Extreme fandom is not always a bad thing. It led San Francisco drag impresario Peaches Christ to invite cult film star Mink Stole to a screening of "Desperate Living," and so began a decades-long friendship and creative partnership.
"I was doing my Midnight Mass movie series in San Francisco," Peaches Christ recalled. "That whole thing was me as a hostess staging elaborate drag pre-shows, celebrating the movies that we love in the form of sketch comedy and contests. Eventually, I decided to see if I could bring an actual icon, someone I idolized, to Midnight Mass. Back in 2000, I invited the legendary cult film actor Mink Stole to come up and attend Midnight Mass, and she did. And for the next almost 25 years now, we've been doing shows on and off together."
Currently, they are touring with "Idol Worship: An Evening with Mink Stole and Peaches Christ." This Sunday, they will bring the cabaret show to Diversionary Theatre before heading off to Texas in April.
"We basically treat people as though they're visiting us in our living room," Mink Stole explained. "There is no fourth wall. We speak to each other. We're speaking to the audience. It's very casual. It's not scripted. We show film clips. We talk about the evolution of our friendship and how we got to know each other, how I got to know John (Waters) and how that started, but then how Peaches and I got to know each other and our work together. It just evolved into a mutual little love fest."
That love fest extends to John Waters, the iconoclastic, independent Baltimore filmmaker who gleefully lobbed incendiary Molotov cocktails into the American culture war in the form of movies like "Pink Flamingos," "Multiple Maniacs" and "Desperate Living." Those films changed Peaches' life.
"I can speak to the fandom, which is part of the theme of our show," Peaches said. "The kernel of all of this started as a kid who was growing up a black sheep in Maryland, going to Catholic school, queer and weird and feeling like I didn't fit in. And it truly changed my view of the world and my entire life trajectory when I discovered Mink and John and Divine, and who they were and what they were doing. The fact that it was in my backyard as a kid blew my mind because Hollywood was a million miles away for me. I didn't think there was anything cool going on in Maryland, let alone the most punk-rock filmmaking I'd ever experienced. As a fan, I think what it comes down to is the transgressive, unapologetically wild way in which these people were making these movies that has stood the test of time. They are still shocking to a lot of people."
Mink also felt like she did not fit in.
"I was also a black sheep in my family growing up Catholic," Mink recalled. "So the films were very liberating for me as well. In the making of them, I was feeling very liberated, but I had no idea, no conception at all that anyone else would feel that, that the people watching them would respond in the way that they did. I love it. It's incredibly gratifying. It's thrilling and humbling that things that we did almost 60 years ago, people still care about them. It's really astonishing to me."
Waters' films remain popular with cult fans because they were always on the side of the weirdos and it frequently engaged in a kind of joyous obscenity that was both shocking and hilarious.
"It's this reflection on society," Peaches added. "A lot of the reflection is about how freakish normal people are. And I think that we, the 'weirdos' of the world, appreciate, one, that it's not mean, and two, that the sexual representation is about how absurd sex is, how funny sex is. And so the sexual shock value of it is in its absurdity in many ways. And there is a joyfulness to all that."
And that humor and lack of meanness extends to the show.
"Our show is very friendly, and we do not discuss politics in the show," Mink said. "We are an escape from that. And yet, even while we're escaping from it, we are fighting against it because we are hoping to keep people together in our community."
Peaches has felt the very real consequences of drag coming under attack.
"I was booked to do a show at the Kennedy Center," Peaches said. "I was super excited, and it was a done deal, and I was going to go to Maryland. I was born in D.C. and to think that I would ever hit the stage at the Kennedy Center was a dream come true for this kid. Of course, that's been taken away, and we know why. And so I think it's more important that we keep going. I'm not going to roll over and stop doing shows. Laughter is healing. We have to continue to get together and laugh. I mean, we need to go out and dance at night, and we need to by day show up and stand up for ourselves and our friends and our loved ones."
Mink agreed.
"There's a wonderful thing about people coming together and laughing together and enjoying themselves together in a room with other people who are laughing with them, who are enjoying themselves with them, that sense of community," Mink said. "We cannot let them take all the joy out of our world. They win if that happens."
San Diego audiences are embracing that message and only one ticket was left Thursday morning for the Sunday show.
