Author Cintra Wilson


Cintra Wilson

Cintra Wilson is a pop culture pundit whose column for Salon.com and collection of essays, A Massive Swelling: Celebrity Re-Examined as a Grotesque Crippling Disease, have garnered her a cult following. An award-winning playwright and screenwriter, she has seen her work produced by Tim Robbins's Actor's Gang theater company in Los Angeles, Naked Angels in New York, and MTV, where her creation Winter Steele was a long-running segment of Liquid Television. She lives in New York City.

Good To Know

Some outtakes from our interview with Wilson:

"The last ‘real job' I had was when I was a Jagermeister Shot Nurse at a nightclub in San Francisco. I had a reclining dentist chair and a bedpan full of Jagermeister and a large irrigation syringe, and I would wear bondage-style nurse attire and shotgun blasts of Jagermeister down people's throats for $2. Most of the shot usually ended up being dribbled down their shirts."

"I have ADD, so I really couldn't read books until I was around 28, and medicated. Until then I mostly read comic books: Edward Gorey's stupendous Amphigorey and its sequels; Love and Rockets by Los Bros. Hernandez, Eightball by Dan Clowes, all of Lynda Barry's books, plus truckloads of Mad magazines and National Lampoons from the 70's and 80's. A friend of my dad's gave me all the Mad magazines -- a huge box of them, starting with Issue #1 and going all the way up chronologically until 1972. I adored them and read them every day and worshipped them and then one day I got home from school and my mother had thrown them away because she said they made me ‘too much of a smart-ass.' I like to torture her now by telling her how much they would be worth today on eBay, and how I will be denying her that dollar amount in future emergency medical expenses when she is dependent on me.

"My marriage recently dissolved, so Benicio, baby, I got an oiled bear rug and a bottle of Cold Duck and a with your name on it. Grr-wow. Come to Mami."

"I truly love miniature golf. And never stand between me and the karaoke machine."