Long Live "Dirty Dancing"

A couple of weeks ago on a hot Sunday afternoon during the heat wave, I happily sat down and put my tape (as in VHS) of the movie Dirty Dancing into our dual DVD/VHS player. Except my delight ended all too soon when the machine ate it.

I had insisted that we keep the VCR so I could watch the half dozen VHS tapes I still have. "But you never watch them," my husband argued. What could I say? I hadn't, not since I met him over four years ago, but I needed to know that I could watch When Harry Met Sally, Grease, Dirty Dancing, The Turning Point or Buffy the Vampire Slayer whenever I needed to.

This dates me, I know. Though I was very young when Grease came out and a good deal of it went over my head ("Mom, what does 'the chicks'll cream' mean?"), I was a teenager when Dirty Dancing came out. I was visiting our grandmother in Florida when I finally saw it, and it was on that trip that I finally, finally got my period at the age of fifteen. These two events, seeing Dirty Dancing and becoming a woman at last, are forever linked in my mind. 

I loved the movie and have loved it through countless viewings in the years since, even when I recognized its imperfections. It depicts Baby's sexual awakening (which I was still personally waiting for the first 20 times I watched it), and now even as a grown and married woman, it still does something to me, something akin to what I felt the first time I saw it. I feel the hope and yearning and the first flush of love because they are now part of the movie for me.

Now I don't expect everyone to love it, but I was shocked when a friend of mine, a fellow romantic as well as a former professional dancer, told me that she didn't get why people loved it so much, why it's such a cultural touchstone when it's such a silly, cheesy movie. I was shocked, until she revealed that she didn't see it when it was first released in 1987. In fact, she didn't see it until she was in her thirties. 

This made me think about how some things hit us hard because we discover them at a particular time and they imprint themselves on us. We then forever carry how we felt that first time we encountered them with us forever. The same is true with certain books we read when we were kids. I never read the Narnia books when I was a kid, and by the time I realized what I'd missed out on, it was too late to feel their magic, to believe them like I would have if I'd read them sooner.

Some of the things in Dirty Dancing went over my head when I first saw it. I didn't completely comprehend that this took place when abortion was illegal, or what that meant for everyone in the story (not to mention in the country at that time). I also hadn't known about the Catskills, and how it was a favorite vacation spot for New York Jews in the earlier part of the 20th century. Family's like Baby's went to resorts, but the movie A Walk on the Moon depicts working class Jewish families heading to the same place, only instead of resorts they got little cottages. Nothing fancy, just something away from the city. If you haven't seen A Walk on the Moon, you really should. Viggo Mortensen stars with Diane Lane and it's a smart, very sexy, bittersweet story. And Viggo is young and crazy sexy.

Speaking of Jews, I'm one, and I have decided to make the heroine in my next novel (the as yet untitled Book Three in the Sin City series) Jewish. That said, religion will be as important in this one as it is in the others, which is to say, not at all important. But it's more about having a little diversity, a slightly different culture and background to work with, and I thought that would be fun. Hence we'll be seeing more of Cheryl's friend, Beth Levine, not to mention Jason's friend, the (gentile) ER doctor Evan Hunter. They are in for some crazy times.