In Cry-Baby, director John Waters created a candy-colored 1950s fantasy full of rockabilly rebels, square society girls, and gloriously exaggerated juvenile delinquents.
And among the Drapes — the film’s leather-clad bad kids — one of the most unforgettable was Traci Lords as the fierce and fearless Wanda Woodward.
She didn’t just steal scenes. She detonated them.
Leather jacket. Sharp attitude. And one of the film’s most quoted lines:
“Beat it, creep!”
Cry-Baby became an instant cult classic — blending greaser aesthetics, camp humor, and Waters’ signature outsider celebration. Over the years it’s been embraced by queer audiences for exactly those reasons: its exaggerated style, rebellious characters, and gleeful rejection of polite society.
