"Why John Waters?"

Filmmaker Lynda L. Hinkle confesses her obsession!

My friend asked me this question but what he really meant was, "Why are you so obsessed with this quirky little gay man with a funny moustache?"

There are times that the backstory is even better than what you see on the screen with movies. With John Waters that is so often true, particularly of his earlier films. I think of him tromping around in the fields outside Baltimore filming Pink Flamingos, high as a kite (He likes to say "People see my older works and say we must have been on drugs. Well we WERE") and yet solidly focused on this consuming passion for celluloid that almost reaches the heights depicted in the character of Cecil B.Demented, his madman director in the movie of that name.

I can identify. The first time I held my camera I knew it was love. I knew it was all over for me. Passion like none other.

And somehow, John Waters turned this lustful perversion we share into a lifestyle. Selling to a shocked and stunned audience his occasionally grotesque and always unsettling view of the world, John Waters was able to pay bills and devote his life to this Divine madness (pun intended). And this is, of course, every pervert's dream. To strike it rich doing what they would do hidden in closets anyway.

So I paid a ridiculous amount of money and traveled up to Boston, a 6 hour trip in my rented Chevy Blazer with a slightly mocking transmission drone. I waited in the scathing line in front of Brookline Booksmith to go down into the basement where apparently they keep only the truest perverts and sit in the presence of a man I had absolutely nothing witty to say to whatsoever. If we were alone on an elevator I still could not have managed to stammer out the "I LOVE YOU, MAN" that formed like a ball of grease in my arteries and blocked the pumping of my heart. But, I did get photographs.

Why John Waters? Somehow this man has managed to be who he is and still succeed in a cynical, cynical business. I want to slip through the cracks like that. I want to be the cultural anomaly I was born to be, just as he was.

Awwwww... forget it. I LOVE HIM, MAN!!!!!

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