The MagazineMondo BaltoWho and what’s to blame for John Waters.Oct 18, 2010, Vol. 16, No. 05
• By SUSIE POWELL CURRIE
 Role Models  by John Waters If, as a 10-year-old, you fantasize about your real parents being the Wicked Witch of the West and Captain Hook, you are probably not headed for a career in social work or nursing. If the year were 1956, and you lived in a tony Baltimore suburb, you might be John Waters. “For [Patty] McCormack, The Bad Seed was a role; for me, it was a lifestyle,” he writes. Back when I kept up with Charm City culture as an editor at Baltimore magazine, I dutifully rented the notorious director’s Pink Flamingos. And Hairspray. I even saw Serial Mom in the theater. None, I must confess, left me wanting more—although, having been raised in the South, I kind of identified with Kathleen Turner’s white-shoes-after-Labor-Day-setting-off-homicidal-rage thing. (However, in my day, that transgression would have meant social suicide, not an actual corpse.) Waters and I went our separate ways when I got a job, then a husband and children, in Washington. But then, this past spring, I ran across a compelling interview he conducted with a serial child-killer who, I had recently learned, grew up just down the street from our current home. More recently, on the other side of the notepad, he was given a chance to name the greatest influences on his life and work—and his first choice was St. Catherine of Siena, who happens to be our firstborn’s patron saint. So I was game for giving this present volume a try, if only to see what strange company St. Catherine was keeping in there. To read more, you must be a Weekly Standard Subscriber We're Sorry,
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