Uncharted Waters

Dec. 9—details

—A John Waters Christmas

—8 p.m. Monday, Dec. 12

—Lensic Performing Arts Center, 211 W. San Francisco St.

—Tickets are $35 to $145; 505-988-1234, lensic.org

You can love Christmas. You can hate Christmas. But you can never, ever escape Christmas.

Counterculture filmmaker and Baltimore icon John Waters shared that holiday observation and numerous others in his trademark staccato style in advance of his Monday, Dec. 12, one-man show at the Lensic Performing Arts Center. There, he will regale the audience with yule tales both real and embellished, consulting only the notes stored in his head.

Waters, famed (or infamous) for offbeat films such as Serial Mom, Polyester, and Pink Flamingos, has been touring A John Waters Christmas since 1996. Outside of the holiday season, he sporadically performs End of the World, which skewers the end times that Waters says the world is in.

At the time of the interview, he had yet to embark upon his 18-date tour. In precisely 15 minutes, the 76-year-old auteur reflected on his creative process, being busier than ever before, and how he really feels about the word "Christmas."

PASATIEMPO: Do you write material for this show around the holidays, or are you thinking about Christmas year-round as you prepare? That can't be fun.

JOHN WATERS: No. As it comes, I just kind of do it. You know, I have folders and ideas, and I take something from other shows and turn them into Christmas things, but mostly I just have to sit down and [write] every day. It has a skeleton, similar to the other show I do.

PASA: What's the writing process like for the Christmas show?

WATERS: I have two days from now to memorize it. I've done it every year, but I write a new one every year, and my other show I do, called End of the World, is what I do the rest of the year. I'm on my computer all day, but I don't write on it. I write everything by hand. I have certain kinds of pens, legal pads I like, scotch tape ... It doesn't matter how you write. You just have to do it.

PASA: Given that the whole show is memorized, at what point do you feel like you've got it down?

WATERS: It's always opening night. It's like, "Here goes! No safety net." I don't even take my glasses on stage. If you take notes, you use them.

PASA: The end-of-year holidays can be lonely or overwhelming for people. Will this show bring them some comfort?

WATERS: I start off everything [in the show] about how Christmas is broken and wrecked, and then I say we're going to fix everything. So it has solutions to the worst things about Christmas that people might be feeling in the audience, as much as it celebrates the best things that people might also be thinking. If they come to the Christmas show, buying the ticket is already satirizing how they feel about the holidays.

PASA: The word "Christmas" has been phased out of some holiday greetings and advertisements. Do you keep it in your show's title as a lighthearted provocation?

WATERS: Well, on my Christmas cards it says "season's greetings" because I have friends who are Jewish, friends who don't believe in Jesus. I mean, I don't believe in it! But in the same way, there is a holiday, so to me it is not offensive to say "Christmas" to anybody. At the same time, I love that the Satanic Temple argues against mixing church and state and every time there is a Nativity scene in a state capitol, they forcibly put a Satanic scene next to it. I think that's hilarious. I'm absolutely not a Satanist, either. I don't believe in either side.

PASA: You've been touring this show for 26 years, working well into the night every December. How tiring is it?

WATERS: I am 76 years old. I've never been this busy in my life. But I have it down to a science where I get picked up at five in the morning to get to the airport. And then I have to have an early check-in at the hotel and go to sleep when I get there for a couple of hours, because I work the night shift. Then I do the show, which is 90 minutes of spoken word; sometimes we have meet-and-greets afterwards. You know, it is exhausting. But you have to keep doing it because you want a new audience to come. That's why I rewrite it every year. That's why I continue to try to stay in touch with the audience, because that personal touch works.

PASA: You're known for sartorial sharpness. What will you wear during the performance? What are you wearing now, for that matter?

WATERS: I have a theatrical outfit that I will be wearing. But do I have a uniform in real life? Yeah, a turtleneck and some kind of pants. That's what I have on right now.

PASA: You're known primarily as a filmmaker. Do you battle nerves on stage?

WATERS: You know, I hadn't done shows for two years during COVID, and when I went back out, I was in concert at Red Rocks [Park and Amphitheatre in Colorado], which holds 1,000 people, and I remember walking out on stage. It's the same exact feeling I had when I came out from behind the puppet stage when I was 12 years old with a puppet on my arm. It's the exact same thing I'm doing now: scaring children.

Obviously, there's something the matter with people in show business. They go through life asking strangers to tell them how good they are. That means they're insecure, and they're trying to make up for something they never got. The thing is, show business never actually [provides] that, but then you get addicted.

PASA: What's your experience on stage in Santa Fe?

WATERS: I've done shows a couple of times there, but I don't think I've done the Christmas show there. I played in a school in Albuquerque. It was within a mental institution. I remember that.