-legged friends (or foes). Get to the theater early to grab a pre-show cocktail and hear live music by (appropriately) Brooks Long and the Mad Dog No Good.

A Date With John Waters
Feb. 14. 124 Market Place. 8 p.m. $44-110. Perhaps no one embodies the spirit of Charm City more than hometown auteur John Waters. Fresh off of a retrospective at The Baltimore Museum of Art, the beloved director of films such as Pink Flamingos and Hairspray is making Valentine’s Day a little weirder with a monologue about his artistic influences, good taste, and sexual politics. To make date night unforgettable, filth followers can even spring for a meet and greet with the Pope of Trash himself after the show.

Max’s Belgian Beer Fest
Feb. 15-17. 737 South Broadway. 11 a.m.-2 a.m. Free. According to Lyft, Max’s Taphouse was the most visited bar in Baltimore during 2018, and for a good reason. During this annual beer fest, belly up to the bar and sample a selection of rare European pours that will join the pub’s usual 200-plus bottles and taps for the entire weekend. If you have one dubbel or tripel too many, no worries, the Fells Point favorite will be serving up Belgian-inspired snacks to soak up the suds.

Charm City Django Jazz Fest
Feb. 22-23. 3134 Eastern Ave. 8 p.m. $25-28. In celebration of this finger-plucking music genre pioneered by Belgian jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt, gypsy jazz musicians from near and far will take over Creative Alliance for two days of blazing guitar runs and jazz heat during this fourth annual jam fest. Revel in the chance to hear the likes of Ellicott City-based wunderkind Samuel Farthing, local jazz group Ultrafaux, and Philly-based accordionist Dallas Vietty and his group Passarinho. creativealliance.org.

Frozen Harbor Music Festival
Feb. 22-23. Inner Harbor, 34 Market Pl. Prices vary. While most music festivals wait until the warm weather months to host big-name acts and sold-out crowds, the Frozen Harbor Music Festival embraces the cold and parties on anyway. This year, spend the weekend show-hopping to Inner Harbor venues (think Baltimore Soundstage, Rams Head Live!, and Leinenkugel’s Beer Garden) to hear 160 regional and national acts jam out across 10 stages.

American Craft Show
Feb. 22-24. Baltimore Convention Center, 1 W Pratt St. $5-$50. Times vary. Whether you’re visiting this revered makers festival for an hour or for the entire weekend, the American Craft Show is guaranteed to have something for everyone. The three-day downtown event, which features work by artisans from near and far, hosts wares such as jewelry, ceramics, and furniture at every price point. Be sure to stop by one-of-a-kind booths like Tristan Sopp’s, where you can buy DIY folded-paper animals, and Marc Tickle’s, which features handmade kaleidoscopes.

The Baltimore Museum of Art started 2019 with one of the busiest weekends in its history—including a rare “sold out” day—as hundreds lined up to see the John Waters retrospective before it closed.

On Saturday, museum staffers were forced to deny admission to prospective patrons by mid-afternoon, after ticket sales reached capacity for the building’s galleries. The museum stayed open past its regular Saturday operating hours to accommodate the long lines of people who had reservations. Sunday was almost as busy.

The show that drew the crowds was John Waters: Indecent Exposure, an exhibit of visual art created by the Baltimore-based writer, filmmaker and visual artist.

On view since October 7, this was the first retrospective in Baltimore of Waters’ work as a visual artist, and Sunday was the last day of the show. The museum is open for free but charges an admission for certain exhibits, including the Waters retrospective. Ticket prices ranged from $5 for visitors 18 and under to $15 for adults. Not even members could gain admission if they didn’t have a reservation.

On Saturday, demand for tickets was so strong that sales were cut off around 3:30 p.m. Visitors who came to the museum after that were greeted with a sign at the reservations desk stating that the exhibit was sold out and encouraging people to make reservations for Sunday.

“Yesterday was the single busiest day that we had for this exhibit,” even surpassing opening day, said Mercedes Lopez, the museum’s visitor experience manager. In all, 1,294 people saw the show on Saturday, and 1,168 saw it on Sunday, according to the museum’s count. They came from all over Maryland, and an unusually high percentage weren’t museum members, Lopez added.

“People are definitely coming out to see John Waters,” she said. “We had a lot of people who had never been to the museum before, but who had run into John in a bar or saw his Christmas show. It’s always exciting to have first-time visitors.”

Lopez said the last BMA exhibit to have a sold-out day was the Matisse/Dieberkorn show in 2016, featuring the works of Henri Matisse and Richard Diebenkorn. For the John Waters show, the mood was more relaxed and playful, she said.

“We had a lot of unusual outfits, a lot of people dressing up. People came in beehives and as characters from his movies. That was a lot of fun to see the quirkiness of his fans.”

On Sunday, Lopez said, the museum was at capacity from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. but still had some tickets in the afternoon, when the Ravens were playing the Chargers at M&T Bank Stadium.

People standing in line around 4:30 p.m. Saturday had various reasons for waiting to visit the museum. Some said they received the tickets as gifts and that the day and time were chosen in advance. Others said they knew the show was ending and bought the tickets just before sales were cut off.

Liz Fisher said she came from Easton to see the show. “My daughter gave this to me for Christmas,” she said, adding that she is a big fan of Waters. “Better late than never.”

“We’re last-minute Larrys,” admitted Kate Clemmons, who stood at the end of the line with her husband, Brent. She also said they got the tickets as a gift and that they were celebrating an important occasion: “It’s our wedding anniversary.”

Jason Bartholomew said he and his wife Rebecca Klein were near the end of the line because “we have a 5 year old.” Bartholomew said they put off getting tickets because they figured the show “would be there forever,” then realized it was closing on January 6. He said they called for tickets around 3 p.m. on Saturday and apparently got them just before sales ended.

Francis Tucci wasn’t so lucky. She and a friend drove from Howard County to see the show and were told tickets were sold out. She said they stayed to see other exhibits at the museum, including the Cone collection and the Ebony G. Patterson tapestry exhibit in the Berman Textile Gallery.

Tucci speculated that the partial shutdown of the federal government may have contributed to the crowds, because many of the museums in Washington were closed on Saturday. “I’m thinking that because of the shutdown in D. C., a lot of people came here,” she said.

The crowds were good for business at the museum’s gift shop and restaurant Gertrude’s Chesapeake Kitchen, both of which were busy through the weekend. Many in the gift shop were buying Waters-related souvenirs, including framed prints, T-shirts, and tank tops.

Besides triggering a sell-out, the John Waters show was shaping up to be BMA exhibit with the highest attendance in 2018, according to the museum’s senior director of communications, Anne Mannix-Brown, who said the Waters show was likely to be the “highest attended” for the year, although not the highest in museum history.

Those who missed Indecent Exposure during its Baltimore run still have a chance to see it if they are willing to travel. The exhibit opens at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, on February 2 and runs through April 28.

In the 1960s, New York had counterculture artist Andy Warhol with his “Factory,” where beautiful people of all stripes came together to party, do drugs, have sex, and make art. In the ’70s, Baltimore had John Waters and his “Dreamlanders,” a ragtag group of outsiders, weirdos, and misfits who comprised the cast and crew of his subversive films. (And perhaps had sex and did drugs—hey, that’s their business.)

After all these years, it’s important to remember what a rebel Waters was in the early days. His films were designed to discomfit and shock; he wanted to eat the rich and take down the bourgeoisie. He famously scuffled with Maryland’s draconian censor board, and his movies were banned in several countries. In Baltimore, he was initially embraced only by arthouse fanatics and punks, but eventually—first with Pink Flamingos, then Polyester, and ultimately with his breakthrough hit, Hairspray—he was embraced by the mainstream.
Hairspray has become something of a cottage industry, but the original film shouldn’t be confused with the more mild-mannered (if still delightful) versions that followed. Waters’ Hairspray was a wonderful celebration of diversity and a takedown of racism, but it also had a scuzziness around the edges that the subsequent iterations lacked. (It also featured a touching and widely acclaimed performance by Waters’ dear friend the drag queen Divine, who tragically died shortly after the film debuted.)

By the time Cry Baby came around, Baltimore had already begun to commodify the kitsch of his films—selling pink flamingo lawn figurines and hairspray cans in his honor. Somehow, the notion of the “Hon”—so integral to Baltimore’s Charm City concept—became wrapped up in the Waters iconography. But in a 2008 article in USA Today, Waters swore off the word and even the Honfest. “To me, it’s used up,” he said. “The people that celebrate it are not from it. I feel that in some weird way they’re looking slightly down on it. I only celebrate something I can look up to.”

This is the most crucial aspect of Waters’ art. If you think he’s making fun of the Edie the Egg Lady, you’re missing the point. He loves these people, and he respects them, too. The world of John Waters is all-inclusive. The only people he judges are those who judge others. What could be more Baltimore than that?

Editor’s Note: This story was updated to reflect the results of the November 13 Commission for Historical and Architectural Preservation hearing.

Jesse Salazar and Tom Williams approached acclaimed street artist Gaia about a year ago to ask if he would be interested in painting the side of their Mount Vernon rowhome. But the couple couldn’t have planned a better week to finally get their three-story portrait of Baltimore-bred drag icon Divine.

An unplanned break freed up Gaia’s schedule this month, and he called Salazar and Williams to see if they wanted to pull the trigger on the ambitious private commission before he headed off to the Netherlands on October 24. They did.

The stars seemed to have aligned. The project began October 15 and, four days later, the day Divine (born Harris Glenn Milstead) would have been 73 years old, Gaia was painting. Just two miles straight north, a John Waters retrospective graces one of the Baltimore Museum of Art‘s special exhibition galleries.

“The timing is perfect and it’s strange,” Gaia says. “It’s sort of surreal that there isn’t already a monument to her in the city.”

The image chosen for the mural is from the cover of Divine’s 1984 single, “I’m So Beautiful,” and photographer Greg Gorman’s graphic style fit right in with Gaia’s aesthetic. But Salazar says the message is for those both familiar and unfamiliar with that particular track.

“We asked Gaia to create this mural as a tribute to Divine and the city’s queer history,” he says. “Our feeling was that, at a time when LGBT rights are being threatened, we hoped that beauty would inspire others to know that they, too, are beautiful, and the message that she’s sending to Baltimore I think is timely and important. For those who know Divine, it’s a celebration of her strength. And for those who don’t know her, I loved the image of this bold woman saying ‘I am beautiful.'”

The piece feels even more timely in the wake of this week’s news that the Trump administration is considering defining gender in a way that would threaten the rights of transgender and gender nonconforming people across the country.

As members of the LGBTQ community and its allies proclaim “we will not be erased,” this image has emerged in one of Baltimore’s historic “gayborhoods” to celebrate queer history, identity, and acceptance.

While Salazar says support for the mural in the neighborhood has been strong, the work has run into some trouble with the city. During the final day of painting, Gaia was approached by a city inspector who said there had been complaints about the mural. The piece was never authorized by the Commission for Historical and Architectural Preservation, which head of CHAP Eric Holcomb says must approve all exterior changes in local historic districts. Salazar is now working with the city to submit an application to keep the mural in place.

“There’s probably no other person you could paint and have it be this important, that I can think of, for that location,” Gaia says. “Whether or not the city wants to fight a monument that should exist is like, just don’t. The kind of compliments I’ve been getting, you can tell it’s really touching people.”

As it stands, the mural on East Preston Street is the only such work dedicated to Divine in the city. (Though there are constant unofficial tributes to Milstead at his gravesite in Towson.) Previous public efforts to create a monument made it through the bureaucratic hurdles only to be derailed by a lack of funding. As news of the mural has spread, support has poured in from Divine’s fans and public art supporters from Baltimore and beyond.

The image was shared multiple times by the official Divine Instagram account, and John Waters visited to pose with the mural Tuesday afternoon. Noah Brodie, CEO of Divine’s estate, sent a letter to CHAP in support of the new piece. In it he says, “It’s an inspiring message for counter-culture types, the LGBTQ community, and those affirming body positive representation. In many ways, she represents the strength of Baltimore’s character, and serves as a reminder of the city’s perseverance and authenticity. Divine is brassy, bold, and beautiful; just like Baltimore.”

The statement was echoed by Christian Larsen, associate curator of modern and contemporary art at The Met in his own letter of support. “The message your city sends of diversity, difference, acceptance and even celebration of one of your most daring and bold personalities is exactly what these dark times call for,” he wrote. “We are every day more at risk of falling prey to fear, prejudice, and discrimination against any and all communities that don’t conform to an increasingly narrow definition of normal. Baltimore is anything but normal. It dares to be different. Out of respect for all your citizens, please keep it that way.”

On November 13, CHAP met for its monthly hearing. Last on the agenda was a request from Salazar for retroactive approval of the “I’m So Beautiful” mural. In addition to the multiple letters of support and 4,200-plus Change.org petition signatures Salazar provided as evidence for why the mural should stay, Holcomb had requested two questions be answered in Salazar’s testimony: First, whether the mural could cause damage to the existing masonry, and second, whether the mural would detract from the historic Mt. Vernon streetscape.

Testimony from Sherwin-Williams scientists was read, and community members came out both in support of and in opposition to the mural. A statement from John Waters was presented by an assistant. It read, in part: “I’m kind of mystified as to the controversy and hope today’s hearing is merely a technicality…I had read in the press that the neighborhood association is concerned that this well-intentioned mural would overwhelm the historic character of the neighborhood. It seems to me that the negative national news about the crime rate in Baltimore is much more apt to overwhelm our streets than Divine, and I know it’s a crazy world out there, but like it or not, Divine is historical now, and I think most of Mount Vernon is proud of Divine’s history here. What better development in neighborhood crime watch than Divine? Looking down beautifully over the passers by on Preston Street and keeping them safe.”

The committee found itself in a catch-22 of sorts in deciding whether the mural should stay or go. On one hand it was in violation of a rule stating that historic unpainted masonry should not be painted over. On the other, a second rule states that well-adhered paint should not be removed from historic walls to avoid the risk of damage to the structure. While the mural probably would not have been approved had it been brought in front of CHAP to begin with (a situation Salazar acknowledged and apologized for in his testimony), its existence on the wall means that CHAP would now have to break another rule to take it down.

While that may seem like a major loophole, city residents shouldn’t get any bright ideas about painting their own tributes on their historic homes. Salazar testified that he did not realize that works of art were in the same category as painting the exterior of a home only to change its color, and during the course of deliberation, Commissioner Larry Gibson presented the plan that would end the nearly hour-long discussion of what to do about Divine’s vivid visage.

“I think we should keep the mural, but for none of the reasons that I’ve heard up until now,” said Gibson. “I think the fundamental reason is, and this is a one-time thing, I accept the owner’s statement that they did not know—that somehow our rules with respect for murals are ambiguous or uncertain. There’s some distinction between just painting and changing color and an artistic work of art. But going forward, there should no longer be that ambiguity.”

Those looking to put up enormous works of art in their neighborhoods won’t get as lucky as Salazar and Williams have, it seems. “The press is here. Nobody in the future can tell us they didn’t know,” Gibson said, eliciting laughs from both the commission and those gathered to testify. “This is a one off.”

After several testimonies, much deliberation, and a few moments of confusion during the vote, the retroactive approval of the “I’m So Beautiful” mural on East Preston Street was unanimously passed, to applause and a couple of whoops from the crowd.

For the next couple of decades, at least until the paint begins to fade (“a topic for future commissions,” quipped CHAP chair Thomas Liebel), Divine’s arched eyebrows will continue to peek out from the alleyway overlooking a pair of dumpsters. It would be an odd location for nearly anyone else, but for the Queen of Filth, it feels just right.

EAT

Oct. 5: The Local Oyster Anniversary Party

Mt. Vernon Marketplace, 520 Park Ave. 7 p.m. Free.

Somehow, it’s already been three years since one of the city’s best shuckin’ teams started slinging Skinny Dipper oysters and other bay-fresh seafood to hungry crowds at Mount Vernon Marketplace and events around town. This Friday, celebrate their third anniversary in typical Local Oyster fashion with pours by Union Craft Brewing, a live performance by local blues legend Ursula Ricks Project, and, of course, tons of half shells by True Chesapeake Oyster Co.

DRINK

Oct. 5-7: Maryland Fleet Week and Air Show

Locations, times, and prices vary.

Once the anchors drop, it’s time to raise a glass to our city’s nautical history and the U.S., Canadian, and British Naval ships and vessels that will occupy our waters during this week-long extravaganza. Start the Fleet Week festivities on Friday afternoon with a celebration at West Shore Park, featuring brews from local favorites like Heavy Seas, Atlas Bew Works, and Union Craft Brewing. In between behind-the-scenes tours of the docked ships and checking out the Fleet Week Festival at the Inner Harbor, take advantage of this weekend’s seafaring specials like exclusive cocktails at Wit & Wisdom and military discounts at Old Line Spirits.

SEE

Oct. 7-Jan. 6, 2019: John Waters: Indecent Exposure

The Baltimore Museum of Art, 10 Art Museum Dr. Wed.- Sun. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Free-$15.

Whether you’re a fan of his outlandish films or you’re still recovering from that infamous scene from Pink Flamingos, there’s no denying that John Waters is a living legend in the city’s arts scene. On Sunday, The Baltimore Museum of Art will unveil this first-ever retrospective of the Pope of Trash’s visual arts career, featuring more than 160 of his provocative photos, sculptures, and video and sound works from the past few decades. From black-and-white stills from his 1970 film Multiple Maniacs to a campaign button that reads “Have Sex In A Voting Booth!” take in this one-of-a-kind exhibition during its opening weekend to get a glimpse into the life and mind of one of Charm City’s most notorious characters.

HEAR

Oct. 5-6: The Afro Punk Ballet

The Peale Center, 225 N. Holliday St. $15-25.

For one weekend only, transport to a post-apocalyptic world during this Afro-futurist opera-ballet that challenges popular notions of heroism, morality, and futurism. Produced by rising local performance collective Afro House, this mythical production features soundscapes that flow from sci-fi-esque punk accents to traditional gospel, blues, and jazz sounds to convey the story of a future where the world has been charred by the heat of two suns. Accented by choral accompaniments, the show’s powerful composition takes this awe-inspiring production to a whole new level.

DO

Oct. 5: Made in Baltimore Opening

Industrial Arts Collective, 22 W. North Ave. 5-9 p.m. Free.

Since it appeared at the former Space Camp art gallery back in 2015, this pop-up shop has grown into a locally loved tradition that promotes the best of the city’s maker community. This year, the Made in Baltimore shop will kick off its five-month run by transforming Station North’s Ynot Lot into a makeshift beer garden so shoppers can sip on local brews while browsing through goods from more than 70 area vendors. Stop by on Friday afternoon to shop local and support area makers like B. Willow, Knits Soy & Metal, and Tiny Dog Press.

No one better represents Baltimore’s fringe arts scene than living icon John Waters. From putting his hometown and its off-beat characters on the big screen in Hairspray to sparking the city’s affection for kitschy plastic flamingos and drag queen Divine in Pink Flamingos, his five-decade arts career continues to this day—and his eccentricity does, too.

On October 7, the Baltimore Museum of Art will unveil John Waters: Indecent Exposure, a retrospective of his work dating back to the 1990s, featuring more than 160 photos, video clips, early films, photocopied drawings, sculptures, and assorted ephemera (like archival photos of John with Andy Warhol and the framed Joan Miró reproduction he bought at the BMA Shop when he was a child). We asked him to reflect on some of his favorites from the upcoming salon-style exhibit.

You’ve lived in Baltimore all your life, you’ve been exhibiting in the U.S. and abroad for some 20 years—why are you just now doing this massive exhibit in your hometown?
I think it’s the right time for me to come home and have a show at the Baltimore Museum [of Art]. I couldn’t have the first one there because people would’ve just said, “Oh, that’s just because he lives in Baltimore.” I had to go out in the rest of the world and build 20 years of exhibitions and museum shows and books. Now that I’ve done that, I think Baltimore is the perfect homecoming. It’s where I got my first taste for the love of how art can infuriate people.

Baltimore is so prominent in all your films. It’s not obvious to a viewer whether it’s prominent in your visual art as well. Is it?
No. It’s the only thing I do that has very little to do with Baltimore. Not completely. My studio is there. My art assistants are there. I have a piece about Mr. Ray, who was one of the most notorious hairdo lunatics on the radio in Baltimore for decades, that I idolized—and he was horrified that I liked him [laughs].

What is it about Baltimore that’s kept you here?
Everything—the sense of humor and the extreme style. Everything I wrote about, everything that informed me was always about taking what some people think is a negative thing and exaggerating it, turning it into a style, and having a sense of humor about it. Baltimoreans have always done that. I like living there now more than I ever did because it’s the only place left that has a bohemia. It’s gotten more expensive, but it’s still cheaper than anywhere else. And kids can still live there and start, you know, bohemia! And the music scene there, the people who have had national success—they stayed. They bought houses. I think that’s very, very important, to stay in Baltimore.

You see that happening with the younger generations of artists?
Yes, I do. I see musicians and artists that grew up in Baltimore didn’t leave when they got success, and students that came here decided to stay. That’s all kind of new and good. You don’t have to leave Baltimore anymore to have success. You might have to have people outside of Baltimore like [your work], but you don’t have to leave.

So getting back to your exhibit—I understand that you take photos of TV screens and rearrange them to create a new narrative.
Yes, most of the work is like that. This show is really about editing. I take images from other people’s movies and put them in a completely different context, often with other movies and scenes, and tell a story that you read from left to write. So it’s about writing and editing.

All your career has been about that, right?
Yeah, you know, I write all my movies, I write all my books. I’ve never made a movie I didn’t write. This is just telling a story in a different way—in the art world rather than in a movie or onstage when I speak. It’s about telling a story and celebrating the failure of show business that really all the movie stills would be rejected from real publicity campaigns. They show what you can’t show.

I show the tape marks that the actors have to hit to stay in focus—but I don’t show the actors or costumes. I show things that go wrong like hair that gets stuck in the gate and ruins a scene. I just show everything that could go wrong and celebrate the failure of show business and the art world, hopefully in a humorous way, because I love everything I make fun.

Well and you’ve lived it—you’ve probably experienced firsthand pretty much everything that could go wrong on set.
Yes, I have, probably [laughs]. And I’ve experienced a lot that went right, too. And sometimes when something goes wrong, it is right in the arts world once it is isolated and put in a different completely showcase what is wrong is right. Like my commercially shot movies don’t work in the art world when I use them for imagery. The worst shot ones work the best.

So you’re using images from your movies as well other filmmakers’.
Once in a while, yes, but just one second of a movie—one second that proves no movies are bad. Because there’s 24 frames a second, and somehow you can find one frame out of 24 in a 90-minute movie that’s good.

Do you truly believe that no movie is bad?
I’m saying if you have access to every frame in a movie, no movie is all bad. You can find one great frame and celebrate it—out of context, stolen, isolated, hidden, put in the wrong projector, the wrong theater, the wrong book for the wrong audience, then it’s good.

I wanted to talk about this photograph called “Divine in Ecstasy.” What were you thinking when you captured that?
I was looking for a still that I didn’t have. I wanted that still. It’s the most ludicrous part of the film [Multiple Maniacs], where Divine is attacked and raped by a transgender man and an insane woman. It’s probably is the most sacrilegious scene to ever be filmed. I never had a still because we were always worried the police were gonna come and get us. We’d been arrested for making a movie before that, Mondo Trasho, so we’d jump out, do a scene, and run! So I just put an old VHS on the TV, and I just kept shooting like a crazed fan in the dark. And then I saw it and thought, oh God—this looks even artier than I could ever imagine. So that’s how I started doing this. Stills are what everyone remember from movies. I always knew how important they were. Even when I had no budget, I had stills.

Why is this photo considered your first official visual art piece?
I never say the word “art.” When people say to me, “I’m an artist,” I secretly think, “I’ll be the judge of that.” Someone else can call me an artist; I’m not calling myself an artist. I think that is up to others and history to call you an artist. But it was my first photograph that was ever shown in an art gallery.

Well, assuming what you’re exhibiting is art, do you see your work as pop art or conceptual art or what would you classify it as?
I think it is conceptual, if I had to name it. I think it all up before I do it. and then I have to go find the images to write with, to edit with, to make that concept come through. The whole idea behind the show is, can art be funny? It’s always been witty, but can it be funny? To me, it can be. But we’ll see.

John Picks His Favorites

Beverly Hills John. 2012. Rubell Family Collection, Miami. © John Waters, Courtesy Marianne Boesky Gallery

“I always say L.A. is just one big York Road. To me, eventually everyone is gonna look the same in L.A. There’s only so many kinds of faces you can get.”

Congratulations. 2014. Collection of Brenda Richardson. © John Waters, Courtesy Marianne Boesky Gallery
“Congratulations is code. When your gallery calls you and says, ‘congratulations,’ you know that you sold something. When you’re a collector and you say, ‘I want it,’ the art dealer will say, ‘congratulations’—which to me is so ludicrous. Many galleries leave the price list out with red dots on [the pieces] when they’re sold. I told the story of the worst thing that can happen in the medium that is the best thing that can happen.”

Divine in Ecstasy. 1992. Collection of Amy and Zachary Lehman. © John Waters, Courtesy Marianne Boesky Gallery
“I wanted that still. It’s the most ludicrous part of the film [Multiple Maniacs], where Divine is attacked and raped by a transgender man and an insane woman. So I just put an old VHS on the TV, and I just kept shooting like a crazed fan in the dark. And then I saw it and thought, oh God——this looks even artier than I could ever imagine. So that’s how I started doing this. It was my first photograph that was ever shown in an art gallery.”

Loser Gift Basket. 2006. Courtesy of the Artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York. © John Waters
“I’m trying to imagine and celebrate everything that can go wrong in show business. Everybody used to give away gift baskets. If you went to the Oscars as a presenter, you’d get cars and stuff. You’d get amazing stuff. But then they started taxing you. It ruined—overnight—the gift bag business. This was my idea of what could be the worst gift basket if you lost the Oscars.”

Visual Art

MICA ArtWalk
Maryland Institute College of Art undergrad class of 2018 will showcase their work in the three-hour ArtWalk extravaganza on May 11. Expect to see art in all genres and mediums: painting, sculpture, illustration, ceramics, graphic design, film, animation screenings, and more. New this year, the event is free to the public, complete with food trucks to give the event a festival feel. “The entire campus becomes one huge art gallery,” says Erin Baynham, social media manager at MICA. This is a great way to see what these talented kids are up to, with the added bonus of meeting them face to face and buying work to take home. 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. May 11 throughout the MICA campus. Work will remain on view through May 14. 

Music

The Björk Songbook
The Evolution Contemporary Series will conclude its season on May 8 with a concert of songs by Björk, taken from her newly released 34 Scores for Piano/Organ/Harpsichord & Celeste. Baltimore artists including Outcalls, Joy Postell, and The Witches will play renditions of songs by the legendary Icelandic pop star. Judah Adashi, founder of the series, is known for breathing new life into symphonic music, and this concert is sure to be no exception. 8 p.m May 8 at An die Musik, 409 N. Charles St.

Through the Eyes of a Child
The Through the Eyes of a Child performance is inspired by the work of Clara Han, associate professor of anthropology and co-director of the Program on Racism, Immigration, and Citizenship at Johns Hopkins University, who is exploring in a new book how violence is passed down through generations of families. The concert will be presented as part of Music of Reality, a series that brings musicians and scientists/researchers together and intersperses lectures with music. Music will include pieces by Leonard Bernstein as well as contemporary composers. 7 p.m. May 4 at 1025 S. Potomac St.

Theater

Life or Theatre?
With Baltimore Annex Theater’s production of Life or Theatre?, Charlotte Salomon may very well become a household name alongside Anne Frank. The play is written and directed by Carly J. Bales (founding producing artistic director of EMP Collective) and based on the life and art of Salomon, a German-Jewish woman in Nazi-era Berlin who completed nearly 1,300 autobiographical paintings (the largest singular body of work by a Jew during the Holocaust), gave them to a friend, and was murdered shortly thereafter in Auschwitz. The play combines her intimate prose and expressionist painting with music to bring to life her story, 100 years after her birth. This is Bales’ first full-length play. Thursdays through Sundays May 24 to June 17 at Annex Theater, 219 Park Ave.

Follow No Strangers To The Fun Places
The Acme Corporation will dissect the process of art making (specifically theater) in their new play Follow No Strangers To The Fun Places, by Lola B. Pierson (creator of Baltimore’s Ten Minute Play Festival). It’s loosely based on Italo Calvino’s novel If on a winter’s night a traveler, though we’ve been told not to get too excited about that point, as the play bears little resemblance to the book. May 3 to 19 at The Great Hall at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church, 1900 St. Paul St.

SOUL The Stax Musical
Go back to the birth of soul music at Baltimore Center Stage’s production of SOUL The Stax Musical, which revives the songs of Otis Redding, Isaac Hayes, The Staple Singers, and other classic R&B stars during its world premiere. The musical tells the story of the Memphis-based Stax Records and music’s power to unite us, then and now. May 3 through June 10 at Baltimore Center Stage, 700 N. Calvert St.

Dance

Moving Walls: A Performance of Body & Sculpture
Baltimore Independent Dance Artists examines human experience in relation to architecture in its new, experimental show at The Peale Center. Dance combines with a large sculptural installation and animation for the experience, though the set alone, created by Noa Heyne, is worth a visit to the museum. 8 p.m. May 3 and 5 at The Peale Center, 225 Holliday St.

Film

Maryland Film Fest
There is much to be excited about when it comes to this year’s Maryland Film Fest in Station North. There’s Matt Porterfield’s latest, Sollers Point, starring McCaul Lombardi; 10 blocks of shorts; a screening of the film I, Olga Hepnarova, selected and introduced by John Waters; an after party in the Ynot Lot and Windup Space; and much in between. Get ready to laugh, cry, and contemplate life every which way with more than 40 feature films across all genres and cultures. Learn more about it here and here and here. May 2-6 at the Parkway Theatre and MICA.

Miscellanea

Baltimore Portrait: Artists in Conversation
As part of the VOICES speaker series at The Church of the Redeemer, Baltimore artists Amy Sherald and Stephen Towns will be in conversation with Baltimore Museum of Art director Christopher Bedford this month. Both have become Baltimore celebrities recently after receiving national attention for their work—Sherald with the unveiling of her official portrait of former first lady Michelle Obama at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, Towns with his first museum exhibition (currently on view at the BMA). 7 to 8:30 p.m. May 30 at The Church of the Redeemer, 5603 N. Charles St.

The marvelous Maryland Film Festival is back tonight (through May 6). Here’s a great chat I had with festival director Jed Dietz and filmmaker Matt Porterfield. And below are capsule reviews of a few of the titles playing at the fest, including Porterfield’s Sollers Point.

SOLLERS POINT
3.5 stars

Sollers Point might be local auteur Matt Porterfield’s most commercial film to date, while still retaining his astonishingly lived-in sense of working class Baltimore. Our hero is 26-year-old Keith (McCaul Lombardi), sweet, but not too bright, and handsome in a coiled, dirt-bag kind of way. He’s just out of Jessup and, after 9 months of house-arrest, is trying to stay clean, but forces are conspiring against him. All around, he encounters his past: disappointed loved ones and relatives, pissed off ex-girlfriends, gang-bangers who want him back in the fold. And he’s a master at self-sabotage, too, always seeming to take the wrong path when life offers him a crossroads. Lombardi plays Keith as taciturn, wary, and wounded. You sense the futility in rooting for him, but you do all the same.

WE THE ANIMALS
3 stars
 

Jeremiah Zagar’s dreamy coming of age film, based on Justin Torres’ semi-autobiographical novel, casts a hypnotic spell. In upstate New York, three young brothers are so close, they almost breathe as one. They all look alike—loose-limbed and shirtless, with matching dark-haired crew cuts—and they run free through their ramshackle house and neighborhood. All three brothers are rowdy and spirited, but the youngest, 10-year-old Jonah (Evan Rosado), is the most sensitive. He’s an artist and a worrier and he’s slowly coming to terms with his queer identity. Life at home can be volatile, as the boys’ father (Raúl Castill), while loving, has a dark temper and is prone to bouts of self-pity; their mother (Sheila Vand) yearns to escape. Throughout, Jonah cautiously observes it all, concerned for his brothers and wondering what his own future holds.
 

MADELINE’S MADELINE
3.5 stars
 

It’s hard to properly describe Josephine Decker’s Madeline Madeline. If I were to merely recount the plot—a troubled but brilliant girl gets deeply involved with a cult-like experimental theater troupe, much to the consternation of her mother—it would sound almost conventional, but it’s anything but. Instead, Decker combines dream-like imagery, improvisation, and even some elements of horror to create a thoroughly singular cinematic experience. Molly Parker, as the charismatic but exploitative director of the troupe, and Miranda July, as the overly protective mother (they are presented as unwitting doppelgangers of each other) are both wonderful. But it’s newcomer Helena Howard, as Madeline, who gives an utterly mesmerizing, star-making performance.

WOBBLE PALACE
2.5 stars
 

“They say we’re a generation of narcissists,” says Jane (Dash Nekrasova), one half of the doomed couple explored in the amusing but cringe-y Wobble Palace. “But it’s not like we have anything else besides student debt and front facing cameras.”

Jane and her boyfriend, Eugene (Eugene Kotlyarenko), are trying one last-ditch experiment to possibly save their relationship—they’re splitting up the apartment they share for the weekend (Eugene gets Saturday and Jane gets Sunday).

The film starts from the perspective of Eugene, a self-styled weirdo who wears an elaborate man bun/combover hybrid that he calls the “floating toupee.” He immediately logs onto Tinder and tries, ineptly, to romance a series of women. Eugene calls himself a nice guy, and maybe he is, but his desperation to get laid comes off as creepy.

Next we see things through the eyes of Jane, who is only marginally more appealing than her oddball beau. At least she seems to have some moderate talent as an artist—she decorated the couple’s aggressively quirky apartment (think Astroturf and baby doll heads). But she frets the whole film about whether or not she’s “basic” and is rather cruel to Eugene.

Wobble Palace, which Kotlyarenko directed and co-wrote with Nekrasova, is very much of its moment, almost to a fault. At times the film feels rather explicitly anthropological, like a treatise—albeit a funny one—on millennial narcissism in the mid-2010s. (Look for already outdated phrases like “Bernie Bro,” “cuck,” and “basic bitch”!)

Still, young audiences will recognize themselves and their friends and be amused. It’s hard not to laugh at these characters, but a little harder to care about them.   
 

SICKIES MAKING FILMS
3 stars
 
 

This stylish documentary, from local filmmaker Joe Tropea, chronicles the history of film censorship with a particularly close look at Maryland’s own censorship board, the longest-operating in the country. Of course, it was doubly ironic that Maryland, home of that infant terrible of cinema, John Waters, would have the most draconian such board, but it was kept alive by my many factors including one particularly colorful censor, Mary Avara, a true Baltimore character who made the national talk show rounds.

You’ll learn a lot watchng this film—for example, it was progressives who were the first to call for film censorship, in the name of protecting children and serving the greater good (eventually, that ground was ceded to conservatives, and in particular, the Catholic church). And you’ll see that Marylanders were largely embarrassed by the censorship board, which literally cut the naughty bits out of films all the way up until 1981. Tropea keeps things lively by deploying a combination of talking head interviews (including film historians, theater owners, politicians, and Waters himself), old film and TV footage, original illustrations, and the kind of kitschy tableaus of documents, pens, and clippings that would make Wes Anderson proud. In the end, the censorship board was shuttered due to indifference more than anything else.

“The lesson of the history of censorship is that it doesn’t work,” says former Maryland State Senator Howard Denis, who introduced the bill to abolish the censor board. “ . . . You really cannot censor art. Art will have a way of expressing itself.”

“Believe it or not, Joe and I were co-workers at the Pizza Hut in Glen Burnie,” Cindy France says in a mini-documentary that’s part of the retrospective of former Baltimore photojournalist Joe Kohl’s work at the Maryland Historical Society. “Where you’d expect to meet an artist,” she adds ironically.

Kohl, who died in 2002 at the age of 44 from leukemia, earned a degree in fine arts from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and served on the staffs of The Baltimore News-American and Baltimore Business Journal. But it is his personal and freelance efforts for a diverse number of publications—including the City Paper, Afro-American, Village Voice, Easy Rider, Catholic Review, and Mid-Atlantic Gay Life—that set his work apart.

Outside his daily journalism beat, the prolific Kohl recorded Baltimore’s alternative culture, which coincided with his own social interests and curiosities, as the Maryland Historical notes in a statement accompanying the exhibition. Those included “the city’s erotic sub communities, small venue-rock concerts, and queer night life.”

“I don’t think he was really interested in who was the prettiest,” adds Donna Sherman, another friend of Kohl’s, in the short film. “I think he was interested in personality and [people] who had some kind of crazy thing going on with them that he would love to put on to film.” 

The mostly black and white images hung in the show, titled “Unscripted Moments: The Life & Photography of Joseph Kohl” are—as Sherman suggests—spontaneous and beautiful, but in a gritty, off-kilter, blue-collar Baltimore kind of way. They also feel like surprising material for a Maryland Historical Society exhibition, given their occasionally provocative nature and document the city’s underground scene, but also that the 1980s and 1990s are now considered historical.

Joe Tropea, Maryland Historical Society curator of films and photographs, describes Kohl’s shooting of early marches for AIDS funding, protests demanding divestment from apartheid South Africa, Baltimore bar and street scenes, John Waters and Divine on the red carpet outside the Senator Theatre, the world of sex workers, BDSM play, and the underground music scene as “a time capsule from the end of the last century.”

In other words, this is not the picture-perfect world of renowned former Baltimore Sun photographer A. Aubrey Bodine.

Tropea curated “Unscripted Moments” with Linda Day Clark, a professor of Fine Arts at Coppin State University, former City Paper photo editor and award-winning photojournalist J.M. Giordano, and Josh Sisk, an award-winning arts and culture photographer.

“What emerges,” Tropea says, “is a vision of Baltimore that’s open-hearted and raw, cosmopolitan and compassionate—and a portrait of a photographer who exposed his love for the city and all its variety in every shot.” 

Later, France says in a phone interview that the show was strange for her to look at when she first saw it. “I know a lot of those photographs,” the 54-year-old says with a laugh. “I was there.

France adds that she was “warned” about Kohl when she started at Pizza Hut, that fellow employees told her Kohl took pictures of everything and often asked people to pose nude for him. “You have to realize,” she says, “Joe was a teddy bear, but he was different. First, he was a big guy. And he wore these big, wire-rim glasses, had a longish, bowl hair cut, and giant muttonchops. Nobody had muttonchops then. It’s funny, too. He did ask a lot of people to pose nude for him, but never me.”

Although his illness came about unexpectedly and his life was cut short, Kohl left behind a substantial body of work—some 55,000 photographs now in the Maryland Historical Society collection.

“[Joe] called me one day and told me he was in the hospital and was in a pretty weakened state,” France says of her old friend. “I asked him if we wanted me to come by and he said, in his Joe way, ‘That’s why I’m calling, bitch.’

“I thought I’d better go,” she says. “I went that weekend and that was the last time I talked to him.”