The Baltimore Sun from Baltimore, Maryland • E4

4 THE BALTIMORE SUN SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 2016 Using his diagnosis as catalyst for change Rapper Freeway hopes to raise awareness for early detection of chronic disease By Wesley Case The Baltimore Sun Philadelphia rapper Freeway was just in Baltimore last Sunday, headlining a concert at the Ottobar. On Friday, he made the trip again but this time, it chips one of my favorite foods. I can't indulge in them like I used to," Freeway said on the phone Thursday from his house on the outskirts of Philadelphia Then there's the toughest part: How much water he can drink. "I can only take in 32 ounces of fluid a day," he said. "Especially in the summertime, I have to really monitor what I drink." Life is drastically different for Freeway these days, but he's turning his disease into a catalyst for raising awareness, which explains his trip to Baltimore.

Not only did he receive dialysis treatment while here, but Freeway met and interviewed patients to get feedback on how their treatments are working. The visit was filmed for a documentary about Freeway's life after his diagnosis. "I just want to get a different opinion from some of the people that's on dialysis," Freeway, 38, said. "Baltimore has always been a second home to me, so I figured it'd be good." The goal of the documentary, which does not have a release date, and the visit: To help raise awareness of the need for early detection of chronic kidney disease, along with diabetes and high blood pressure. Freeway was diagnosed with the latter two in 2012.

He believes a simple checkup would have made a huge difference in getting his health under control sooner. And despite knowing he fit three categories that increased his risk for lddney failure diabetes, high blood pressure and being black Freeway said it still didn't compel him to take his health seriously enough. He wants to correct that for others. "A lot of people don't want to go to the doctor. A lot of people think there's nothing wrong with them," he said.

"I'm not even that old. I'm in my 30s. If it can happen to me, it can happen to anybody." Dr. Bernard Jaar, the nephrologist who treated Freeway on Friday, said chronic lddney disease "is a huge problem in Baltimore," and inner cities in general. Jaar said African-Americans are three to four times more likely to be affected by lddney disease than white people for multiple reasons, including access to care in a city population and genetic predisposition.

"Kidney disease can be a burden on a patient's mortality," Jaar said. "The one thing to know is kidney disease is a silent disease. You don't have symptoms until it's very advanced." Freeway, born Leslie Pridgen, said modifying his lifestyle and being more aware of his health has him feeling well today. He can tour, but still needs to receive dialysis treatment multiple times per week. But Freeway who became a rap star thanks to rapid-fire, scene-stealing verses on songs like 'What We Do" and "1-900-Hustler" maintains a positive oudook-Freeway's last release was his fifth album, April's "Free Will." He said he finished before his kidney disease diagnosis, which explains why he doesn't address it on the record.

That will change with his future music. "I still feel like I have a lot to talk about," Freeway said. 'With the kidney failure and me still pushing and driving and still being able to see success, all of these things are just fueling the fire of the music I'm creating." wesley.casebaltsun.com twitter.com midnightsunblog Freeway, who was a key member of Jay Z's Roc-A-Fella Records in the early 2000s, received dialysis treatment at Med-Star Good Samaritan Hospital for his chronic kidney disease. The disease Freeway was diagnosed just over a year ago, and it has significantly changed how he has lived since. "It's a lot of things I have to stay away from.

For instance, potatoes and potato Dreamlanders look back on 'Multiple Maniacs' The players John Waters, 70, has written and directed 10 movies since "Multiple Maniacs," the most recent being "A Dirty Shame" (2004). In 2002, a musical version of his 1988 film "Hairspray" opened on Broadway and went on to win eight Tonys. He is also an artist, author and frequent TV presence. "Kiddie Flamingos," a video featuring children reading a kid-safe version of the script of his 1972 film "Pink Flamingos," goes on view Sept. 21 at the Baltimore Museum of Art.

He lives in Tuscany-Canterbury. George Figgs, 68, ran Fells Point's Orpheum Theatre until it closed in 1999. Still a member of the projectionists' union, he splits his time these days between homes in Woodberry and Toronto, where he lives with his life partner, Patricia Ormsby, and sits in occasionally with the jazz band Eucalyptus. Susan Lowe, 68, went on to play the starring role of Mole McHenry in Waters' 1977 "Desperate Living." She is an artist and retired teacher who continues to host classes and workshops occasionally at the Creative Alliance. She lives in Highlandtown.

Pat Moran, who admits only to being about the same age as her longtime friend Waters, is a three-time Emmy-winning casting director and continues to run Pat Moran Casting out of her office in Canton. She and her husband, Chuck Yeaton, live in Mount Vernon. Vincent Peranio, 7L retired re-cendy after a long career as a production designer and art director in television and movies. In addition to his work for Waters, he earned acclaim as a production designer for several locally shot TV series, including Barry Levinson's "Homicide: Life on the Street" and David Simon's "The Wire." He and his wife, Dolores Deluxe, live in Fells Point Bob Skidmore, 69, a friend of Waters' going back to eighth grade, is a retired accountant living in Towson. Mink Stole, 69, continues acting.

Her resume includes more than 60 movie and TV credits, most of which have nothing to do with Waters. She lives in Tuxedo Park, across the street from the house in which she grew up. Chris Kaltenbach MANIACS, From page 1 humor, gay and straight, and bikers." Saturday at the Charles Theatre, a restored version of "Multiple Maniacs," restored to the point where even Waters says it looks better than it ever has, will have its Baltimore premiere. Even at the ripe old age of 46, the film is not for the squeamish or the easily offended, including as it does scenes of murder, cannibalism, armpit licking and doing things with a rosary that must be left to the reader's imagination. It remains as merrily subversive as any piece of cinema ever released George Figgs, who plays Jesus Christ in the movie, proudly calls it "the most blasphemous film of the 20th century." To mark the occasion, we spoke with Waters and six longtime associates, all of whom worked on "Multiple Maniacs" and much of the rest of the Waters canon.

Our cast includes Waters, Figgs, actors Mink Stole, Susan Lowe and Bob Skidmore, art designer Vincent Peranio and Pat Moran, who acts in the film and pretty much served as Waters' right hand. All remain friends and speak fondly of Divine, the 300-pound actor and drag queen who would go on to become Dreamland's biggest, and most beloved, star. Just about everyone involved with "Multiple Maniacs" had worked with Waters before. In fact, they came together for the film simply because he was making it. Few knew much about what was going to happen.

Mink Stole: 'We were still, 'Hey kids, let's put on a There was no thought at all for what posterity would show. I never knew whether anybody was going to see these things. I trusted John if something was going to be done, that John would do it right. It wasn't up to me." George Figgs: "John never had to write characters. We existed.

AH he had to do was write us into things and give us lines that most of us would have already said." Bob Skidmore: 'We would all pile into a station wagon and we would just go do something." John Waters: "At the time, we were fans of exploitation movies and art movies. I always tried to put them together. Herschell Gordon Lewis had made a movie called and this is really not anything like the plot, but the tide is certainly a joke on that There was also gore in it, when Divine eats the heart and all that stuff. That was certainly because of Herschell Gordon Lewis' influence at the time. "I had made 'Mondo which was sort of a satire of all the 'Mondo' movies.

And so this was every one of my movies is a satire of a certain genre. And this was the gore movie." Susan Lowe: 'We were in love with Fellini, Ingmar Bergman. Andy Warhol's films, at that time, we thought were brilliant. We watched all those kinds of films, and we read books that we shouldn't have read, Nietzsche and William Burroughs and all that" "Multiple Maniacs" contains scenes that were anything but standard cinematic fare the film-opening "Cavalcade of Perversions" (filmed under a tent pitched on the front lawn on Waters' parents' Lutherville home) features a guy eating vomit, a junkie going through withdrawal and a gal licking a bicycle seat; moves on to scenes involving sex in a church a priest gave him permission to film there, Waters says, without knowing just what was going to be filmed and ends in a mob chase through Fells Point that no city officials had been warned about beforehand. But Dream-landers were game for anything.

FIGGS: "Back in those days, I actually thought I was Jesus Christ. I was taking a lot of acid and everything. I really did and still do, in a way. I have messianic tendencies. I just said, 'Yes, of course I'll play Jesus.

I am VINCENT PERANIO: "Basically, what he would do is, him and Pat Moran, maybe, would call the friends on a weekend and say, 'OK, get a sheet and a blanket. Meet us at 8 in the morning on Mill Race Road; we're gonna do the Stations of the And that's what we did." PAT MORAN: "It was certainly not unlike 'The Little Rascals' on LSD, basically making a movie. We were serious about it, but not without a sense of humor. That LAWRENCE IRVINE Michael Renner Jr. as the Infant of Prague and Divine as Lady Divine in "Multiple Maniacs." If you go The restored version of "Multiple Maniacs" will be shown at 11:30 a.m.

Saturday, 7 p.m. Sept. 12 and 9 p.m. Sept. 15 at The Charles, 1711 N.

Charles St. Waters will introduce the film and do a post-screening on Sept. 12. thecharles.com. sively losing her mind, and (inexplicably) being raped by a giant lobster.

WATERS: "In Provincetown, where we lived every summer even then, there was a postcard everywhere of the beach with a broiled lobster in the sky, it said, like, 'Visit Cape We would always trip and used to say, 'Oh God, this lobster in the sky is going to attack PERANIO: "He sent me this card, from Provincetown. It basically says, 'Can you make me a big and a couple lines, how he thought it should be made which is exactly what John does all the time. "John gave me $35. 1 worked for about a week and a half on making this aluminum frame and the chicken wire, and then covering it with papier-mache. And then we had little levers inside, and my brother and I got in it.

And we raped Divine." The movie had its premiere April 10-12, 1970, in a hall at Baltimore's Unitarian Universalist Church on Hamilton Street. The audiences, by all accounts, loved it. Evening Sun critic Lou Cedrone, however, was no fan, but Waters didn't mind. WATERS: 'When it came out, it was 98 percent ignored, and 2 percent negative, from Lou Cedrone. I remember what he said, we used it in the ads: Waters' first tallde is also his first We used that quote.

He's right. I look back on it now, and think, STOLE: "John made us love the bad reviews, because he reveled in the bad reviews." As much as the Dreamlanders loved working with Waters, they loved working with Divine even more. Born Harris Glen Milstead, Divine died in 1988, following a successful career as a drag queen, singer and actor; just months before his death, childhood friends Waters and Divine had enjoyed the premiere of their most successful collaboration, "Hairspray." STOLE: "Divine was wonderful to work with. Always knew his lines, always was on time, never created any problems. He was such a professional.

He was also very generous. He was never trying to upstage me. He didn't have to." SKIDMORE: "He was a friend first, more than a movie star. At the time, I knew he was going to be famous someday, but really didn't know how it was going to happen. Maybe not that movie, but some movie in the future." LOWE: "I loved Divine.

We smoked so much pot together." Today, "Multiple Maniacs" looks cleaner and plays better than ever. The restoration is good news for the Dreamlanders, for all sorts of reasons. WATERS: "First they said, 'Do you want us to keep all, to restore all the scratches and the No, I said. never wanted it to look like that. Make it new, let's make it look as good as you What they can do today is amazing." Peranio: "It's not like looking at any other film.

It's truly home movies to me. That's what we were doing for fun and amusement at that time, with all of our friends. You want to laugh; you want to cry. There are so many mixed feelings now what is it, 47 years later?" chris.kaltenbachbaltsun.com twitter.comchriskaltsun always prevailed. We always thought we were funny, to each other." LOWE: 'We were degenerates, and we loved it!" The whole film was shot guerrilla-style there was no state or city film office to run interference, no effort was made to get permits or alert anyone ahead of time that filming was about to happen.

WATERS: "My favorite scene, there's one where Divine, Rick Morrow and David Lochary drive away from the 'Cavalcade' in an old white Cadillac convertible. That was David's real car. But it barely worked, and it died right when we were shooting. So when we pull into that parking lot which is in the projects, by the way we had to push it there, and just left it. You see them get out, and Rick has a gun, and Divine's in full drag, just getting out of a Cadillac convertible in the middle of the projects and running, basically." Then there's the scene everyone remembers or the scene that everyone remembers that can be talked about in a mass-circulation newspaper: Divine, as Lady Divine, alone in her room, progres.