Excerpted from “Ladies and Gentlemen... the Nicest Kids in Town!”
Crackpot: The Obsessions of John Waters by John Waters, Vintage Books, 1987. Reprinted with the permission of John Waters.

If I have one regret in life, it’s that I wasn’t a Buddy Deaner. Sure, as a teenager I was a guest on the show. I even won the twist contest with Mary Lou Raines (one of the queens of The Buddy Deane Show) at the Valley Country Club. But I was never a Deaner. Not one of the Committee members, the one chosen to be on the show every day – the Baltimore version of the Mouseketeers, “the nicest kids in town,” as they were billed. These were the first role models I knew. Arguably the first TV celebrities in Baltimore.

The Buddy Deane Show was a teenage dance party, on the air from 1957 to 1964. It was the top-rated local TV show in Baltimore and, for several years, the highest rated local TV program in the country. While the rest of the nation grew up on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand (which was not even shown here because Channel 13 already had Buddy Deane), Baltimoreans, true to form, had their own eccentric version. Every rock’n’roll star of the day (except Elvis) came to town to lip-synch and plug their records on the show: Buddy Holly, Bill Haley, Fats Domino, the Supremes, Annette Funicello, Frankie Avalon, and Fabian, to name just a few.

You learned how to be a teenager from the show. Every day after school kids would run home, tune in, and dance with the bedpost or refrigerator door as they watched. If you couldn’t do the Buddy Deane Jitterbug, you were a social outcast. And because a new dance was introduced practically every week, you had to watch every day to keep up. It was maddening: the Mashed Potatoes, the Pony, the Waddle, the Locomotion, the Bug, the Handjive, and, most important, the Madison, a complicated line dance that started here and later swept the country.

The Committee, initially recruited from local teen centers, was to act as hosts and dance with the guests. To be selected you had to bring a “character reference” letter from your pastor, priest, or rabbi, qualify in a dance audition, and show in an interview (“the Spotlight”) that you had “personality.” At first the committee had a revolving membership, with no one serving longer than three months.

But then something unforeseen happened. The home audience soon grew attached to some of these kids. So the rules were bent a little; the “big” ones, the ones with the fan mail, were allowed to stay. And the whole concept of the Committee changed. The star system was born.

The Committee governed itself, and being elected to the Board became the ultimate status symbol. This Committee’s committee chose new members, taught the dance steps, and enforced the demerit system, which could result in suspension or expulsion. You received demerits for almost anything: Chewing gum. Eating the refreshments, which were for guests only. Or dancing with other Committee members when you were supposed to be dancing with the guests (a very unpopular rule allowed this only every fourth dance). And if you dared to dance the obscene Bodie Green (the Dirty Boogie), you were immediately a goner.

In the 1960s came a whole new set of stars and teased hair, replacing the ‘50s drape with a Buddy Deane look that so pervaded Baltimore culture (especially East and South Baltimore) that its effect is still seen in certain neighborhoods of this great Hairdo Capitol of the World.

By far the most popular hairdo queen on Buddy Deane was a 14 year-old Pimlico Junior High School student named Mary Lou Raines, who was the talk of teenage Baltimore. Every week she had a different “do” topped off by her special trademark, the bow. “We really sprayed it,” remembers Mary Lou today. “The more hairspray, the better.”

Integration ended The Buddy Deane Show. When the subject comes up today, most loyalists want to go off the record. But it went something like this: Buddy Deane was an exclusively white show. Once a month the show was all black; there was no black Committee. So the NAACP targeted the show for protests. Ironically, The Buddy Deane Show introduced black music and artists into the lives of white Baltimore teenagers, many of whom learned to dance from black friends and listened to black radio. Buddy offered to have three or even four days a week all black, but that wasn’t it. The protesters wanted the races to mix.