News4U Online

You may have recently seen the new movie starring John Travolta, Michelle Pfeiffer, Christopher Walken, Amanda Bynes, James Marsden, Queen Latifah and Brittany Snow or perhaps the older movie starring Ricki Lake, but nothing, not even John Travolta dressed up like a large and in charge woman can compare to seeing this classic on the stage. It would be like only seeing Mr. John Travolta in a pair of hot tight black jeans and greased up hair in Grease without actually ever seeing it live, the magic is only half fulfilled.

What is even more interesting is that Hairspray was based on a true show. Though Dick Clark ruled the airwaves with his timeless American Bandstand, Baltimore, Maryland, never ran American Bandstand because they produced a dance program of their own called The Buddy Deane Show. Everyone from Buddy Holly to Fats Domino made an appearance on The Buddy Deane Show to plug their newest album. According to John Waters, guest teenage dancer on The Buddy Deane Show, “you learned how to be a teenager from that show. Every day, after school, kids would run home, tune in and dance with the bedpost or refrigerator door as they watched. If you couldn’t do the Buddy Deane jitterbug, you were a social outcast. And, since a new dance was introduced practically every week, you had to watch to keep up. It was maddening: the Mashed Potatoes, the Pony, the Waddle, the Locomotion, the Bug, the Handjive, and most important, the Madison, a complicated line dance that started here [Baltimore] and later swept the country!”