Nice girls don't wear cha-cha heels
The other night some friends and I watched John Waters' 1974 classic Female Trouble. Most people find comfort in their roots, the place they came from. For me watching Divine run by seedy Baltimore row houses in her two-tone beehive hair and sequence animal print one-armed dress is familiar, it's comfortable. I'm lucky to say that I share my Towson High School diploma with both John Waters and Divine, fellow alums. Besides this, the John Waters vintage of bad taste was welcome in my house and often introduced by my dad. I remember watching Hairspray in middle school—which compared to the 70's Xrated classics seems like a Disney film— and loving the asthetic immediately.
As soon as someone got a driver's license in high school we migrated to
Fell's Point to scrounge through thrift stores and comtemplate what we would get pierced when we turned 18. Inevitably John Waters would be sitting with a friend, smoking a cigar, and selling vinyl records and ceramic figurines at a table on the pier. During sophomore year, Mr. Waters filmed Serial Mom in the halls of our high school, and all classes virtually stopped. Our faces were pressed to the windows watching Kathleen Turner's suburban mom run over a teacher, post parent-teacher conference, in her sedan.
I'm taking the "Lucky Streak" Greyhound bus to Atlantic City tomorrow for our annual family vacation at the Jersey Shore. My family moved several times when I was growing up, leaving and then returning to Baltimore, but I've spent every summer at the Jersey Shore; swimming, reading, napping, eating Jersey tomatoes and peaches and every kind of seafood, playing Hearts, and falling asleep in a room that faces the ocean on the land my great-grandparents bought. I can't wait to spend the week with a book in the sand. It's one of the most comforting rituals in my life. Comforting, just like Harris Glenn Milstead's obese Divine walking down the aisle in drag in a see-through wedding dress, no underwear, big bush exposed—It's just like a bedtime story, just like home.
As soon as someone got a driver's license in high school we migrated to
Fell's Point to scrounge through thrift stores and comtemplate what we would get pierced when we turned 18. Inevitably John Waters would be sitting with a friend, smoking a cigar, and selling vinyl records and ceramic figurines at a table on the pier. During sophomore year, Mr. Waters filmed Serial Mom in the halls of our high school, and all classes virtually stopped. Our faces were pressed to the windows watching Kathleen Turner's suburban mom run over a teacher, post parent-teacher conference, in her sedan.
I'm taking the "Lucky Streak" Greyhound bus to Atlantic City tomorrow for our annual family vacation at the Jersey Shore. My family moved several times when I was growing up, leaving and then returning to Baltimore, but I've spent every summer at the Jersey Shore; swimming, reading, napping, eating Jersey tomatoes and peaches and every kind of seafood, playing Hearts, and falling asleep in a room that faces the ocean on the land my great-grandparents bought. I can't wait to spend the week with a book in the sand. It's one of the most comforting rituals in my life. Comforting, just like Harris Glenn Milstead's obese Divine walking down the aisle in drag in a see-through wedding dress, no underwear, big bush exposed—It's just like a bedtime story, just like home.
posted by Rebecca at 10:07 AM
2 Comments:
salty balty is a special place, it is.
My favorite line from the movie..."I wouldn't suck your lousy dick if I was suffocating and there was oxygen in your balls!" said Taffy to her stepfather. Have a fun week on the Shore!
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