BUBBLES IN TROUBLE

On the way to Paradise, hang a right at Intercourse and you’ll find Whoopee—Whoopee, Pennsylvania, a bucolic town about to be disrupted in every way possible by ace cosmetologist Bubbles Yablonsky, who’s trading her blow-dryer for a pitchfork as she goes undercover to convince sourball editor Dix Notch to give her a permanent berth on the Lehigh News-Times. She’s tracking an exclusive on the Hochstetter twins, a couple of good old Amish boys picked up on I-78 for grand theft auto. But her interest in Lancaster County is personal as well, since it’s also the childhood home of Bubbles’s friend Janice Kramer, a runaway bride whose Uncle Elwood happened to turn up dead in his posh condo pretty much at the same time as Janice was stranding Mickey Sinkler at the altar. And in this week of the Pickle Fest, Bubbles’s mom, Lulu, and Genevieve, her musket-toting sidekick, decide to tag along—a lucky thing, since their timeshare gives Bubbles the perfect place to squirm out of her apron and back into her favorite tube-top preparatory to bombing down the Lincoln Highway giving hot-oil treatments to calves, flagging down bulldozers with her bra, stopping land-grab schemes, smooching with sexy photojournalist Steve Stiletto, and, yes, solving both crimes.

Strohmeyer’s second is even more over the top than her debut (Bubbles Unbound, 2001), but with the funniest moments reserved for bit players like Genevieve. Instead of tickling gently, Bubbles smacks you with humor as broad as a whoopee pie in the kisser.