The year is 1988, and this podcast is a dedication going out to all the Dreamlanders and all the freaks.

The movie, hairspray.

Hello everyone and welcome to

I am Paul Sheer joined as always by my movie cohort Amy Nicholson.

We love movies, we love talking about movies, we love drawing connections to classic films,

looking at these films that are part of our culture and asking,

are they as good as we remember or do we just remember them that way?

Which is a very loaded question for an episode that is about watching my childhood favorite film that you have not seen.

Oh Paul, I will say nothing, I will not interrogate you yet.

I will just say we are doing the John Waters hairspray, a movie that has shaped me in every single way.

And when I watch this movie, it's almost like understanding myself a little bit better.

I feel kind of like this is a podcast episode where I'm just going to like walk in front of everybody

and like take off my shirt and say to dad, this is who I am as a person and now I am revealed.

So a little scary, there's only a few movies that I feel this way about.

Well, I will keep my opinion to myself until we get into the main episode,

but I will tell you that we are going to go on a deep dive and talk about the characters that make up this John Waters movie.

Not only we're going to kind of explore the tragedy of divine, but also the impact that divine had,

as well as get into some of these bizarre pairings of Sonny Bono and Debra Harry and Piasadora and Rico Kasek.

I mean, this movie in many ways is John Waters' most mainstream film,

but is it is most subversive because we don't even see what he was trying to do?

I love this question because this is definitely a movie that cupped up on me.

That as many times as I've watched it, it has changed and evolved under my own feet.

...