MARIO BANANA (# 1)

Mario Montez, the star of <i>Harlot,</i> was in a lot of off-off-Broadway plays and doing a lot of underground acting for Jack Smith and Ron Rice and Jose Rodriguez-Soltero and Bill Vehr. And this was all in addition, he told me, to his regular job: working for the post office. Mario was one of the best natural comedians Id ever met; he knew instinctively how to get a laugh every time. He had a natural blend of sincerity and distraction, which has to be one of the great comedy combinations.
A lot of Marios humor came from the fact that he adored dressing up like a female glamour queen, yet at the same time he was painfully embarrassed about being in drag (he got offended if you used that word he called it «going into costume»). He used to always say that he knew it was a sin to be in drag he was Puerto Rican and a very religious Roman Catholic. The only spiritual comfort he allowed himself was the logic that even though God surely didnt <i>like</i> him for going into drag, that still, if He really hated him, He would have struck him dead.
Mario was a very sympathetic person, very benign, although he did get furious at me once. We were watching a scene of his in a movie we called <i>The Fourteen-Year-Old Girl,</i> and when he saw that Id zoomed in and gotten a close-up of his arm with all the thick, dark masculine hair and veins showing, he got very upset and hurt and accused me in a proud Latin way, «I can see you were trying to bring out the worst in me.»

Andy Warhol,
«POPism: The Warhol 60s»,
Warhol and Hackett, N.Y. 1980

Together with the screening of <filmlink id=\"1938\">Mario Banana (#2)</filmlink> and <filmlink id=\"1785\">Screen Test # 2</filmlink>