(“You can’t just mosey into a pit of pink flamingos. For one thing, he learned during an ill-fated Floridian photo shoot that he doesn’t like real birds, and they don’t like him.
Pink flamingo movie#
“My movie wrecked that.” Forty years later, the sculptures have become unlikely fixtures of a certain kind of high-end sensibility, a shorthand for tongue-in-cheek tackiness.īut, for his part, Waters says he has completely OD’d on the flamingos. “The only people who had them had them for real, without irony,” Waters says. “To this day, I’m convinced that people think it’s a movie about Florida.” Waters enjoyed the plastic knickknack’s 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. “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 says. 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 “the filthiest person alive.”
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In 1972, Waters released the film Pink Flamingos, which was called both an abomination and an instant classic. “I don’t remember ever seeing a pink flamingo where I grew up,” the filmmaker muses.
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One house down the street had a fake wishing well and that was painful enough. In their buttoned-up Maryland suburb, lawn ornaments of any kind, let alone plastic pink flamingos, were anathema. His mother, the president of a local garden club, cultivated burgeoning flowerbeds and precise hedges. Some flamingos are darker or brighter shades of pink, others are more orange or red, and still others are pure white.John Waters’ childhood yard was an exercise in good taste. Because habitat and food sources vary from place to place and season to season, the birds’ colors also vary. There are six different species of flamingos, which are found in various places around the world.
Pink flamingo skin#
Humans, on the other hand, would need to eat quite a lot of carrots (a food so rich in carotenoids that it gave the pigments their name) to turn their skin a shade of orange. Because the flamingo diet is nearly exclusively carotenoid-filled delicacies, the birds have no problem coloring themselves. To actually color those external attributes, carotenoids must be ingested in very large amounts. In the digestive system, enzymes break down carotenoids into pigments that are absorbed by fats in the liver and deposited, for flamingos, in the feathers and skin. The bright pink color of flamingos comes from beta-carotene, a red-orange pigment that’s found in high amounts within the algae, brine fly larvae, and brine shrimp that flamingos eat in their wetland environment. So, if it’s not part of their DNA, why do these birds take on shades of pink?įor flamingos, the phrase “You are what you eat” holds more truth than it might for humans. The pink of their feathers, though it is their most famous quality, is not a hereditary trait. With a name that derives from the Spanish or Portuguese word meaning “flame-colored,” the birds are known for their vibrant appearance.
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100 Women Britannica celebrates the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment, highlighting suffragists and history-making politicians.
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Britannica Classics Check out these retro videos from Encyclopedia Britannica’s archives.