Maybe it’s precisely because I don’t much like dinner parties that I spend so much time fantasizing about dream dinner party guests and ideal seating arrangements. At any rate, one of my perfect scenarios involves being seated between Dorothy Parker and John Waters, and Michael Ehrhardt’s recent interview (in The Gay and Lesbian Review), with the man William Burroughs dubbed the “Pope of Trash,” did nothing but reinforce Waters’ standing on the A-list.
I can take or leave Waters’ films (Hairspray, Pink Flamingos, Polyester), but every interview I’ve encountered with the man has been a marvel, and his new memoir, Role Models, is one of the most entertaining books of the year.
Waters’ back-and-forth with Ehrhardt is a smart, snappy, free-range delight from start to finish.
Read the whole thing, but here are a few highlights:
I really hate people who go on an airplane in sloppy jogging outfits. That’s a major offense today. And I can’t abide people who bore you by talking about their food allergies and special diets, like vegetarians. Of course, I wouldn’t go so far as murdering them.
[In Provincetown] I even lived in this wonderful tree fort, with a rope ladder and small apartments. Some crazy person constructed it; it had no roof, so if it rained you got soaked to the bone. It was owned by Prescott Townsend….He was an early gay liberationist who would ride around on a small motorcycle on the beaches and hand out gay liberation material to people. Mink Stole was going to marry him. Prescott would let you live in his tree fort if he liked you, and you got free hot dogs.
I’m sometimes surprised to have made it this far. I guess now I can attract, uh, guys who are into gerontophilia–which is a really ugly word. But, old chickens make the best soup! I prefer being a “filth elder.”
And, finally, here’s an atonement opportunity for somebody in Hollywood (hello, criminals who financed Hot Tub Time Machine):
I do have a movie called Fruitcake ready to go, but it’s fallen through a couple of times. It’s a children’s Christmas adventure film about a family that steals meat. They’re door-to-door meat salesmen, which we have in Baltimore, who knock on your door and say, “Meatman!” You say, “I want two porterhouse steaks and a pound of ground beef.” And then they shoplift it for you, bring it back, and you pay half of what’s on the label. The young son, named Fruitcake, runs away from home during the holidays, after he and his parents are busted for shoplifting food. He meets up with a runaway girl, who was raised by a gay couple and is searching for her birth mother. Johnny Knoxville and Parker Posey would have starred in it. The people who paid me to write it liked it, but now the production company is no longer there.
Source:The Gay and Lesbian Review
