Man, how I LOVE this Pink Flamingos nesting doll set by BoBo Babushka. The details are impeccable and really well done. From what I understand, BoBo Babushka isn’t making this particular set currently, but since there’s been some interest on the Internet BoBo Babushka is considering retailing them again.
As for the Polyester and Female Trouble sets, it appears they are available. If you’re interested, you can ask about pricing here at BoBo Babushka’s website.
Sad news from Improbable Research: Donald Featherstone, the man behind the iconic pink flamingo lawn ornament, has died at age 79.
Don created the flamingo when he was freshly graduated from art school, and newly employed at a plastics factory. One of his first assignments was to create three-dimensional plastic lawn ornaments (up to that time, most plastic lawn ornaments were more or less flat). The flamingo was one of his earliest efforts for the factory.
Eventually he became president of the company. After Don retired, dire things were done, by his successor, to the flamingo, triggering a worldwide protest, which eventually led to a more or less happy rallying of the forces of Good, and a restoration of the plastic pink flamingo’s status. In 2011, the flamingo attained new heights, when the Disney movie Gnomeo and Juliet featured a plastic pink lawn ornament named “Featherstone”.
Featherstone’s lawn sculptures have become beloved badges of American suburban kitsch, adored ironically by probably about as many people as enjoy them sincerely. And of course, their ticky-tacky ubiquity inspired the title of John Waters’ breakthrough film Pink Flamingos, which has nothing to do with the ornaments. Waters discussed the connection in an interview with Smithsonian.com:
“The reason I called it Pink Flamingos was because the movie was so outrageous that we wanted to have a very normal title that wasn’t exploitative,” Waters says. “To this day, I’m convinced that people think it’s a movie about Florida.” Waters enjoyed the plastic knickknack’s earnest air: Though his own stylish mom might have disapproved, the day-glo wading birds were, back then, a straightforward attempt at working-class neighborhood beautification. “The only people who had them had them for real, without irony,” Waters says. “My movie wrecked that.” Forty years later, the sculptures have become unlikely fixtures of a certain kind of high-end sensibility, a shorthand for tongue-in-cheek tackiness.
The great outré film director John Waters will be screening his new movie Kiddie Flamingos in January, which reportedly depicts children performing a table read of his signature film, the utterly perverse midnight movie classic Pink Flamingos. This is Waters’ first new filmed work since 2004’s gleefully oversexed A Dirty Shame. Per ArtNews:
Called Kiddie Flamingos, the video depicts a table read of Waters’ 1972 film Pink Flamingos, which is as full of any kind of obscenity and depravity that one would hope to imagine–only here it’s been recast as a children’s movie, with child actors and all the X-Rated content “defanged and desexualized,” according to the gallery, which also calls this G-rated version “more perverse than the original.”
I am dying to know how a script as unabashedly raunchy as Pink Flamingos’ could possibly be bowdlerized into kid-safeness while leaving ANY of its plot intact. The film depicts a sexual act with a chicken, mother-son incest, murder, a singing butthole, the kidnapping and confinement of women for forced breeding, and, probably most infamously, the actual consumption of dog shit on camera. Screenings will be held at NYC’s Marianne Boesky Gallery, on W 24th St in Chelsea, as part of Waters’ exhibit “Beverly Hills John,” which is scheduled to run from January 9 - February 14, 2015.
Enjoy the original theatrical trailer for Pink Flamingos. As Waters himself points out in its brief introduction, it’s a montage of audience reactions, and no actual scenes from the film are shown!
Rock and Roll taught John Waters how to annoy his parents, but it was the nuns from his local church, who inadvertently encouraged his interest in cheap, exploitation films:
‘The first thing I can remember rebelling about really, was when I was about 8-years-old and every Sunday we’d go to church. Once a year they’d read us this pledge that we had to take for the Legion of Decency, which was the Catholic Church rating the movies—what you could see and what you couldn’t—and the condemned ones were the ones they’d tell us you’d go to Hell if you saw these movies.
Well, I remember refusing to do this pledge and my mother was kind of shocked, but I was just a child, and she didn’t make a big deal out of it. And on Sundays, the nuns would read us this list, with this voice like the Devil, and you know, seeing this nun stand there saying, “Love Is My Profession, Mom and Dad, The Naked Night.” I thought “What are these movies?” I’d never heard of them—they didn’t play at my neighborhood, believe me—but I would go and see them, or read about them, and clip the little list and keep a record of all these condemned movies. The Mom and Dad poster is hanging right in my hall—it’s still that much of an influence. But it made me want to see these movies I’d never, ever heard of. So, in fact they encouraged me, [the nuns] encouraged my interest, without ever knowing it completely.’
Growing Up With John Waters is a fabulous Channel 4 documentary from 1993, where the notorious director of Pink Flamingos, Multiple Maniacs, Female Trouble and Hairspray talks about the childhood events that shaped his life.
Babs Johnson and Edie The Egg Lady get psychedelicized.
Yellow matter custard, dripping from a dead dog’s eye.
Crabalocker fishwife, pornographic priestess,
Boy, you been a naughty girl you let your knickers down.
I am the eggman, they are the eggmen.
I am the walrus, goo goo g’joob.”
Mr. Vader: “Do you believe in God?”
Babs Johnson: “I AM GOD!”
What with John Waters seemingly everywhere these days (Salon, the NYT, Fresh Air) as he promotes his new book, Role Models, I thought it’d be a fine time to revisit one of his former film muses, Edith Massey.
Watching those three films growing up (and watching them, and watching them), Massey always struck me as being infinitely stranger than larger-than-life drag queen, Divine. Maybe it was because I somehow grasped that “drag” was, by definition, “performative,” and thus safer than the whacked-out maternalism that Massey so artlessly channeled. In fact, whereas Divine’s acting method might be described as quotation-marks-within-quotation-marks, Massey seemingly acted without the cushion of any marks whatsoever—quotation or otherwise.
Massey’s life after Waters was perhaps no odder than her life before it, and its trajectory has an arc straight out of Dickens: from orphanage to reform school, from freight train rider to brothel madam, and then, as these things sometimes go, to Hollywood.
Some of this ground is covered in the ‘74 documentary on her life: Love Letter To Edie (you can watch a clip from that film here). The below interview from the early 80’s is also amusing:
Of course, no Massey entry would be complete without the infamous “Egg Man” moment from Pink Flamingos. That follows below:
After a battle with cancer and diabetes, Massey passed away in Venice, California, in 1984. That was 2 years after Massey and her band, called, naturally, Edie and the Eggs, released the below Rodney on the Roq staple, Punks, Get Off The Grass:
