Peaches Christ and Mink Stole Talk Idol Worship

Filmmaker, podcaster (co-host of the fabulous Midnight Mass podcast), and drag icon Peaches Christ is bringing cult film legend Mink Stole to a theater near you with an intimate, revelatory, side-splitting, and heartfelt cabaret show called Idol Worship. The 6-city tour kicks off in San Francisco with two sold-out shows on February 10th, and ends in Washington, D.C. on February 20 – with possibly more dates to come.

If you’re a fan of John Waters, Divine, drag history, or cult movies, you won’t want to miss this one-of-a-kind event. Join Mink & Peaches for an evening of storytelling – including tales of John Waters, Divine, drag history, and cult movies – film clips, and live songs in the wildly entertaining and uncensored event, which is guaranteed to be as hilarious as it is revealing.

An original Dreamlander—the term for John Waters’ cast and crew regulars across his 50+ years as a filmmaker—Mink Stole has co-starred in every single Waters film dating back to his notorious 1967 short Roman Candles and the iconic Pink Flamingos, in addition to such cult favorites as But I’m a Cheerleader, Gregg Araki’s Splendor (1999), and Julie Klausner’s series Difficult People.  

Mink and Peaches have been close friends for over two decades, starting when Peaches invited Mink to be a special guest at her renowned “Midnight Mass” series tribute to the John Waters epic Desperate Living in 2001. Since then, Mink has appeared in several Peaches productions, including an unforgettable role opposite star Natasha Lyonne in Peaches’ writing/directing feature film debut (as Joshua Grannell), All About Evil.  

We had the chance to talk to Peaches and Mink about the tour, the John Waters exhibit at the Academy Museum, and queer film in general in our exclusive interview.

I know that you both go way back, with Mink appearing in Midnight Mass shows and you both worked on All About Evil, like, how did this Idol Worship tour come about? 

Mink: I blame Joshua.

Peaches: It all started back when I began Midnight Mass in 1998. I was a young drag queen who was doing a midnight movie series. Obviously, growing up in Maryland and discovering John Waters and Divine and Mink and Edith Massey and all of those people at a young age was completely transformative.

In my mind, Mink Stole to me is Elizabeth Taylor. I was obsessed. I grew up screaming all those lines and these people really changed my life. So, when I sent a letter to her publicist at the time – back in 2000 – and invited her to come to our little midnight movie screening in San Francisco, I couldn’t believe that she accepted the invitation and then came and then as we did the show and of course my job is to put on a big spectacle of a show honoring this icon in an evening of queer worship. It was clear that it meant something to Mink and that she and I had chemistry and that we could be friends.

You know, I’ve never stopped being a fan. I will never stop being a fan of any of these people. But Mink was the first to invite me into her life. And so, we did a series of shows for many years until it became obvious, especially because of Mink’s music and her album, that we could do a show without a movie screening which then opened us up to being able to create a cabaret show like this one.

What can fans expect at these shows?

Mink: Well, it’s a conversation. I mean, it’s not really a cabaret show in that we do sing, but we do duets and we do also do individual songs, but there will be film clips and then there will be discussion of the films from my perspective as having been in them rather than a discussion of their value as cultural phenomenon. We know our outline, but we never really know exactly where it’s going to go. We know, okay, well, the song comes in here and we do this here, but the conversation flows very freely.

And often, you know, things will happen that we don’t expect, things will come up that we don’t expect, and memories will be triggered that we haven’t thought of. It’s just it’s basically an evening with us, where we entertain the audience but there’s no fourth wall. It’s not scripted. It’s within a structure but it’s very free form. It’s not just we get up there and we ramble, it’s a little tighter than that… it’s actually a lot tighter but it’s fun. It’s just an evening with two people who really like each other and really want to talk to each other. And of course, it’s all about me. (Laughs) No, it’s about us.  

Now, you had both worked together on All About Evil. What was it like for you both working on that film?  

Mink: There are few people in the world that I trust as much as I trust Joshua, and he got my trust that very first night that I came up to be on Midnight Mass. He absolutely took such good care of me. And in all of our dealings after that, I was always treated really well. I’m not talking that I was feted, but I was treated with respect and courtesy and things that he said would be done were done. You know, this is not always the case. [Peaches] always delivered more than he promised. So, when he asked me to do All About Evil, I said yes before I ever read the script…I maybe should have read the script. (Laughs)

You know, it was San Francisco. It was cold. The hard part for me was when my mouth gets sewn shut – when Natasha Lyonne sews my mouth shut – which I have to say she actually did. I mean, there was a prosthetic film across my face, across my mouth, but she did actually take a needle and thread and sew me up. She never hurt me. She really did a great job of it, but then for, I don’t know how long a period of time, I could not speak – and you have no idea how hard that is. I just could not, because if I had spoken, I would have broken the stitches.  

Peaches: And, this is actually going to be part of the Idol Worship show that we do. I found recently going through old photos a behind the scenes snapshot of Mink being supported by me where I’m basically – because she was tied up and on that floor of this attic and her mouth was sewn shut – you know, she was getting tired of laying down on the floor, so they wanted to prop her up. So, she’s leaning up against my back, and she has a yellow legal pad that she’s written the word “hurry” on, and she’s giving me the middle finger. So, I’m going to share that image as part of the Idol Worship show.

But I mean, the reality of it was we were asking a lot of the actors. It is a gore movie, you know, prosthetics aren’t comfortable. Mink had to go in Baltimore and have a cast made of her head – not once, but twice, because they messed up the first one. And that experience is very claustrophobic and very stressful. It’s where they wrap your whole head in cement, basically. I was terrified because here I was torturing my idol, and so I was on the set just trying to be confident and a good director and supportive, but I was also terrified.

One of the other noteworthy things about that shoot where we’re shooting in the attic is that most of the film was shot at the Victoria Theater, but those scenes were shot at The Armory in San Francisco, the old military armory, which at that time was a pornographic production studio specializing in S&M movies for kink.com. And Mink and Natasha had not been told what that was. They just were brought to The Armory and I’ll never forget Mink coming out of the bathroom and asking, “Excuse me. Why is there a wall of douches in the women’s room?”  

Mink: Oh, there were racks of lube and condoms everywhere and the floors of the room where we did the makeup was rubberized and there were these big eye hooks in the wall. There was nothing going on.  They weren’t doing any of their porn filming while we were there, but it was obvious what it was.

Peaches, what is your favorite of Mink’s roles that she’s played?

Peaches: I swear, I think I have an answer and it changes. For years and years, my answer was Taffy Davenport. And I also think, I mean, what doesn’t change is my love of Female Trouble as just my favorite movie, maybe my favorite movie of all movies ever made. But I’ll switch gears and I’ll get really into Peggy Gravel (from Desperate Living) for a little while and then I’ll just really need to visit some Connie Marble and lately I’ve just been really watching every moment of Dottie Hinkle in Serial Mom. So, I guess my favorite, I’ll go back to the original, which is Taffy Davenport, but it does change, you know, it’s probably a tie between Taffy and Peggy right now.

Which was your favorite role, Mink? 

Mink: I love Taffy. I love Taffy because I related to Taffy so strongly. I related to Taffy in ways that I didn’t relate to the others because I was a child that had always been told I was a brat, so I had always been told I was a bad girl. I’ve always been told I was a brat and Taffy wasn’t bad. She was unhappy. She wanted her mother to love her. She was desperate for affection and attention and the only attention she ever got was negative. So, she went for that, but I really related to her and I identified with her. Now, my mother never beat me with a car antenna. There were no, no actual similarities and I wore regular clothes, but that feeling of frustration of being a decent person inside the body of a brat. Plus, she got to be really bratty and that was fun.  

I was thrilled to see that John Waters got an exhibit at the Academy Museum. Have you both been to see it and what do you think about it? Do you feel like it’s mainstream-ized too much or do you appreciate the worship of his work?

Mink:  Yes, of course. We were both there at the opening. When you walk into this exhibit and they have created a chapel with stained glass windows of John and Mary Vivian Pierce and Divine and me and Edith (Massey) and David Lochary and Jean Hill and there are pews…and then they’re showing clips of early movies, of the Cavalcade of Perversion from Multiple Maniacs. That’s not mainstream. 

I mean, people walk in, and they sit down and watch those and the people who love them, you know, love it. But it’s still very shocking to people. There are other areas where you can actually watch film clips of the very first movies John ever made like Hag in a Black Leather Jacket, which was filmed on the roof of his parents’ house, where a white girl and a black man are married by somebody in a Ku Klux Klan outfit. This isn’t mainstream at all. But then you go into another area of the exhibit, and it’s just showing costumes from Serial Mom and Hairspray. And that’s very easy to look at. I mean, I always tell people, watch the clips because that’s the history. That’s how this all happened. But so, there’s a mainstream element to it.  

Peaches: I’ve thought a lot about this and let me see if I can articulate this. If they were to do an exhibit on, let’s say, Harry Potter, it would inevitably draw a large number of people because of how popular Harry Potter is. But the reality of it is, Harry Potter shit exists all over the world, all the time. There’s Harry Potter theme parks, Harry Potter studio tours that you can go on…but I think with something like a John Waters exhibit, it feels like he’s crossed over and it’s mainstream because it’s being presented at the Academy Museum.  But what I would say is, while their attendance is probably still really, really good, it’s more like, you know, a small percentage of Harry Potter fans would go to something like that.

Whereas 99% of John Waters fans are going to go to this. And what I loved about the exhibit, and I went multiple times, and I got to be there with Mink and her husband, and I actually got to see Mink see where they put her Connie Marble glasses and it was surreal. I mean, it gave me chills to be in that moment and be with her and get to walk through the exhibit together. My sense is that the audience that’s coming to that are still outsiders. You know, they’re the weirdos. I mean, you could really tell these weren’t the people that you would consider mainstream.

But maybe the outsider audience, we have the internet now, we’re able to communicate more. This cult of John Waters is kind of growing in a way, like he has a camp that he and Mink go to, and these campers are obsessed adults who pay money every year to go camp in the woods, so they can be with each other and be with their icons, and I don’t think that exists with other movie fandoms quite the same way. It’s a unique thing. 

Mink: I have taken quite a few people to see the exhibit and it’s very interesting their responses. Some people are, oh, man, this is great. With other people – people that I don’t know that well or who I know through other people that I have included when I’ve taken friends with me, there’s always somebody who is really put off – not that they would tell me. Not so much that they would make a deal of it or go, oh, I can’t be friends with you. But they’ve never seen a John Waters movie, and this is their introduction to it. So, it’s tough for some people still.

Is it surprising to either one of you how long John’s films have endured in culture?  

Mink: To me, it is. It’s astonishing that people still want to see something that we made over 50 years ago. We didn’t know that. I mean, it’s a good thing we didn’t know that. It would have been very different. I thought, you know, they’d show a couple of times and disappear like movies do. Movies come and go, they show up, they’re shown and then they’re gone. So, the fact that Pink Flamingos and Hairspray are in the Library of Congress on the National Register of Films is stunning to me. Well, Hairspray, not so much because Hairspray became a play, it became another movie. But the fact that Pink Flamingos has gotten that honor is kind of startling. So yeah, I do find it amazing.

Peaches: I’m on the other side of the coin, you know, as the kid whose life was changed because of these movies quite literally. I can’t imagine what my life would be like if I hadn’t had that exposure to these films, it really set me on a course to know that there was a place for me out there.

So for me, I think these movies will endure forever. I partly see it as my mission, my job as Peaches Christ and as a fan has been to create a fellowship and a celebration – and Midnight Mass while being tongue in cheek in tone, isn’t all a joke. I create space for like-minded weirdos and outsiders to come and worship what we love, and we worship these movies and there’s a real fellowship to that.

And, you know, now you see it happening when John goes to the Madonna Inn or John goes to camp or whatever. To me, this all makes sense. I also love befriending both John and Mink and getting to see the flip side of their own surprise. I’ve been with Mink and people will show her, like, I remember once this guy who I know showing Mink a giant tattoo of Connie Marble.
So, there’s Mink looking at her own self tattooed on this person’s arm.  And I think the person thought that the reaction would be different. You could tell that Mink was kind of like, that’s weird – because for her, she doesn’t see it the same way that we see it. For me, of course you’d get a Connie Marble tattoo, why wouldn’t you? So, I love getting to see both sides of it.

Peaches, if you could curate your own Academy exhibit for your favorite film or director that’s not John Waters. Who would you want that to be? 

Peaches: Oh God. Well, you know, so many of my influences I was introduced to through my worship of John. I got his book Shock Value at a young age, and I read that book and it’s because of John that I was introduced to people like Herschel Gordon Lewis or Russ Meyer. But I would say maybe the filmmaker who I would love to see get lauded that way – and in a really like expensive way – would be William Castle because I think as Peaches, it’s the most connected to what I do, which is gimmicky and has a spirit of showmanship and sort of almost a circus-like sensibility. I would love to see someone do a William Castle film festival where they redo all the gimmicks. You know, they have the nurses in the lobby. They’ve wired up the seats for The Tingler. They’ve got the skeleton coming out of the screen. I think that would be so cool. That would be awesome.

What do you think like the state of queer representation in cinema is like right now? 

Mink: You’ll have to ask Joshua because I really, I have watched so little, I’ve watched so few movies these days. I’m a bad cinephile. I’m a bad movie goer.

Peaches: I think it’s better than it’s ever been, and I think we’ve still got a way to go. When I was sort of first becoming aware of queer activism, I remember protests happening because of Silence of the Lambs and Basic Instinct, two movies I quite like, especially Silence of the Lambs. It took both parts of myself to be able to understand that you can critique what’s happening in Hollywood with characters only being delivered to the public as killers, you know, so queer people were basically relegated to being psychotic murderers. And like me, you can also love those characters.

You know, I love Buffalo Bill. I love that movie, but when it’s only Norman Bates and it’s only Buffalo Bill, that’s a problem, right? That doesn’t work. Now we’ve got queer people on TV and every walk of movies, and we can kind of go back to presenting them as killers again because now you’ve got the whole range of queer experiences out there.

I still think we’ve got a little further to go. In fact, I think what’s really exciting as far as representation goes is seeing how it’s affected genre movies, which is my passion. So, things like Get Out opening the door for other Black filmmakers to be able to make horror movies, that’s extraordinary. And we’ve seen that with queer people as well, I think we just need to see more of us.

When I made All About Evil, we were told it was ahead of its time in some ways, you know, because the horror world was not ready for an unapologetically sort of queer camp romp tributing Herschel Gordon Lewis, whereas I think if that movie came out now, now that there’s a discussion around queer horror, it would be received differently than it was.

Mink, will you be singing on this tour?

Mink: We both will. We do a great duet of Female Trouble, my version. And I do the French song “Bang Bang” and Joshua has a song that he sings. And then we have another duet at the end of the show. So, you know, there’s music throughout. I think the music is fun and we love doing that. But the crux of the show is the conversation and the film clips – but the music is also important.

I had asked you, Mink, about writing your autobiography, and you said you probably would do it. Is that still anything you’re considering doing?

Mink: First of all, my memory is completely shot, and I kept no notes, and I think if you’re really going to write an autobiography, you have to have kept some journals and I didn’t. So, there are so many things that I just don’t remember now. The only way that I could possibly do it – it’s a possibility, but not a likelihood – is to have a lot of marijuana and a microphone or even better have a lot of marijuana and somebody to follow me around as I ruminate. I mean, I do use a lot of marijuana and sometimes, you know I get to chatting with myself about things when I’m on gummies, but to actually devote that much time and energy to thinking about my life, I just don’t know that I want to do that. 

Besides the tour, what else is going on with you?

Mink: There’s not a lot going on with me. I’m basically retired. I mean, I’m not fully retired. I’m not coming out of retirement to do this show, but I really don’t do a whole lot. I got married a few months ago and I’m living a very quiet, domestic life here in Los Angeles. It’s a life I never had before. This is my first marriage. I’ve never had this type of life. It’s very new and kind of great. You know, this is all very novel for me. My passion now is I take piano lessons. I’ve been taking piano lessons for three years and in another three years, maybe I’ll be able to play you something. It’s really, really hard.

Peaches: We (still) do the [Midnight Mass] podcast and I’m always involved in what my immersive theater production company is doing. We’re actually bringing back a show that we presented last October. We’re bringing it back for four nights. It’s called The Initiation. It’s a 60-minute immersive horror experience where you join a cult. And then I’ve been, as strangely as it sounds, I’ve been doing a lot of events with symphony halls. I have some new symphony shows coming up. One is a symphony of terror show. We’ll do our holiday show and then we have a symphonic pride show. It’s sort of been surreal juggling these different things. 

Get information and tickets for Idol Worship at peacheschrist.com. New episodes of the Midnight Mass podcast premiere on Wednesdays and are available on Apple or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the pod on Twitter and get the latest from Peaches on Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and Facebook. You can also get a personalized greeting from Peaches on Cameo. Follow Mink on Twitter.