00:00:00.000If you want to support the Missing Witches Project, go to missingwitches.com, join the coven, check out our merch, our books, Missing Witches and New Moon Magic, and our deck of oracles, the Missing Witches Deck of Oracles.1.00
00:00:14.840You aren't being a proper woman, therefore you must be a witch.1.00
00:00:50.920I need inspiration. I need colour. I need heat.
00:00:55.600So I pull out my beach blanket with matching towel and lunch cooler, all emblazoned with patterns of a creature of colour and heat, who inspired ancient myth-makers, 19th-century authors, and cult film directors alike.
00:06:23.620Flamingos evolved to live and thrive in some of the harshest environments that our Earth has to offer.
00:06:33.320So, if you, like many of us, are feeling attacked by your surroundings, the vicious workings of late-stage capitalism and broligarchy, classist tools of mockery, remember.
00:08:54.580and an ancient spell of evolution whispered through millions of years of DNA.
00:09:01.400Their legs, spindly as they may appear,
00:09:04.940have thick, tough skin that protects against the burn of salted acid.
00:09:12.500Their beaks are whale-kin sieves, shaped like crescent moons, that strain sustenance from water, thick with brine and mud.
00:09:25.740Filter-feeding, keeping what nourishes them, and releasing that which does not serve, and transforming poison into beauty, and healing, and a future.
00:09:40.220And I'm sorry to say, witches, but sometimes overcoming harsh conditions comes down to having thicker skin.
00:09:48.380Flamingo coloration comes from their diet, brine shrimp turning their fledgling feathers from gray at birth to pink, red, and orange.
00:10:00.060living reminders that what we consume affects who we are,
00:10:06.340affects the story we tell ourselves and the story our existence tells the world.
00:10:13.880What we let in, be it insults or brine shrimp or TikTok trends,
00:10:20.820what we take in, what we absorb, can change us.0.92
00:10:29.180But we witches, we must combine that thick skin with pink plumage.
00:14:36.120They rely on the flock for everything from location scouting to childcare
00:14:41.920Their communities are crucial to their survival
00:14:47.400Like us, our communities are crucial to our survival.
00:14:55.960And while flamingos are monogamous, same-sex partnerships are not all that uncommon.
00:15:02.300Arthur and Curtis, two male flamingos at the Pineton Zoo in southwest England, successfully hatched an adopted egg together.
00:15:11.620The zoo has had several all-male pairings during the past breeding seasons, so the same-sex couple is not an unexpected turn of events, said Pete Smallbones, the zoo's curator of birds.
00:15:27.900But the zoo is not sure exactly how the couple acquired the egg.
00:15:33.080It's likely that this egg became available, unprotected, kind of just left in a nest.
00:15:40.800And then they've taken the opportunity, said Pete.
00:15:44.400As a bird department, we're more than aware of how it's a known thing for flamingos, penguins, and other species to have same-sex pairings.
00:16:30.380In a world of harsh sun, caustic waters, and relentless predators, relationships, togetherness in all its forms is the flamingo's shield, their coven, their ritual of resilience.
00:16:52.640In the great gatherings of thousands, flamingos find protection.
00:17:02.480But in the swirling, synchronized mass, they become an illusion.
00:17:08.680Too many to track, too united to break.
00:17:12.480Predators hesitate, confused by the shifting mirage of pink.
00:17:18.520When flamingos move, they move as one.
00:17:22.640A murmuration on water and sky, a collective consciousness flowing through them, tuned in, and the bond is strong, safety woven into their numbers.
00:17:40.100As John Waters said of an ill-fated photoshoot, quote, you can't just mosey into a pit of pink flamingos.
00:22:18.540flamingo like a flame in the sky like a flame in the sky we fly and swim and run across the
00:22:31.560waters and arrive in 1865 with the publication of lewis carroll's alice's adventures in wonderland0.98
00:22:39.660to find one of literature's most witchy flamingos the queen of hearts a dastardly icon of craze1.00
00:22:48.520and unchecked power has challenged Alice to a game of croquet, a game that the queen has rigged1.00
00:22:55.580to ensure an unearned victory. Quote, Alice thought she had never seen such a curious croquet
00:23:03.460ground in her life. It was all ridges and furrows. The balls were live hedgehogs, the mallets live
00:23:11.840flamingos, and the soldiers had to double themselves up and stand on their hands and feet
00:23:17.600to make the arches. The chief difficulty Alice found at first was in managing her flamingo.
00:23:24.240She succeeded in getting its body tucked away comfortably enough under her arm with its legs
00:23:29.720hanging down, but generally, just as she got its neck nicely straightened out and was going to
00:23:36.280give the hedgehog a blow with its head, it would twist itself round and look up in her face with
00:23:43.880such a puzzled expression that she could not help bursting out laughing. And when she had got its
00:23:51.240head down and was going to begin again, it was very provoking to find that the hedgehog had
00:23:57.300unrolled itself and was in the act of crawling away. End quote. The flamingo refuses to be used
00:24:05.760as a mallet, refuses to take part, silently resists its assigned role in the Queen of
00:24:13.040heart's authoritarian croquet game. And while it could be argued that the flamingo's limp,
00:24:18.480confused collapse in Alice's arms could be interpreted as the flamingo's compliance to
00:24:24.620the queen, sabotaging Alice's chances of winning, we can also see it as an act of defiance against
00:24:32.940authority in general. And in this reading, our flamingo becomes a conscientious objector,
00:24:40.540Rather than actively rebelling, our flamingo engages in passive non-compliance, refusing to function as a proper mallet.
00:24:50.900And this unwillingness to conform reflects the principles of conscientious objection, a moral or ethical refusal to participate in an unjust system.
00:25:03.800so when we look at wonderland's flamingos as enacting an absurdist anti-authoritarianism
00:25:12.400it becomes easy to draw that line back through a sunny sky and land squarely at the feet of john
00:25:22.340waters pink flamingos is cinematic absurdist anti-authoritarianism not just pushing the
00:25:31.600boundaries of bad taste, but in its deeper, truer meaning. The antagonists of Pink Flamingos,
00:25:39.040Connie and Raymond Marble, aren't the villains because they are trying to usurp Divine's title
00:25:44.800of filthiest person alive. No, they're the bad guys because they are hypocrites,0.99
00:25:51.320who claim to be anti-authoritarian, but call the cops anytime something doesn't go their way.0.98
00:25:57.180I'd like to report a lewd and disorderly party.
00:28:39.940In 1996, Don Featherstone won the Ig Nobel Prize for Art,
00:28:47.260a parody of the Nobel Prize that celebrates quirky, yet valuable, contributions to society.
00:28:54.640In 1973, famed movie critic Roger Ebert wrote of John Waters' film,
00:29:00.940Quote, Pink Flamingos is one of the most vile, stupid, and repulsive films ever made, but it achieves that goal so completely that it rises above bad taste into a kind of glory.0.87
00:29:51.040Our flamingo kin have gone from inspiring myths of renewal to inspiring laughter, vanilla taste, and transgressive taste to become a symbol of everything from paradise to disdain.
00:30:07.380Witches have traveled through these cycles too.
00:31:37.240We are not the plastic versions of ourselves, bought and sold on the marketplace, frozen in place, subject to taste, bound to irony, mockery, our attempts to bring joy to our low-income lives, sneeringly described as trailer park trash.0.99