There was a sign I created above it that said ‘Stuck in Hampden, Hon.’” I had been decorating the façade of Café Hon since 1995, when I did an oddball sculpture of Santa Claus’s butt sticking out of a chimney. “I worked with a group of people in Hampden to cast it in Fiberglass seven years later, in the fall of 2009. “Mickey Fried, Jan Cook and I worked on it in Jan’s backyard right in Hampden,” he said. Gornowich said in an email message that his sculpture went up on Café Hon’s façade in December 2002. That made the pink flamingo a fitting symbol for a community like 1990s Hampden with its new, self-aware businesses called Café Hon and Hampden Junque. Later, they were adopted by hipsters and others who knew good taste from bad and displayed them ironically. “I don’t remember ever seeing a pink flamingo where I grew up” in Lutherville,” Waters told Levy.
#PINK FLAMINGO MOVIE#
Photo by Ed Gunts.įor years the plastic lawn ornaments were associated with tackiness and people who had little taste, such as characters in Waters’ movie who had two in front of their trailer. The sculpture is coming down because the restaurant closed on April 29 after 30 years of operation. “To this day, I’m convinced that people think it’s a movie about Florida.”Īll that remained Friday morning of the pink flamingo sculpture that hung above Café Hon’s entrance was the bird’s body. “The reason I called it ‘Pink Flamingos’ was because the movie was so outrageous, that we wanted to have a very normal title that wasn’t exploitative,” Waters explained in a 2014 interview with Emanuel Levy. June 23, it turns out, was National Pink Flamingo Day, dedicated to the plastic lawn ornament that became a pop culture icon in the 1950s and later was used by filmmaker John Waters as the innocuous title for his 1972 film.
#PINK FLAMINGO WINDOWS#
Many of the café’s contents were sold at auction, and its windows have been papered over so no one can see inside. is The Foreman Wolf Restaurant Group, whose principals haven’t said exactly what will take the place of Café Hon. The new restaurateur at 1002 West 36th St. “Just as we put it in storage, the skies opened and the angels wept,” Gornowich wrote on Facebook. I remember fondly sitting with Randall and talking about this giant Christmas decoration. “The Bird’s head, neck and legs were removed today.
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“It’s a sad day in Hampden,” Whiting wrote on Facebook yesterday. As of this morning, all that was left was the bird’s body. The sculpture is coming down because café owner Denise Whiting closed the restaurant on April 29, after 30 years of operation, and a new team is coming in with a different concept that apparently doesn’t include a giant flamingo. on Thursday, artist Randall Gornowich and others started taking down “Big Pink,” the giant pink Flamingosaurus that he designed and fabricated as a holiday decoration for the former Café Hon restaurant in Hampden nearly two decades ago. Photo courtesy of Randall Gornowich.Īround 4 a.m. It does make it unlike any other film.Artist Randall Gornowich holds the head of the pink flamingo sculpture that he and others created to grace Café Hon’s façade in December of 2002. It doesn't make Pink Flamingos a masterpiece. And I don't think YOU, the reader, or anyone other than Waters could have pulled that off. So, although the movie is so disgusting that I wish it had never been made, it is not a squalid film. Pink Flamingos has panache! It has a free-wheeling sense of daring-do that borders on innocent fun. Could YOU recognize the virtues of, let alone even find, someone like Edith Massey? I doubt it. Waters' actors had a style, no matter how bizarre, that is rarer than most depravities. And it's not just a matter of WHAT they will do, but HOW they do it. Yes, GOOD! You couldn't because, first of all, I doubt you have the same quality of acquaintances that Waters had and put into into his early movies.
Even if you - yes YOU out there - the reader, wanted to make the most disgusting movie in the world and even if you had the money and the skills that John Waters lacked in 1972, you couldn't make a film as good as he did. And then there is the primary purpose behind Pink Flamingos - to make the most disgusting, revolting movie possible, perhaps even conceivable. well, they are better than in porn flicks and even some straight-to-video movies, but, jeez, not by much. The camera work is a hair's breadth above home movies the acting and story are. Those who call it "great" or a "masterpiece" are plain wrong, they don't recognize what they are seeing. it looks a hell of a lot better when you're drunk. Having finally seen it again only recently, this time sober, I'm here to tell you. A college dorm had rented a print, and in a drunken state I've not achieved again this past quarter-century, I went to see it. I first saw Pink Flamingos in the mid 70's, back before VCRs.
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