VIRTUAL TICKETED EVENT: John Waters, Mr. Know-It-All

Join us as we celebrate Mr. Know-It-All, the newest essay collection from legendary New York Times bestselling author John Waters, reflecting on how to overcome newfound respectability and rebel in the autumn of your years. John Waters will be in conversation with Steve Palopoli, editor of Santa Cruz’s alt-weekly the Good Times, during this ticketed virtual event on Crowdcast.

Tickets available via Eventbrite—click here to purchase!

No one knows more about everything—especially everything rude, clever, and offensively compelling—than John Waters. The man in the pencil-thin mustache, auteur of the transgressive movie classics Pink Flamingos, Polyester, Hairspray, Cry-Baby,andA Dirty Shame, is one of the world’s great sophisticates, and in Mr. Know-It-All he serves it up raw: how to fail upward in Hollywood; how to develop musical taste, from Nervous Norvus to Maria Callas; how to build a home so ugly and trendy that no one but you would dare live in it; more important, how to tell someone you love them without emotional risk; and yes, how to cheat death itself. Through it all, Waters swears by one undeniable truth: “Whatever you might have heard, there is absolutely no downside to being famous. None at all.”

Studded with cameos, from Divine and Mink Stole to Johnny Depp, Kathleen Turner, Patricia Hearst, and Tracey Ullman, and illustrated with unseen photos from the author’s personal collection, Mr. Know-It-All is Waters’ most hypnotically readable, upsetting, revelatory book—another instant Waters classic.

“That John Waters is a national treasure is a surety. Period. Thank you and good night . . . [Mr. Know-It-All] shows a vulnerability and an honesty and an almost frantic desire to impart to us, before he can no longer, his manic mantras, his obsessive treatises and his biting and blisteringly honest bons mots that are actually really enlightening life lessons.” —Alan Cumming, The New York Times Book Review

John Waters’ books Role Models (2010) and Carsick (2014) were national bestsellers, and his spoken-word shows This Filthy World and A John Waters Christmas continue to be performed around the world. Indecent Exposure, a retrospective exhibition of Waters’ acclaimed artwork, was recently shown at the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio. He is at work on a novel.