Dawn Davenport

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Dawn Davenport is a fictional character from John Waters' 1974 film Female Trouble, played by the drag queen actor Divine.

[edit] Character information

Dawn Davenport is known as a "thief and a shitkicker". She is very obese and gets into trouble a lot at her all-girls high school in Baltimore, Maryland. Her two best friends are Chicklette and Concetta. When she is tattled on by another student (Mardge Skidmore) for eating a meatball sandwich "right out in class" during her history lesson, she is dubbed a "habitual liar" by her teacher Mr. Wineburger and forced to write lines.

All she wants for Christmas is a pair of black cha-cha heels and when her parents don't get them for her on Christmas morning, she knocks the tree down on her mother and shouts: "Get off me you ugly witch...I hate you ...I hate this house...and I hate Christmas!" and runs away only to be picked up by the equally obese drunk Earl Peterson (also played by Divine) and they drive to a garbage dump to have sex on a discarded, filthy mattress. (Divine had a stunt double play Earl while he played Dawn).

Three days later, she gives birth to a baby girl at the Albion Hotel. Within the next eight years, she becomes a stripper and starts arguments with her upstairs neighbor: gay-male loving, peroxide blond Ida Nelson (Edith Massey). Her little girl Taffy (now played by Hilary Taylor) is an extremely obnoxious brat who annoys her mother with her jump-rope rhymes and is beaten with a car aerial whenever she acts up.

Later, Dawn falls in with fascist fashion photographers Donald (David Lochary) and Donna Dasher (Mary Vivian Pearce) who lead her to the life as a "crime model" in their beauty salon (Le Lipsticke) where Dawn meet Gator (Michael Potter), the only straight hairdresser at the shop. They wed and later Dawn and Gator are seen making love as now-14-year-old Taffy (now played by 26-year-old Mink Stole) comes in and begins complaining. When Gator requests that she suck his dick, Taffy responds: "I wouldn't suck your lousy dick if I was suffocating and there was oxygen in your balls!"

Now, Taffy, left alone at home, becomes a strange, misanthropic child, surrounding herself with pieces of wrecked cars and reenacting gruesome auto crashes.

Dawn begins to go insane as she murders the crowd at her stage performance after strangling Taffy to death after having acid thrown in her face by Ida for making Gator leave because she had him fired.

Dawn now believes she's winning an award as she gets the electric chair, the end of her career. Her last words are "I love every fucking one of you!"