Michael Olesker, The Examiner
2008-04-24 07:00:00.0
Current rank: Not ranked

BALTIMORE -

Somewhere in the Great Beyond, where no curse is ever uttered and no bloomer ever dropped, Mary Avara holds her head in her hands and wonders, “Where did I go wrong?” John Waters is back on Broadway — New York’s, not Fells Point’s, and poor Mary’s up there singing with the angels and no longer down here to stand in his way.

She would have tried, you know. She tried for a long time, and look where it got her. She headed the old Maryland Censor Board and made a household name out of Waters, that weird kid from Lutherville who used to battle with her over every frame of film she was trying to snip when John was just trying to titillate a few folks with his outlaw brand of humor and scatology.

And now look what’s happened. He’s got another one of his old movies, “Cry-Baby,” transformed into a musical and opening tonight in New  York, where it’ll run simultaneously with that other Waters hit, “Hairspray,” that’s been packing them in for so many years that it’s one of the longest-running shows in Broadway history.

Where, indeed, did Mary Avara go wrong?

In the old days, Mary and a couple of pals would sit there all day long, in their darkened little room at the censor board, cultivating their inhibitions like rare flowers, and they’d erase all the good parts from every movie that hit Baltimore.

“They’re doing things on that screen,” Mary would cry, “that I wouldn’t do in my bedroom.”

“Like what?” she was asked.

“Like that filth,” she replied, emerging one afternoon from a censor board showing of “Goodbye, Columbus,” where she had just snipped all frames showing Ali McGraw’s tush. “I had 11 brothers and sisters, and I never learned about any of this filth.”

She took particular glee scissoring the early Waters films. She never understood them. She didn’t understand that John was helping everybody whistle past the graveyard of our Puritan inhibitions, that he was poking fun at the very heart of American uptightness. If we laughed hard enough, we wouldn’t have to be haunted by all those damned demons.

What demons?

Why, how about those dreaded 1950s juvenile delinquents?

They wore black leather jackets with the collars up, and they had cigarettes dangling from their lower lips. The guys slicked back their hair, and many had visiting privileges at the grease pit down at the neighborhood gas station. The girls wore cha-cha heels and toreador pants.

Of course, the era’s been mined before. Heck, “Cry-Baby” is located in 1954 Baltimore, and ”Hairspray” takes place here only a decade later. And “Grease” (produced by Forest Park grad Kenny Waisman) came out of that same time frame.

But Waters remembers the endearing little details. In Baltimore, for example, we never called such kids greasers. They were known as drapes. And that’s their name in “Cry-Baby,” which starred Johnny Depp in the original movie. The Broadway show’s got to be making Mary Avara’s ghost recall all the old battles.

A year ago in New York, at a staged reading of “Cry-Baby” to get the musical off the ground, Waters, with a twinkle in his demented eye, described the show as embracing “sexual repression, wayward youth, cool juvenile delinquent music and joyous, bizarre rejects.”

You were expecting, maybe, Pat Boone?

Poor Mary Avara, gone now for nearly two decades. She was fighting with Waters back when John was making his early underground classics, such as “Hag in a Black Leather Jacket” and “Eat Your Makeup,” “Pink Flamingos” and “Female Trouble,” and “Polyester,” all that stuff that turned a big, good-natured guy named Harris Glenn Milstead into an immortal named Divine.

In the weird way of the American marketplace, Avara did exactly what she didn’t want to do. She alerted everybody about this unknown Waters kid, who might otherwise have disappeared without a trace. She made a cause out of him. She gave him a name. While John was rousing all our dormant trashy taste for a laugh, Avara was rousing every civil libertarian looking for a cause.

Suddenly, Waters’ movies weren’t trash, they were camp. Instead of fading into the local woodwork, John became an international name. Museums paid him tribute. He became an American original instead of merely an Avaran obsession.

He’s up there in the lights of New York’s Broadway once more. Just as “The Wire” begins to fade from national consciousness, here comes “Cry-Baby.” America can’t get enough of Bawlamer, even if Mary Avara’s ghost still can’t figure it out.