The BobboSphere: Don't believe everything you think.

Tracy Turnblad and the gang are back in this latest version of the John Waters classic about desegregation in Baltimore, Maryland during the early 1960's. Hairspray was originally a 1980's film starring Ricki Lake as Tracy Turnblad and then turned into a hit Broadway musical. The 2007 film is based more on the musical than the John Waters original film. Waters does make a brief cameo in the new movie as a flasher pervert. Anyone who has seen his Pink Flamingos will appreciate the irony.

The story of Hairspray was based on the real life civil rights protests at Baltimore's Gwynn Oak Amusement Park and at the Buddy Dean Show, a dance program modeled after Dick Clark's more famous American Bandstand.

The 2007 version of Hairspray is if anything, more wickedly subversive than its 1987 ancestor. It's set in the early 1960's remember, when mass protest was just getting started. The message is that when the time is right, it only takes a few brave visionaries to get a movement rolling. The heroes are Baltimore's black working class led by the Queen Latifah character with the irrepressible Tracy Turnblad providing inspiration. The villain is the wealthy blonde station manager played by Michelle Pheiffer. She  leaves a perfumed slime trail wherever she goes

OK, the movie does cop out once, The Christopher Walken character never does kiss John Travolta in drag.It's not a perfect world or a perfect movie.

Real-life desegregation was not as joyful, mischievous or as slapstick as Hairspray suggests. But then it's a musical. Scottish villages don't appear every 100 years as in Brigadoon and an escape from Nazism wasn't normally a accompanied by a score from Rogers and Hammerstein as in The Sound of Music.

I grew up in Maryland, but in the DC area rather than Baltimore. I got a little teary when Queen Latifah leads the protest march through Black Baltimore to bring about the changes that Tracy Turnblad dreams about. At first I was puzzled by my reaction. Then I understood. These actors were playing people I knew. Hairspray was set in 1962. Many Baltimore teenagers from that time would eventually make the trip to College Park. Some would the  join the University of Maryland Black Student Union(BSU) and the Students for a Democratic Society(SDS) and continue the fight. Indeed some of the most militant people I knew on campus were from Baltimore.

I thought of UM SDS members  Debbye Stone and Marc Steiner celebrating their inter-racial marriage. Debbye was the first Black female to live in a College Park dormitory. Debbye's mom had to color in the bride's face on top of the wedding cake because they couldn't find one manufactured the way that Marc and Debbye really looked.

Other Baltimore teenagers would get a get a little older and organize the Baltimore Chapter of the Black Panther Party as well as the Mother Jones Community Information Center, raise the cry of power to the people, and try to build a multi-racial revolutionary movement.

Things did not quite turn out as planned either in College Park or in Baltimore, but Maryland was never the same again.

I hope people flock to Hairspray and learn that you are never too young or too old to stick it to The Man (or The Woman) and that dreams have a power to make real things happen.