According to Mr. Matt, my mom’s hairdresser, this is a movie that will ‘stick with you.’ I agree! My sister, mom, and grandmother dragged me to this because they thought it was going to be good, I didn’t. Now I see I was wrong! It was hilarious and it had great actors whose names I actually knew and fun music and dancing.

Tracy (Nikki Blonsky; an ice cream scooper who didn’t even have to find a cockroach in a cone to get on the news!) is a girl who loves to dance despite her mother’s numerous attempts to make Tracy quit her dream of being on the Corny Collins show, a ‘60s dance show on TV in Baltimore. Tracy’s mother is played by John Travolta. He was very good at being a man in drag who hasn’t left the house since 1951. (Drag means it’s a man playing a woman.) Tracy’s dad, Wilbur (Christopher Walken) owns a joke shop and encourages Tracy to follow her dream.

Tracy loves to watch the show and dance along with her best friend, Penny, (Amanda Bynes) and swoon over a guy named Link (Zac Efron of “High School Musical”), who dances with Amber, a prissy, mean girl who wants to win the Miss Baltimore Hairspray Contest like her mother had. Her mother is now the station manager in charge of the show and she despises overweight girls and thinks that Negro Day shouldn’t even exist.

Negro day is the one day of each month that black people are allowed to dance on the show. Tracy loves Negro Day on the show, which is hosted by Motormouth Maybelle (Queen Latifah).

When one of the dancers has to go away for nine months, Tracy and Penny go to the dancer auditions to get a spot on the show. Amber and her mother laugh at Tracy because of her weight. I wanted to say to Velma, the mom, “Dude-ess! Why are you segregating these people! Don’t you know that black people and overweight people can dance too?”

The movie is quite enjoyable and does have a happy ending. Rated PG for language, suggestive content and momentary teen smoking. My sister, age 9, saw this, and unlike “Transformers,” this didn’t have any uncalled for adult sequences. In other words, my mom wasn’t embarrassed to see “Hairspray” with her mother.

***1/2

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