Think Mink!
Interview by Pippa Brooks
Photo by Jose A Guzman Colon)
Mink Stole is cult royalty. In the first issue of Wylde, she was our first and only interview subject and she agreed to become the official patron of the magazine, so it's a thrill to be speaking to her again, especially since she's appearing in London this month!
On the 24th and 25th March, Mink will be appearing with Peaches Christ in a happening entitled IDOL WORSHIP. This "intimate, revelatory and heartfelt journey" that the duo have created includes stories, songs, film clips and interviews, and the And What? Queer Arts Festival is its UK premiere.
Wylde: So happy to be interviewing you for Wylde again! – you were my first ever interview for the first ever issue of the magazine! At that time you were focused on your music and performing with your band; a kind of musical memoir of your life. I see there is a live song element to Idol Worship… will you be performing No Nose Nanook, which you famously performed with the Cockettes in San Francisco in the Seventies?
Mink Stole: Hi Pippa! Lovely to chat with you again! Peaches and I do sing some songs from the CD, including a couple of duets, but Miss No Nose is staying home this time. Perhaps I’ll bring her with me on my next trip.
Idol Worship is an exploration of fan obsession… please share your most bizarre/hilarious/creepy fan moment!
Most of my fans are absolutely lovely. Occasionally someone will tell me that they were thinking of bringing me a gift turd, but, I am happy to say, that has never actually happened. Recently, in Los Angeles, I had to hide from a woman who came to every performance of Women Behind Bars. She wasn’t participating in the meet-and-greet (extra ticket price) but stood at the foot of the stage, doing her best to interrupt the cast’s meet-and-greet with the audience. I wanted to be polite, but she was drunk and really annoying. I had encountered her before, a couple of years ago at a show in Detroit, where she was also drunk, wouldn’t leave me alone, and when my friends intervened she became quite abusive and had to be removed from the club. At the theatre, when I wouldn’t pay attention to her, she tried to engage the other cast members. She finally left, but lurked outside until a friend told her I had left and I was able to make my getaway. I love my fans and I’m very approachable, but I'm wary of drunks.
How did you and Peaches Christ meet, and when did you first concoct the idea for this show together?
Peaches invited me to be her first celebrity on-stage interview at a screening of Desperate Living in San Francisco, when she was doing her Midnight Mass series. Neither of us can remember the exact year, but it was either the late ‘90s or early 2000s. I hadn’t a clue who Peaches was, but when I walked into the theatre and saw a nearly life size, animatronic Peggy Gravel on the stage stirring a vat of rabies potion, and a banner across the back wall with the words “Hail Mink!” written in four-foot-high letters, I knew I was meeting someone who knew how to treat a guest! We had a great time that night, and became good friends. Peaches is an amazing writer, director, producer, impresario, and whenever she asks, I say yes immediately. Idol Worship was her idea – I’m much too modest to have thought it up!
Did you ever go to a midnight showing of Pink Flamingos where people dressed as all the characters? That must be a fun part of fan worship...
Actually, I haven’t. Is that a thing? Does anyone come as Edie the Egg Lady in a bra and girdle? I’d like to see that!
Photo by Jose A Guzman Colon
Speaking of live shows, I notice you have been starring on stage in Hollywood recently with another John Waters star, Traci Lords in the play Women Behind Bars. How do you like stage acting, compared with film, and was it fun to hang out with Traci again?
Traci Lords really impressed me; this was her first play, and she did a great job! I love theatre and would like to do more. There’s something about landing a line just right, and getting a great reaction from the audience that is immensely gratifying. The sad thing is that when a play closes, it’s gone. For better or worse, film is forever. I’m incredibly lucky that so many movies I’ve done have become classics, but there are some real (no names here) turkeys on my IMDb page.
You have the distinction of appearing in every single John Waters feature film since Mondo Trasho in '69 and in April this year, you'll be Waters' special guest for his 74th birthday event at Joe's Pub in New York - fifty years friend and muse! What are the highlights for you?
We met in Provincetown, Massachusetts in the summer of 1966, so that’s more than 50 years ago! I was a rebellious suburban kid looking for adventure, and I found it! One of the most amazing things that happened that summer was The Velvet Underground came to town with The Exploding Plastic Inevitable. John and I, my sister Sique, and a few other people had moved together into an apartment in a sort of shantytown complex at the end of town that had been built by an elderly radical homosexual rights activist named Prescott Townsend. We prepared for the performance, putting on extravagant makeup and outfits, using feathers from our boas for eyelashes, and got appropriately high on grass and amphetamines. None of us were major drug users, but this was a special occasion. And it blew my mind! Andy Warhol’s movies playing on the walls, Mary Woronov playing with whips, Gerard Malanga shooting up (maybe for real?), and Nico singing Heroin in strobe light! It was fantastic!
It's sensational that the looks you and your fellow performers were creating in Baltimore in the early Seventies would have had such a cultural impact. Drag and punk owe you and Divine in particular a huge debt! Were you in the room when Divine had his hair line shaved back to make more room for make up?
Who knew? Well, we knew we were doing something that hadn’t been done before, but we had no way of knowing anyone would still care 50 years later! At the time, people just stared at us! And sometimes yelled things. It’s amazing what offends people! My boyfriend thinks I’m overstating my personal impact on modern hair trends, but I think I was the first ever to wear fire engine red hair, and David Lochary was the first to have blue hair. Today unnatural hair colours are commonplace, but in 1971 you couldn’t run to the drugstore to buy them; we had to make them ourselves! Van Smith deserves a lot of the credit for the way we all looked, especially Divine. He created that shaved-head look! And designed all Divine’s costumes! I was not in the room when it happened, and when I first saw the look, I was as shocked as anyone. But it was so good! And what Van created for Divine in Female Trouble should have won him an Oscar.
When you were a teenager, was there a film that rocked your world in the way John Waters movies have done for successive generations? Did you go to screenings of Warhol films in the Sixties, for example?
I really wish I could say there had been, but, until I started to work in movies, I didn’t go that often. As a Catholic school student I had to see all the big religious epics, but except for Charlton Heston’s Moses parting the Red Sea, they didn’t make much of an impression. I did love watching old black and white movies on television, though, especially sad ones, and would weep through classics like How Green Was My Valley and The Best Years of Our Lives. I did love Walt Disney’s Snow White, and Sleeping Beauty, though, especially the witches.
Date 24-25 March 2020
Location: The Pleasance Theatre, Carpenters Mews, North Road, London N7 9EF