John Waters
In what still feels like a surreal fever dream, I recently had the opportunity to procure a brief phone chat with the “Pope of Trash” himself, the legendary John Waters.
Like a thin, elegantly attired Kris Kringle possessing a pencil mustache, the iconic filmmaker and author travels across the nation each holiday season, spreading his own very special variety of debaucherous Xmas cheer. For decades, the one-man show A John Waters Christmas has been a staple for those seeking a salacious counterpoint to the average sanitized family friendly Christmas shows, and it returns to the Diana Wortham Theatre on Tuesday, Dec. 20.
Unlike the majority of standard annual holiday programs, Waters aims to keep it fresh for his adoring fans, while also keeping his brain active.
“Every year, I rewrite a whole different thing,” he says. “I’ve finished writing it this morning. I have a little over two weeks to learn it, because I don’t use any notes and it’s a 70-minute monologue.”
He further elaborates, “I do it to just be in touch with everybody. I’ve always been in show business, so it’s just a different way to tell stories. I write books, I do these shows, I make movies. Everything I do is about telling a story and writing something. So it’s just another way to tell stories. And it’s my anti-Alzheimer’s exercise. I write two shows every year. The other show I do, which is now called End of the World and the Christmas show, which every year, if you come, it’s completely different. So that, I think, is a challenge.”
For Waters, it’s not just about getting on stage and telling stories. He undoubtedly enjoys traveling and meeting new people — in his 2015 book Carsick, he wrote of his wild adventures hitchhiking across the U.S., meeting and conversing with all sorts of characters — as long as they’re not dressed slovenly.
“Why are people nude on airplanes?” exclaims Waters. “Why do grown men have shorts on in December?”
Fortunately, when I inquired about the fashion choices of his audiences, he had nothing but positive things to say: “Everybody gets dressed and everybody dresses to please when they come to my shows. There’s no slobs in my audience.”
That being said, you may want to leave your Christmas corsages at home. Otherwise, Waters may mistakenly chastise you. “I see these old things blinking and I think somebody’s videotaping, and it makes me crazy,” he says.
Because it’s impossible to imagine a John Waters show without a bit of perverted humor, I asked about what kind of debauchery showgoers can expect. He rebutted, “Well, hopefully I’ll give debauchery that you wouldn’t expect. That’s why it will work and startle you, and give you a better time. If you could expect it, it would be old hat. So, that’s why, every year, I rewrite it to try to come up with new bags of perversity for you as we come dashing through the snow.”
If anyone knows how to produce new lewd stories to make uptight prudes gasp, it’s the man behind the scandalous “Trash Trilogy” of Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble, and Desperate Living. But for as much as Waters has embraced “bad taste,” he’s always done it the right way.
“It’s a thin line of what we can do,” he says. “I think I weirdly am politically correct, but I make fun of myself and the rules that my audience lives by just as much of the rules that they have fled.”
Music has played a major role in his films, and though A John Waters Christmas is not a musical act, he does sing “a filthy Christmas carol.” And, as Waters reveals, “I think they usually play my Christmas album when everybody’s coming in.”
His 2004 LP, also called A John Waters Christmas, is a delightfully oddball compilation of some of his personal favorite holiday tunes that intentionally excludes one specific Christmas standard. “I really hate the ‘Little Drummer Boy,’” he says. “Every time I hear that song, my blood turns to ice.”
Speaking of turning blood to ice, I asked Waters about his memories of Christmas mass, growing up as a Roman Catholic. Rightfully, he hated it, recalling receiving beatings from his homophobic teachers while attending Catholic high school. But as an adult, he got to have a more pleasant holiday service experience.
“We all went once. Divine was in full drag at midnight mass,” he says. “Children were the ones that figured it out. Adults did not. He passed. He wasn’t [as outrageously made-up] as a Divine character. It was more how he looked in Multiple Maniacs, which was still bizarre. But the children recognized immediately that something was wrong. Adults did not.”
(If only they had shown up at one of the Christmas masses I attended as a child, perhaps time would not have felt as though it was standing still.)
With Waters about to hit the road, has he started decorating his house for the season?
“No, I haven’t. I’m not going to have my Christmas party again. I can’t have 200 people in my house. A lot of people got COVID recently. So, no, I’m not,” he says. “I decorate a little bit. The electric chair [from the film Female Trouble] I do decorate every year a little bit, but not the whole house how I did when I had the party. And also, I’m doing 20 cities this year. It’s the biggest tour I’ve ever had. So by the time I get home, the last thing I’m going to feel like doing is decorating.”
The beloved purveyor of sleaze will be back in Asheville before you know it. So throw your blinking corsage in the trash, put on your best cha-cha heels, and spend the night getting a little naughty.
The rotund bearded man with the red coat won’t mind. He’s too busy taking pictures with children on his lap.
IF YOU GO
What: A John Waters Christmas
When: Tuesday, Dec. 20, 8 p.m.
Where: Diana Wortham Theatre, 18 Biltmore Ave., worthamarts.org
Tickets: $50-$125
(Photos by Greg Gorman)