John Waters

A man hangs from a rope connected to the beam of a barn, his feet smashing through a wooden crate so he looks like he's cut off at the knees. His wife explains that when he was angered or annoyed, he would go to that spot, get up on a bucket, put a noose around his neck and threaten suicide. On the fatal day, she placed the bucket elsewhere, so he grabbed the crate. Is this a picture of accidental death, as she contends? Or is it suicide — or murder? This scene doesn't belong to a forensic TV series like "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.

Sarah Finlayson's morning routine is fairly set. Wake up early. Workout with a trainer. Call her twin sister.  Picking up a hitchhiking John Waters? That's not part of it. Yet the minister's wife from Baltimore stopped her Lexus for the filmmaker and gets the credit for launching his cross-country hitchhiking journey. Finlayson, who's a 59-year-old wife and mother, was driving down Charles Street, heading home from her workout and chatting on the car phone with her twin sister who lives in Jersey.

Another bit of the increasingly oddball John Waters hitchhiking mystery has been revealed. We knew the filmmaker started his cross-country adventure in Baltimore. And we knew a touring indie band had picked him up in Ohio. We also knew a married couple helped ferry him from Kansas to Denver. But we had no idea -- until now -- how Waters made it from here to the Buckeye State ... and beyond. The Frederick News-Post helped clear that up today with a crazy story that details how a Myersville, Maryland councilman named Brett Bidle spent four delicious hours in the car with Waters in Maryland, dropped him in Ohio, and then, defying belief, hooked up with the director again further west.

After eight days, 15 rides and who knows how much peculiarity, John Waters has wrapped his cross-country, "Zen-like," hitchhiking journey and plans to recount his adventures in a book he'd like to call "Carsick. " The New York Times just spoke to Waters, who's coming down from his adventure in San Francisco, where he has an apartment. We learned yesterday that Waters reached his destination in no small part thanks to a 20-year-old Maryland councilman , who drove the filmmaker through several legs of the trip and for his troubles, earned a key to Waters' San Francisco pad and a personal tour of the city.

Filmmaker John Waters' crazy cross-country hitchhiking journey continues, with word Monday that he sped through Kansas with a middle-aged married couple from Illinois. Laura Broviac and Michael McHaney, she a county Democratic Party chief, he a circuit judge, were motoring through Junction City, Kansas, this weekend and according to wjbdradio.com, saw a man near an exit ramp holding a sign. She thought he looked like Waters and after a quick Google search, found that the Baltimore filmmaker was in fact hitchhiking across country.

John Waters could have been starring in a John Waters movie today when he was picked up hitchhiking in Ohio by members of an indie rock band. It's so weird, it can only be true. The website DCist had the amazing details. The band Here We Go Magic was motoring in a van through eastern Ohio, close to the Pennsylvania border, when they pass a dude on the side of the road holding up a sign. They pick the dude up, who turns out to be Baltimore's own quirky filmmaker Waters.

John Waters opened his audience's eyes to a kind of film experience they'd probably never had before. Another writer-director raised in Maryland scared a late-night crowd silly. A movie about a sexual assault left some viewers heading for the exits early. Such were the pains and pleasures of the first two days of this weekend's 14th Maryland Film Festival. Running through Sunday night in and around the Charles Theatre , the festival showcases more than 100 films, including documentaries, short subjects and feature-length narratives.

Baltimore QFest, one of two LGBT film festival set for 2012, will unspool June 21-24 at various locations throughout the city. Organizers plan to show some 60 feature films, documentaries and shorts during the four-day festival. Where the films will be shown has yet to be determined, said Raymond Murray, the event's artistic director. Venues under consideration include the Charles Theatre , the Maryland Institute College of Art , the Creative Alliance at the Patterson and the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Community Center of Baltimore and Central Maryland.

We might be amid the Holidaze, but area clubs and venues are still hosting concerts and dance parties. Luckily, some of the performers this week have non-traditional takes on Christmas. John Waters will tell you what not to do during the holidays at his show at the Lyric, while Scott Weiland will do his take on classic Christmas songs at the 9:30 Club. Elsewhere: Winks, Judy Collins, Spank Rock, and a James Brown dance party. On Monday , Scott Weiland the lead singer of Stone Temple Pilots, who just performed at Pier Six last year, is out promoting his new Christmas album.

"Diner" has resonated with Baltimore-connected writers and moviemakers across the popular and literary spectrum. Here are some of their reactions to the movie's 30th anniversary. The film "shined a light on a time in Baltimore that I was not that familiar with, much the same as my earlier movies may have done to Barry. We later discussed the fact that even though Barry and I grew up five Beltway exits away from each other, I never met a Jewish person until high school and he told me he didn't realize everybody wasn't a Jew until about the same time in his youth.