Love Quote by Pia Zadora

Camp ambition rarely gets stated this plainly. Pia Zadora’s “I love John Waters. You see, I want to be the next Divine” reads like a wink and a dare: a performer associated with glossy, often maligned celebrity culture reaching for the patron saint of bad-taste brilliance. It’s not just fandom; it’s a bid to be reclassified.

John Waters is more than a director here - he’s a cultural passport. To invoke him is to invoke a whole aesthetic of transgression that turns “too much” into the point. And Divine isn’t merely a star; Divine is a role in the broader sense: a deliberately constructed icon who weaponized exaggeration and made “outsider” feel like a throne. Zadora’s phrasing, “You see,” is doing work. It’s the sound of someone anticipating skepticism and leaning into it, inviting the listener to share the joke before they can become it.

The subtext is a negotiation with reputation. Zadora’s career has long been tangled up with questions of legitimacy - publicity, perceived artificiality, the sense that acclaim was bought or borrowed. Wanting to be “the next Divine” flips that liability into strategy: if the mainstream treats you as inauthentic, embrace a tradition that treats performance itself as authenticity. It’s also a smart read of how cult stardom works. Divine’s power came from committing so hard to the bit that the bit became myth. Zadora is signaling she’s ready to stop chasing respectability and start chasing immortality in neon.