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John Waters has two requests for anyone attending either night of his touring Christmas show at the Aladdin Theater: Leave the blinking Christmas jewelry at home—they look like banned camera recording lights from his perspective onstage—and give him some local holiday shopping hot spots.
“I’m Christmas shopping on tour; what do I do, get people gift cards for Hudson News?” the Pope of Filth tells WW via telephone the day after Thanksgiving. This year, he spent Thanksgiving with Pat Moran, a player in his fabled Dreamlanders troupe and one of only three actresses to appear in each of his movies.
The famed bibliophile, 78, is now aware of the situation at Mother Foucault’s Bookshop, though he isn’t sure if he really will have time to shop anywhere. Waters—known for outrageous, unremorsefully filthy queer classics, including but by no means limited to Hairspray, Pink Flamingos and Serial Mom—is on the latest run of his annual Christmas tour, stopping in Portland for two nights at the Aladdin Theater on Dec. 5 and 6. Waters tours during winter holidays like Christmas and Valentine’s Day, though Thanksgiving is his favorite.
Waters writes fresh jokes and opinions each year for his legions of fans, who adore his distastefully trashy sense of humor and style. Fans this year can expect tips on how to talk dirty with just Christmas vocabulary, how to manipulate your parents into getting you the gifts you want, and fashion tips to make over the season’s best-known characters, among other pearls of wisdom.
“Santa, if he just turned his belt sideways, it would look kind of new,” Waters says. “And Jesus in swaddling clothes? Put him in Comme des Garçons rags. We’ve got to reinvent.”
New at the merch table this year is a double-sided single from the Pacific Northwest’s most famous record label, Sub Pop Records: a “Jingle Bells” cover inspired by The Singing Dogs, a ’50s novelty act made of field recordings of barking arranged like music; and “It’s a Punk Rock Christmas,” a spoken-word track of Waters’ perfectly irreverent holiday suggestions. It might seem he’s trolling, especially since the single art includes a sticker reading “Please don’t listen to this record,” but Waters insists his love of Christmas is sincere. Waters isn’t trying to dethrone Thurl Ravenscroft or Mariah Carey as the unofficial voices of Christmas, but rather to cater to one of the few communities left out of niche Christmas celebrations.
“Mariah Carey’s Christmas records I play backwards and hear Taylor Swift telling me to knock over the Christmas tree,” Waters jokes. “The punk Christmas—nobody puts them on the diversity flag or anything, so I think we should have a punk Christmas like we have Christian Christmas and all the rest. It’s a punk rock record that you play with your punk rock family every Christmas Eve and open dangerous gifts. Punks are my people, so I always love for them to be remembered at Christmas.”
For his anti-Christmas suggestions, like using sex toys as ornaments, infiltrating Santa bar crawls, and staging raunchy drag pageants, there is one off-kilter Christmas fan Waters can’t see eye to eye with: Melania Trump.
The once and future first lady’s Yuletide displays at the White House were notoriously off-putting during her husband’s first administration (who can forget the hall of menacing blood-red trees, or the bundles of barren snow-white sticks?). Waters’ opinion that former President Trump ruined bad taste hasn’t changed now that he’s headed back to D.C.
“What I said about everyone whining about Trump is, you get to whine about it for five days, then bring back the ’60s, the Weathermen, the Yippies,” Waters says. “The only problem is, the Yippies used humor for terrorism to embarrass the enemy, but you can’t embarrass Trump.”
Waters’ Sub Pop single is currently his only plan to wade into the Christmas market. It takes deep pockets to finance a home décor or kitchenware line, and the planned film adaptation of his novel Liarmouth fizzled over a lack of funds, so anyone who wants to see Waters’ face on the same Walmart shelves as Paris Hilton and Dolly Parton will have to cough up the dough. He has a plan to get Parton one step closer to EGOT status.
“Not one person dislikes Dolly Parton,” Waters says. “She is the most well-liked celebrity in the entire world. No one dislikes her, no matter your politics, your sexual orientation, poor, rich: Everyone likes Dolly Parton. If she got out of drag and played a junkie, she’d win the Oscar in one second. If she said she’d play a junkie, someone would back it. Call Ryan Murphy, he’d definitely go for it.”
SEE IT: John Waters at Aladdin Theater, 3017 SE Milwaukie Ave., 503-234-9694, aladdin-theater.com. 8 pm Thursday–Friday, Dec. 5–6, $42–$125. All ages.