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.