Oakland club hosts birthday celebration for famed director John Waters
Thee Stork Club in Oakland celebrates the birthday of pencil-mustached film director, author and revered trash-culture icon John Waters for a sold-out performance Thursday night featuring '80s hitmaker Josie Cotton.
Something of a Bay Area institution despite his continuing connection with his hometown of Baltimore, Maryland -- Waters maintains an apartment in San Francisco and has been delivering hilarious, off-color band introductions at the annual Mosswood Meltdown punk festivals for years -- Waters has made the region a regular stop for his speaking engagements and book tours.
Expelled from NYU where he was studying film in the 1960s, Waters rose to notoriety thanks to his string of '70s campy midnight movies including Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble and Desperate Living. Making up what the director termed his "Trash Trilogy," the films shredded the boundaries of conventional propriety and movie censorship with outrageous dialog and action as well as establishing drag queen Divine -- Waters' childhood friend and muse, Harris Glenn Milstead -- as an actor and cult figure.
Waters would eventually go on to more mainstream success with his later films like Hairspray (which inspired the Broadway musical and movie adaptation), the Johnny Depp film Cry-Baby and the scathing satire Serial Mom, but he has remained an icon of trash culture between his b-movie appearances, books and This Filthy World is a one-man stage show exploring his artistic origins. Though he has not directed a new film since he made A Dirty Shame in 2004, Waters has found other creative outlets.
Waters first started publishing books related to his films and collecting stories and essays written for magazines in the 1980s and has ramped up his writing over the past decade, including the travelogue "Carsick: John Waters Hitchhikes Across America" the memoir/essay collection "Mr. Know-It-All: The Tarnished Wisdon of a Filth Elder," and his first novel, "Liarmouth...A Feel Bad Romance" last year. Waters has also extensively explored visual arts with mixed media and manipulated photo exhibits that by his own admission aim to inspire disgust with the viewer. In 2023, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles staged an exhibition of costumes, props, scripts, drawings, correspondence, photography and other oddball ephemera related John Waters' filmography.
Last November, the longtime champion of Christmas who curated a holiday compilation of bizarre and kitschy seasonal songs that was released almost 20 years ago brought the latest edition of his onstage Christmas spectacular to the Great American Music Hall. Waters delivered a hilariously raunchy, rapid-fire set of stand-up that featured plenty of yuletide material, but also covered a wide range of topics and subversive social commentary.
For this birthday party hosted by Thee Stork and Mosswood Meltdown organizers Total Trash Productions, Waters will offer up his caustic observations and comedy to the gathered crowd as well as participating in a Q&A session after a set by LA new-wave favorite Josie Cotton, who is best known for her hits "Johnny Are You Queer?" and "He Could Be the One" that were featured in the film Valley Girl. Cotton was one of the featured acts at the Halloween Meltdown in Mosswood Park in 2022. Those fans who scored sold-out VIP tickets will get early entry an hour before the doors are opened to the public in addition to getting treated to a group therapy session with Waters and a complimentary dirty martini.
John Waters Birthday Bash with Josie Cotton
Thursday, March 28, 8 p.m. $69 (VIP tickets sold out)
Thee Stork Club