John Waters’ notorious Pink Flamingos premiered in 1972 at the third annual Baltimore Film Festival. Promoted as an “exercise in bad taste,” the film follows an outrageous competition for the title of “Filthiest People Alive,” which unfolds in a trailer in Phoenix, MD and at other sites throughout Baltimore City. Today, Pink Flamingos is internationally celebrated as a pioneering example of underground filmmaking. In 2015, Waters filmed children reading “a defanged and desexualized” version of his X-rated script that he hoped would be “even more perverse than the original.” Wearing wigs that reference the earlier characters, the amateur, Baltimore-based cast of Kiddie Flamingos vividly evokes the performances of Divine, Mink Stole, Edith Massey, and the other ”Dreamlanders”—the unforgettably eccentric figures who acted in the movies Waters’ produced through his company Dreamland Productions. At the same time, the children display their own sincerity and delight as they make their way through a deeply unconventional narrative. Waters has stated that the project transforms “innocence into a whole new kind of joyous G-rated obscenity.” The work also reveals a striking similarity between the transgressive spirt of counterculture icons and the very young.