"I used to say, 'Come to Baltimore and you would see people with those hairdos,'" Waters said. "You no longer see that. They're dead or in nursing homes."
Members of the local arts community like April Camlin side with Waters. Camlin, a fashion designer and hair stylist who organized the first Baltimore Fashion Week last year, would like to see less attention focused on Honfest and more on some of the trend-setting art, music and fashion coming out of the city.
"[Honfest] doesn't really express anything that is creative about Baltimore," she said. "There are a lot of really great things that are coming out of Baltimore right now. And so much of what the country sees is this Hon stereotype we try to project for some reason."
Baltimoreans may have held onto the beehive longer than other cities across the country (at one point, Waters dubbed Charm City the "Hairdo Capitol of the World"). But the 'do didn't start here.
"It's not a Baltimore thing," said Holly Alford, a fashion professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. "It was being done in New Jersey, New York - all over. It was a very popular hairstyle."
In fact, hairstylist Margaret Vinci Heldt, the self-professed "queen of the beehive," claimed to have invented the look nearly 40 years ago in Illinois. A beauty magazine challenged her to design a trend-setting look, and she answered with the beehive.
The word hon has also been a part of American vernacular for ages - something Whiting freely admits. She has heard it used in a McDonald's all the way up in Connecticut.
"Hon is universal," Whiting said. "It's a universal term of endearment. It's not something that's unique to Baltimore. We just happen to celebrate it."
The press - at home and abroad - loves the Hon and the Honfest. This year, several British journalists are traveling to Hampden specifically for the festival.
Honfest might be a big deal in and around Baltimore, and some outsiders might be familiar with films by John Waters and Barry Levinson, but Joe Tourist generally does not know about this particularly colorful and quirky aspect of the city's past, said Nancy Hinds, the vice president of public affairs for the Baltimore Area Convention and Visitors Association.
If you were to list Baltimore's biggest attractions, Hons would be nowhere near the top, Hinds said. Tourists mainly come to the city to stroll through the Inner Harbor, visit historical neighborhoods such as Mount Vernon and crack open steaming hot crabs.
