Crackpot by John Waters

Author:John Waters
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

9

“Ladies and Gentlemen …

the Nicest Kids in Town!”

If I have one regret in life, it’s that I wasn’t a Buddy Deaner. Sure, as a teenager I was a guest on this Baltimore show. I even won the twist contest with Mary Lou Raines (one of the queens of The Buddy Deane Show) at a local country club.

But I was never a Deaner. Not a real one. Not one of the Committee members, the ones chosen to be on the show every day—the Baltimore version of the Mouseketeers, “the nicest kids in town,” as they were billed. The guys who wore sport coats with belts in the back from Lee’s of Broadway (10 percent discount for Committee members), pegged pants, pointy-toe shoes with the great buckles on the side, and “drape” (greaser) haircuts that my parents would never allow. And the girl Deaners, God, “hair-hoppers” as we called them in my neighborhood, the ones with the Etta gowns, bouffant hairdos, and cha-cha heels. These were the first role models I knew. The first stars I could identify with. Arguably the first TV celebrities in Baltimore.

I’m still a fan—a Deaner groupie. I even named some of the characters in my films after them. So you can’t imagine how excited I was when I finally got a chance to interview these local legends twenty years later.

The Buddy Deane Show was a teenage dance party, on the air from 1957 to 1964. It was the top-rated local TV show in Baltimore and, for several years, the highest-rated local TV program in the country. While the rest of the nation grew up on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand (which was not even shown here because Channel 13 already had Buddy Deane ), Baltimoreans, true to form, had their own eccentric version. Every rock ’n’ roll star of the day (except Elvis) came to town to lip-sync and plug their records on the show: Buddy Holly, Bill Haley, Fats Domino, the Supremes, the Marvelettes, Annette Funicello, Frankie Avalon, and Fabian, to name just a few.

You learned how to be a teenager from the show. Every day after school kids would run home, tune in, and dance with the bedpost or refrigerator door as they watched. If you couldn’t do the Buddy Deane Jitterbug (always identifiable by the girl’s ever-so-subtle dip of her head each time she was twirled around), you were a social outcast. And because a new dance was introduced practically every week, you had to watch every day to keep up. It was maddening: the Mashed Potato, the Stroll, the Pony, the Waddle, the Locomotion, the Bug, the Handjive, the New Continental, and, most important, the Madison, a complicated line dance that started here and later swept the country.

Although the show has been off the air for more than twenty years, a nearly fanatical cult of fans has managed to keep the memory alive. The producers of Diner wanted to include Buddy Deane footage in their film, but most of the shows were live and any tapes of this local period piece have been erased.

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