'Hairspray' Is an Aerosol Version of the Real Baltimore

BALTIMORE The city on the bay is awash -- the citizens would say "awarsh" -- with local heroes this week. The great Cal Ripken is about to enter baseball's Hall of Fame and Cal Love is so dense the vapors bring moisture to your eyes and clear your complexion. But there's more than enough love to go around, and another load of it is being dumped on another Baltimorean of transcendental grace, bad boy (but in a good way) director John Waters.

The dapper, ironic iconoclast is enjoying a cone of white-hot attention as a big, gaudy movie version of the Broadway musical version of his 1988 pop art confection "Hairspray" opens today.

These gentlemen have much in common, and it's not an ability to go to the left and make a backhand stop and a long throw, though it would be highly amusing to see the elegant wisp that is Waters try such a thing, especially in his lime-green shoes, socks and slacks. The salient point, however, is that they, and they alone, kept what the locals derisively call "Charm City" on the national map at a time when it had been deserted by its football team and much of its industry, was plagued with bitter, pointless dope crime and seemingly about to drop off into Toledohood or Dubuqueism.

Other similarities: Both had skill but not much range; both were good-size, gangly fellows; both found a niche where they excelled and performed feats of grace hitherto unseen. Both were locals; neither left town to make it big nationally. Both were gifted not only with talent but with charisma. They attracted followers by the bushelful and always brought a little sizzle into the venue with them. Cal stood for decency, duty, endurance, fair play and honesty. John stood for exactly the opposite, with a good dose of sexual perversity thrown in. Each achieved an easeful maturity that was even more charming than they'd had in youth. Each moved aside willingly and with good manners when the time came for younger usurpers to take center stage; if embittered, they kept their beefs quiet.

And each did something no one else had done before. Ripken played in 2,632 consecutive major league games; Waters got a guy to eat dog poop on camera.

Of such sublime achievements is greatness made. But it must also be said that each, in a gentle and unintended way, perpetuated a fraud, represented an unattainable ideal, offered dreams in a city of squalor. That is evident on sports talk radio, which has pretty much turned into all Cal, all the time, a river of adoration, where the shortstop's limited range and less than stellar lifetime batting average go largely unmentioned. It was also evident Wednesday night at the arty and beloved Charles Theatre, just above the train station and the world's ugliest statue, where the half-green, all-rosy Waters appeared as the central icon in a ritual as old as Hollywood itself: the premiere.

For geezers, it brought back a few memories, and the contrast between then and now was jarring.

It so happened that I covered the first Waters premiere in Baltimore, not for "Hairspray" in '88 but for his earlier bust-out, "Polyester," in 1981. ("Hairspray" premiered at another venerable Baltimore theater, the Senator, on Feb. 16, 1988.)

Immediate differences:

1981: No TV cameras.

2007: 11 TV cameras.

1981: Waters wore black.