The secular leftists at The Washington Post just adore making fun of Christmas and the annoying conservative relatives you have to encounter. One way they demonstrate this is by promoting radical gay filmmaker John Waters – best known for the movie Hairspray (1988, largely cleaned up by Hollywood as an adapted Broadway musical in 2007) – and his one-man holiday stage show, “A John Waters Christmas.”
In the Post’s Express tabloid, Sadie Dingfelder touted how Waters has presented his show in more than 200 times in cities across the U.S. – addressing such pressing questions as “Is Prancer the only gay reindeer?” and “What unsafe toys should I buy for my child?” She introduced an interview with attitude: “We talked to Waters, 71, about crackheads, nudity, curses, electric chairs and other holiday traditions.”
The Post asked if the show is a bit of a “takedown” of Christmas, and Waters replied it’s “not a takedown, but it is self-help for people that hate it.”
The headline in the "Weekend Pass" section of the Express was “Did this man just lick your chair?” That’s because Waters joked that he believes in a “Christmas curse” on the conservative relatives. When they leave the room, you lick their chair:
POST: What advice do you have for people who are visiting conservative relatives for Christmas?
JOHN WATERS: If you want to change someone’s politics, there is a Christmas curse I believe in. The way it works is, when a relative leaves the room, you run over and lick their chair. And then when they come in and sit back down, they might soften politically. You just can’t get caught doing it.
What's with the licking? It sounds a little like gay leftist Dan Savage hating Gary Bauer so much when Bauer ran for president in 1999 that he licked the doorknob to his hotel room when he had a cold, hoping he would infect Bauer.
Waters promotes his show by being outrageous and cartoonish. When asked about his Christmas decorations, he replied: “I have very insane Christmas decorations: I have a Unabomber birdhouse; I decorate the electric chair that [drag queen] Divine got fried in in Female Trouble, my movie; I have Christmas balls with ugly pictures of relatives.”
And what about caroling? “No, but I always wanted to. I never took crack, but I want to so I can go out with crackhead Christmas carolers and knock on doors and yell “Jingle Bells” really fast, just to see their faces.”
Waters isn’t always this fun-loving. In 2012, Noel Sheppard reported for us on how he fully endorsed then-New York mayor Michael Bloomberg’s regulations on soda sizes on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher: “I’m for it, I know what he means. But technically, how about all you can eat restaurants? They’re obscene to me. I don’t get how they’re legal.”
On the other hand, Waters admitted that he used to smoke five packs of cigarettes a day despite them being “the only thing the government ever told you was true – they kill you.”
