I just sat through “Dirty Dancing.”
Not the Broadway musical, but the original movie starring Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey. I haven’t seen it from the begining to end in a long time, though I know it by heart now. I’ve seen parts of it so many times, I can quote lines. I know the backstory of the filming and the fighting between the two leads. The movie is over 20 years old.
And yet, sitting through it, I still want to get up and dance. I want Johnny to come up to my table and say, “Nobody puts Donna in a corner.” Then we go up and do the incredible dance at the end, including the lift. You know the lift – the one she’s too afraid to do. The line that makes it for me is, “You will hurt me if you don’t trust me.” Johnny says that while they’re practicing the lifts in the lake. But in the end, that’s the real point of the movie’s theme: until she trusted him completely, everything she did would hurt him. But when she did – confessing to her father about their relationship – it was wonderful.
But that’s not what makes this movie so special to me.
When the movie first premiered in 1987, I went with my college roommates, Patti and Kimberly, for Kimby’s birthday. We argued about who used whom (I was Switzerland; I thought they used each other). But after that, practically every Friday night, we piled into cars and headed to the Bremen movie theater and watched it fo $1.00. We tried to do “dirty dancing” in our dorm suite, which was pretty pitiful since we were all girls. We convinced a friend of ours (another Patti) to do a lift in the stairwell. We also debated the themes of abortion, premarital sex, lying, etc. (we were at a Christian college). But we loved the movie and the music.
So I watched the movie again tonight. And for a few moments, I was transported back to those wonderful Friday nights at the Bremen theater with my roommates and best friends. I remembered the fun, the laughter, the dancing.
We’ve all grown up and moved on. Most of us are married; some of us have kids. “Dirty Dancing” was pretty tame considering what’s out there now. And I wonder how our kids will react to the movie (especially the boys). We’re scattered across the globe and rarely keep in touch these days. And somewhere, wherever they are, “Dirty Dancing” is proably being shown on television.
And I hope that Patti, Kimby, Sherry, Wendy and Heather will sit down and watch it again. And I hope they’ll remember that wonderful time in our lives.
donnad69
