Memo to Myself: Never Stop Watching “Dirty Dancing”
In the past few years my friends have started making babies. It’s normal, being in our early thirties and all, but it also means they have re-assessed how they spend their time away from home. Take the movies, for example. Five years ago a 9pm showing full of graphic violence and sex would have been just fine. Now since they often tote their tots, entertainment has come to mean “a matinee that is enjoyable for young kids but has more advanced themes for us adults.”
It was after a recent conversation about “The Muppets” (all have agreed that this movie fits the ‘fun for all’ bill) that I thought about some of my go-to Sunday afternoon flicks. Would they have to be tucked away in a dark faraway place should I ever have kids?
“Dirty Dancing,” a longtime weekend favorite, immediately came to mind. It’s the first VHS I ever saw, let alone watched without my parents (thanks cousin Suzanne!). But did it have to be that way? Could my parents have given me a snack and turned it on instead of telling me it was forbidden, which of course only made me want to watch it that much more?
So I considered every part of the film—from the title itself to Patrick Swayze’s erotic man-handling of a virginal Jennifer Grey—and the more times I watched it the more I resisted sequestering it in a dank basement that I don’t currently own in the name of children I don’t yet have. Here’s why:
- Yes, the dancing may be overtly sexual, but no matter what age the viewer good rhythm is fun to watch and inspirational. (Has “Dancing with the Stars” taught us nothing?) On top of potentially piquing a kid’s desire to get a move on, Baby, Penny, and Johnny Castle have seriously tight bodies thanks to all their practicing. “Dirty Dancing” shows us that in only a few short lessons it is possible to go from beginner to still-a-beginner-but-going-to-perform-publicly-anyway status while burning a ton of calories. You can’t go wrong with that get-up-and-swish-your-hips-message
- Apparently Penny wasn’t sick with the flu! She had an abortion—a fact that went entirely unnoticed by me when I was 7. This is a perfect “parents get it but kids don’t” moment that will make the movie more meaningful for an older audience, while the younger ones will instead use their limited knowledge of life to fill-in-the-blanks. On the flip side, if you’re “a parent of the “we don’t shield our children from anything” school of thought there’s no better time to introduce the complicated topic of when life begins using Penny and Robbie’s affections for one another
- Sure tensions over Civil Rights and the Vietnam War were boiling in the 1960s, but if you were a well-off Jewish family you escaped TV dinners and Walter Cronkite-delivered news in favor of places like Kutsher’s, which offered such wholesome activities as crafting and salsa classes. “Dirty Dancing” showcases this subset of society, where plain white sneakers (Keds, the mid-century Toms with laces) ruled and messages were delivered in person, not by text. Baby’s family is a perfect case-study for a culturally-rich history lesson on the changing American family
- There are a lot of rags-to-riches stories out there (“Annie” being my favorite growing up), but this movie throws that dreamy BS in the trash. Johnny Castle is “rags” and Baby is (upper middle class) “riches”—and at the end of the movie, they’re still in the same socioeconomic position. It’s a good lesson that sometimes things don’t work out… but disappointments can be offset by an amazing dance number complete with a perfectly-timed lift, a high jump off of a stage, and impromptu back-up dancers
So no, I will never relegate “Dirty Dancing” to an out-of-the-way dusty bin should I ever spawn a few of my own. In fact I will gladly display the DVD beside copies of SpongeBob and Dora because Patrick Swayze was right.
Nobody puts Baby in the corner.
