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Jonathan Rosenbaum’s Newsletter · Aug 20, 2026

FEMALE TROUBLE

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Jonathan Rosenbaum’s Newsletter · Jonathan Rosenbaum’s Newsletter

At the Music Box Theatre in Chicago on Thursday. August 20 at 9:45 pm. Presented by Rated Q on 35mm, tickets are $17. The event features a cocktail hour at 9:00 PM in the Music Box Lounge with Miss Toto, followed by a drag pre-show at 9:45 PM before the film.

]From the Chicago Reader (December 1, 1989).

This 1975 feature is the best of John Waters’s movies prior to Hairspray and his ultimate concerto for the 300-pound transvestite Divine, whose character will do literally anything — including commit mass murder — to become famous. As in all of Waters’s early outrages, the technique is cheerfully ramshackle, but Divine’s rage and energy make it vibrate like a sustained aria, with a few metaphors about the beauty of crime borrowed from Jean Genet. With Edith Massey and Mink Stole, as well as some doubling on the part of Divine that allows the star to have sexual congress with himself, giving birth to . . . guess who? 90 min. (JR)

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