As shaved on TV.

Seattle, Memorial Day, 2002--Flew up today to offer support, love, and encouragement to my friends and collaborators Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittaman, who are trying out their new musical, based on the John Waters movie Hairspray, prior to Broadway. Marc and I have worked on a string of Bette

Midler shows and Billy Crystal Oscar medleys, Scott directed my one-man off-Broadway show, and the two of them wrote my opening number, "The Queens Behind the Scenes."

Harvey Fierstein is playing Edna Turnblad, the role created by the late, great Divine in the film. It's never easy to offer friends support, love, and encouragement, especially if their show stinks and you have to produce vague words of praise for the costumes or that cute chorus boy who does a split and fortunately lands on his padded dance belt.

This, however, is not the case with Hairspray, It's a smash from the opening number. The show is smart with heart and manages to be as brilliantly awful as a John Waters inspiration needs to be and as brilliantly boffo as a Broadway musical must be all at the Same time.

I'm sitting with John Waters, who is seeing the show for the first time. "This is like The Twilight Zone," he says during intermission, "all these characters I dreamed up in my kitchen, singing and dancing on a stage." Harvey is particularly genius. When he comes on in a voluminous red dress with hair to match, it's Lucille Beach Ball.

Los Angeles, January 2003--Somebody at Wllliam Morris thinks I could replace Harvey as Edna. I point out that first, Harvey is irreplaceable, and second, he will probably stay in that red dress until they tear the theater down around him like Gloria Swanson in those last pictures of the Roxy.

Nevertheless, somebody has to carry the John Waters message cross-country, and there might be a casting possibility there. Scarily, I would have to audition. Scarier, if I got the part, I would have to shave. It's only been 32 years. I grew the beard in 1971 for a movie that still hasn't been released. It was so much fun not shaving, I vowed that I would never shave again. But vows were meant to be broken, as the sage philosopher Jennifer Lopez has pointed out.

New York, July 2003--I got the part. I've just returned from having my beard shaved on Live With Regis and Kelly. I had all these clever, double-entendre beard remarks prepared, but one look at Regis and Kelly made me realize I would be going nowhere and at top speed.

The shaving was done by Sal, the demon barber of Mulberry Street, who spoke with the kind of Italian accent that's so thick it would leave the Sopranos standing around scratching their heads. He sliced and diced and cut me up pretty good, which I didn't realize until I noticed that Kelly Ripa was looking at me with such horror that I thought Kathie Lee must have been standing behind me.

Now I have to learn how to shave myself. And just when I'd finally gotten potty-trained.

Newark, N.J., September 2003--We just did the first full dress, makeup, hair, everything performance in front of an audience composed almost entirely of people who've seen Hairspray 400 times--including the original Broadway cast. The only thing they could laugh at was the new stuff (the creators have done some fluffing for the road) and the mishaps, and they laughed plenty at all of it. The stuff a real audience will laugh at sat there. Odd things like difficult costume changes got big cheers, just because this audience knows how hard it is to do them. What America will make of us remains a question mark.

It's going to be a big adventure taking this inherently subversive piece of work, where a fat girl gets the gorgeous guy and a fat guy plays her mother, to audiences weaned on cats and French revolutionaries and ABBA sing-alongs. Between shows, I'm going to be forced to spend at least some time looking at a face I abandoned in 1971. lt's gay heaven and hell, and with musical numbers besides.