The Tacky History of the Pink Flamingo
From its start in Massachusetts, of all places, to its inspiration of a John Waters film, the lawn ornament has some staying power
By Abigail Tucker (Smithsonian magazine, 9/2012)
From The Smithsonian Collections: Plastic Flamingos. c. 1980, photo by Jason Petra
John Watersā childhood yard was an exercise in good taste. His mother, the president of a local garden club, cultivated burgeoning flowerbeds and precise hedges. In their buttoned-up Maryland suburb, lawn ornaments of any kind, let alone plastic pink flamingos, were anathema. One house down the street had a fake wishing well and that was painful enough.
āI donāt remember ever seeing a pink flamingo where I grew up,ā the filmmaker muses. āI think I saw them in East Baltimore.ā
In 1972, Waters released the film Pink Flamingos, which was called both an abomination and an instant classic. The movie has almost nothing to do with the tropical fowl that stand sentinel during the opening credits: The plot mostly concerns the exertions of a brazen and voluptuous drag queen intent on preserving her status as āthe filthiest person alive.ā
āThe reason I called it āPink Flamingosā was because the movie was so outrageous that we wanted to have a very normal title that wasnāt exploitative,ā Waters says. āTo this day, Iām convinced that people think itās a movie about Florida.ā Waters enjoyed the plastic knickknackās earnest air: Though his own stylish mom might have disapproved, the day-glo wading birds were, back then, a straightforward attempt at working-class neighborhood beautification. āThe only people who had them had them for real, without irony,ā Waters says. āMy movie wrecked that.ā Forty years later, the sculptures have become unlikely fixtures of a certain kind of high-end sensibility, a shorthand for tongue-in-cheek tackiness.
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