I LOVE Edith Massey. If ever I had a spirit animal, it would be her. She’s super sweet, but crazy raunchy too. Two things I aspire to be. Most people, if they know of her, know her as the Egg Lady from Pink Flamingos. But Edith Massey is more than just a lady that sits in a crib in her underwear eating eggs!
In Polyester she plays Cuddles Kovinsky. She was once the maid of Francine Fishpaw (Divine), but she inherited money from a family she worked for, and now she is the world’s oldest debutante. Cuddles is totally clueless about poor Francine’s mental health, bless her heart.
I chose to paint her in her tennis whites, the quote is from the following scene (at about 1:50 in):
More Cuddles Polyester:
She’s feeling HEAVENLY today!
Isn’t she just Ra-Sha-Sha? I think so.
Of COURSE I have written about her before, because she means so very much to me. This originally appeared over at On The Rag Mag:
Here’s the thing about Edith Massey, it’s hard to untangle my feelings about her from my feelings about John Waters and my feelings about Divine. I love them all so very dearly, but Ms. Edie is just the tops. Perhaps it’s that she has such a strong resemblance to multiple people in my family, or her big ol’ messed up teeth, but she has a special crib in my heart. While the films she appears in can have harsh themes and mean people, her characters always have a kind of innocence about them. Her enunciation of every vowel in every word is just the sweetest thing. That’s just it, even when she is playing the cruel Queen Carlotta in Desperate Living, she is just so damn loveable. No one but Edie can scream, “DON’T LEAVE PECKER TRACKS!” and still leave you smiling.