Dirty Dancing (1987)

directed by Emile Ardolino

Sarah Sweeney

I never fantasized about my future wedding so much as I dreamed of being whisked away on vacation by a hunky dance instructor.

Growing up in the late ’80s, Dirty Dancing was my favorite movie and I remember long summer days sprawled in front of the TV, hypnotized by Patrick Swayze. I wanted to crawl inside his muscle shirt and lick his collarbone, to feel one trickle of Swayze sweat on my skin seconds before he spun me dizzy and breathless across the stage into our cinematic ever after.

Dirty Dancing was just one in a collection of movies that served as a salve for my erratic family life. My drunk father was chronically ill with Crohn’s disease, and my mother—with her burgeoning career, sports car, and reclaimed pre-baby bod—was reluctantly a part of it all. Kids can sense their parents’ misery and so did I, running wild with shoplifting, smoking, and digging deeper into movies like Grease, Labyrinth, Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead, the John Hughes canon. Hollywood was my fail-proof getaway, its stars the unlikely caretakers who taught me about life and love while my real parents warred and bemoaned their fates.

I also worshiped movies because I grew up wanting to be a star, whether a soprano at the Met or a bombshell heiress-murderer on a daytime soap. I craved a life that mimicked the drama and excitement found in film and TV and believed anything could be solved with a perfectly timed monologue or by spontaneously bursting into song.

“Don’t make a scene,” my mother used to chide me. “Your life isn’t a movie!”

Ever the dramatist, I’d whip my hair while turning on a heel, declaring, “Oh, yes, it is!”

From weddings to grocery stores, I put on a show everywhere I went, which often landed me in trouble, especially at school. To quell my bad behavior, my parents and teachers diverted me into theater. I loved attention, that much we all knew was true, but I needed a healthy outlet for it, they told me. On nights and weekends, I practiced lines with my mother and found solace on stage, where I could channel my frustrations with school and my parents’ crumbling relationship into something that felt transcendent.

As a family, we religiously watched Star Search, and for years I begged my mother to move us to Los Angeles so I could audition. I remember watching a young LeAnn Rimes belting on TV, turning to my parents and sobbing, “That could be me!” My mother once offered a consoling maybe. I grasped onto any sliver of possibility, any ounce of hope.

But I knew I was trapped in North Carolina for the foreseeable future. Seething with small-town desperation, my imagination became my most potent escape, movies my most trusted confidants. From a tortured Winona Ryder pining for Joe the convent caretaker in Mermaids to Anna Chlumsky singing “Wedding Bell Blues” to her English teacher in My Girl, I gravitated toward plucky boy-crazy heroines who I might’ve been friends with in real life, and the troubled yet poetic men who captivated them.

Nothing spoke to me quite like Dirty Dancing and Swayze as the unforgettable Johnny Castle, a brooding but good-hearted dance instructor employed at a resort called Kellerman’s. As a kid, I conflated Johnny and Swayze, too naïve and awestruck by Swayze’s seamless portrayal to consider the possibility that they were not one and the same. With his supple lips and eyes that conveyed more meaning than his words, Swayze/Johnny became my personal prototype of what a man could and should be. Tough but vulnerable. Confident but self-aware. Flawed but trying.

I was equally obsessed with Baby and the everyday appeal of actress Jennifer Grey. In Baby, I recognized myself: a daring but altruistic rulebreaker; pretty, but not outlandishly so. While I lacked the grace and refinement of more affluent families around town, I was preternaturally smart and, like the ambitious Baby, who was headed to Mount Holyoke in the fall, I eventually understood that my one-way ticket out of North Carolina and the life I craved wasn’t ever going to come from Star Search, but the sheer force of my grit, and only that.

*

The first man I ever loved wasn’t Patrick Swayze, but Davy Jones, the crooning British heart of the Monkees.

Nickelodeon syndicated The Monkees on Sunday mornings in the mid-80s, and I can still see my parents making breakfast in the kitchen while Davy frolicked across the TV screen, too pretty to be a man, yet he was—all 5’3” of him. I was smitten.

I was also smitten by the show’s rabid horde of girl-fans who stalked Davy on city streets and chased him down California beaches, desperate to maul him with smooches. These are my people, I remember thinking.

I begged my father into ordering Monkees LPs from infomercials and played them to scratchy death on my Big Bird turntable. Meanwhile, inside our sunlit carport, we housed a pack of stray kittens—Mickey, Mike, Peter, and my Davy.

My mother had also once loved Davy, a fact I marveled at as I grew up, as though our shared affinity for one man might’ve been passed down to me the way my brother and I inherited her turquoise eyes and arched brows. She’d even met Davy once, at a hotel in Greensboro on July 12, 1967, just two weeks shy of 14. The Monkees were the opening act for Jimi Hendrix at the Greensboro Coliseum, and my mother had cleverly sniffed out the band’s accommodations and materialized there hours before showtime.

I now know well the giddy, delirious feeling my mother must’ve had when she found Davy drinking beer and lounging with the band by the hotel’s outdoor pool. She’d stalked an international teen heartthrob without any advanced technological aid. Yet for all the spunk and resourcefulness it took to get her there, my mother carried little more than a bottle of Coppertone, which Davy dutifully autographed.

But if my mother’s taste in men was hereditary, then her dogged pursuit of them was, too.

One of my earliest memories takes place in kindergarten: I’m upside down on the monkey-bars, my dress gathered at my shoulders, my She-Ra panties intentionally exposed for the playground boys to see. Even then, boys were fascinating, a target to thrill and taunt, the perfect vessels for my dramatic machinations.

As I grew up, these antics intensified. My friend Evie and I spent countless listless evenings prank calling boys from our middle school, then boys from high school, and even the occasional downtrodden rock star (sorry, Paul Westerberg and Blake Schwartzenbach!) or campus gym teacher, all the while camouflaging our voices and whispering inanities, from the sexual to the downright absurd.

Dirty Dancing certainly didn’t make me boy-crazy, but when I look back at some of my shenanigans, I can see how the film helped to reinforce my innately theatrical impulses while shaping my romantic consciousness. And I’m not the only one. In the past decade alone, much has been written about the film, including praise for its progressive treatment of abortion, economic stratification, and women’s sexuality. A 2010 Jezebel article by Irin Carmon called Dirty Dancing “the greatest movie of all time.”

Carmon interviewed screenwriter Eleanor Bergstein for the piece, and she said of Baby: “I conceived of her and made her a fighter. A girl who just won’t give up ... and who doesn’t expect the world to be handed to her. There’s a lot she doesn’t understand, but she works very, very hard.”

Not a lot has been said of Baby’s calculated romantic pursuits, though. While her demure sister Lisa preens and waits to be courted, Baby discards the longstanding romantic attitude that men should do the pursuing. And though she’s infantilized (her real name is Frances) and painted the asexual good girl whose intellect surpasses frilly courtships, Baby is assertive, and Baby is sexual. She meets Johnny once and zeroes in on him from the start.

In the now-legendary I carried a watermelon scene, Baby is a naive interloper in the blue-collar world of Kellerman’s staffers, who maintain a choreographically raunchy and employees-only district somewhere in the Kellerman’s hinterlands. But Johnny spots her and decides to integrate her into the resort’s underbelly, if momentarily.

With a crook of his finger and a sultry smirk, Johnny shucks Baby from her protective shell and teaches her how to bump, grind, and twirl within seconds. And that’s all it takes: seconds. What happens next is that Baby forces herself into Johnny’s life by facilitating an illegal abortion for his dance partner Penny, then takes her place in a neighboring resort’s dance showcase so Penny can undergo the procedure that night. Baby and Johnny spend days practicing dance moves, solidifying their chemistry, and their romance eventually culminates with an epic dance-off seared into our collective pop culture consciousness.

*

During my junior year of high school, my creative writing class attended High Point University’s Phoenix Literary Festival, a dayslong conference that lured promising writers of all ages from across the state. For two years in a row I won the top prize for writing in the 18-and-younger category but, more importantly, I met a boy.

Jackson could’ve been the prototype for My So-Called Life’s Jordan Catalano. The festival had ended on a high note, but after exchanging numbers and returning to our respective hometowns—Jackson in Mt. Airy, the town famous for producing Andy Griffith—we’d spoken on the phone just once. But that simply wasn’t good enough for me. If I believed in anything, it was that men were invitations, doorways to stage elaborate overtures to chart our cinematic course.

Skipping school was as much a part of my routine as scrubbing my face raw with apricot St. Ives, and one morning I decided I needed to pay a visit to Jackson in Mt. Airy.

“But how?” my friend Whitney asked. “Isn’t he at school?”

I thought for a minute, then I had it: “We’ll pretend to be exchange students who want to tour the school!”

As an aspiring actress, I could pull off a menu of foreign accents, while Whitney was fluent in German thanks to a summer abroad. We hauled ass to Mt. Airy in my lilac Corolla and a few hours later, in the parking lot of Jackson’s high school, we signed off on the plan: Whitney was now Hannah from Munich, I was Bridget from London.

Mt. Airy is the epitome of a small Southern town and because it was unlikely that the high school had any precedent for this, we were treated like world diplomats, teenaged VIPs. With a snap of his fingers, the principal readily summoned the student body president to conduct our official campus tour. It was just before lunchtime when she paraded us down hallways, through classrooms, and into the cafeteria, where everyone soon convened. Whitney spotted Jackson ahead of me and tugged my sleeve.

He looked horrified when he saw us. That should’ve been enough to realize that pretending to be a foreign exchange student to get facetime with Jackson was outrageous, but it somehow wasn’t.

A month later, I turned up at his school dance where he was again perplexed (frightened?) to see me in the flesh. But I chose not to view his reaction as a bad thing; instead, I rationalized his bewilderment into amazement. He’d never met anyone quite like me! Those small-town girls lacked imagination. I was brassy, devoted, the real thing. When he told me to meet him behind the school, I hastily zoomed around back, parked next to some dumpsters, and imagined the steamy dry hump session to come.

Only Jackson never showed. After an hour of waiting, I motored to the front of school to discover that the dance was over. Plastic cups rattled across the parking lot. The moon lolled overhead. It didn’t once occur to me that what I’d done might be considered too much. Making aggressive and dramatic plays for love was something I considered heroic.

I couldn’t understand where I’d gone wrong in my chase for Jackson because Dirty Dancing had helped cement the idea that women who pursued their romantic interests without abandon or inhibition got both the guy and an amazing love story, too. In my version of Jackson’s school dance, we would’ve floated across that scuffed gymnasium to some schmaltzy ’90s power ballad and given the kids something to remember.

Unlike my parents who’d reluctantly left behind their hedonist ’70s glory days and settled into a bitter malaise of work and parenthood, I was certain that I could do it all and have it all. That my life would never resemble the humdrum spectacle of theirs. And as my desire to break out heightened over the years, the ozone layer between reality and art continued to erode, and from Dirty Dancing sprung a blueprint for my life, what I deemed the ultimate fantasy: meeting the love of my life on vacation.

*

In 2011, when I was 28 and on a vacation to Cozumel with my then-boyfriend Paul, it happened.

Over the course of an afternoon snorkeling cruise and a few Tecate Lights, I fell for my charismatic tour guide, Eduardo. We’d later agree that it was love at first sight. I’d finally stepped into my very own version of Dirty Dancing, and it had to play out.

Like Baby, I worked very, very hard. Six months after meeting Eduardo, I returned to Mexico and consummated our international love affair. Then I broke up with Paul, took a sabbatical from work, and moved to Cozumel. And for a little while, I finally knew what it felt like to have that magic, exultant kind of love, the kind you see in movies and think, My life is incomplete without it.

Love like that is rare, to be sure, and in romantic movies, love like that happens because women are frequently the North Stars on a man’s personal journey. We transform men into better versions of themselves, working as foils to reflect their faults and sometimes their abhorrent behavior back to them. And our emotional labor and sacrifice are almost always powerful enough to transform any man, to call him back from the howling dogs of his lesser self.

In Pretty in Pink, quirky blue-collar Andie (Molly Ringwald) crosses social lines and provokes Blaine (Andrew McCarthy) to question his insular, yuppie social circle after feeling shame for pursuing her. They break up, of course, before Blaine ultimately shirks the preppy crowd and confesses his love for Andie during—where else?!—senior prom. In Pretty Woman, sex worker Vivian (Julia Roberts) inspires a cynical Edward (Richard Gere) to seek more from life than hollow friendships and billion-dollar business deals. Only after she dismisses his proposal to be his full-time “beck and call girl”—“I want the fairy tale,” she declares—does Edward realize that his life is nothing without her. Even with his fear of heights, he scales the castle walls of her gritty Hollywood apartment to win her back. His cynicism is dead—long live the romantic hero!

As if Baby hadn’t already done enough for Johnny, she falls on the sword for him next, alibiing him for the theft of some guests’ wallets, torching her veil of virtue and virginity along the way. Johnny marvels at Baby’s bravery—she’s defied her family, Kellerman’s, social convention, the law, and bedded the staff in a matter of days.

“I’ve never known anyone like you,” he tells Baby. “You think you can make the world better.…You’re not scared of anything.”

But beneath his dancing prowess and detrimental sexiness is a man on a wire, a man whose economic circumstance forces him into trysts with the resort’s “bungalow bunnies” for extra cash, a man who wants to be as noble as Baby’s physician father—who saves Penny after her botched abortion—if only he believed anyone might take him seriously.

Despite Baby’s alibi, Johnny is fired from Kellerman’s anyway. In their goodbye scene, Johnny loads his belongings into his Chevy while Baby watches stoically. “She’s Like the Wind” churns softly in the background.

“Guess we surprised everybody,” Baby says.

“Yes, we did,” he sighs. Then, after a long beat: “I’ll never be sorry.”

He kisses Baby one last time and drives away, seemingly forever.

The scene might easily be corny, but it’s bittersweet. Both Baby and Johnny seem resigned that their relationship has run its course, that the cruel forces of capitalism and conservatism are far too powerful for their love, that those summer weeks they shared were ephemeral, magical, too illicit to last. Baby has college in the fall and after that, the Peace Corps? A career in international law? A seat in the Senate? She’s going places, as they say, and her path just doesn’t realistically converge with Johnny’s. He’ll tour the dance circuit for a few more years before a knee injury forces him into the union. They’ll never see each other again.

But we know that the most realistic outcome doesn’t happen. Johnny returns for Baby and the two dance the night away to “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life.” Dancing is the only way he knows how to be brave, and it’s as much his breakout moment as it is a way to prove Baby’s efforts weren’t in vain. Here was a man who so admired his partner’s verve and moral compass that he accepted them as personal challenges, and finally stood up to the man—Baby’s father and Kellerman’s, too.

“Nobody puts Baby in a corner,” Johnny famously announces before leading Baby onstage. As a kid watching him lift Baby into the air in front of her family, friends, and Kellerman’s guests, I instinctively understood that whatever future personal or professional glory might arrive for Baby no longer mattered. This was the time of her life. The thing she’ll compare all future things to. The moment that changes her forever.

But the moment also changed me forever. For so long, that dancing finale was the very image of what I craved for myself, what I viewed as the only thing that mattered and would ever matter: that a man might someday return for me and lift me into the air on the strength of his love and bravery. I’d spend years fixated on fantasy and waiting around for men to change, staving off the creeping recognition that no partner would ever rescue me from my problems and from the mundanity of life because I wasn’t ready to admit or accept that I needed to rescue myself. That I could have the movie, but only if I was the Patrick Swayze of my own life.

After upending my entire life to be with him, Eduardo and I broke up. He was moody and possessive, and all my efforts, pleas for therapy, and attempts to prove how much I loved him never materialized into the dramatic turnabout I’d expected. Love always wins in the movies, but my romantic ideology relied on the belief that the real world operated that way, too. I always wanted to be the girl crying at the airport until I was the girl crying at the airport, because the movie was over and without a last-minute grand gesture. No Eduardo running through the tourist throng, wailing my name, begging me not to go.

There was only a concerned Midwestern mom patting my back. “You OK, hun?” she cooed. Heartbeat filled my ears and snot dripped from my nose. I could barely form a sentence, but she nodded, fishing around her purse and handing me a tissue as if to say, I know it hurts, but get yourself together and get on this goddamn plane.

All these years later, I don’t know how I did it.

But even now, when I watch Dirty Dancing, part of me is still that girl in North Carolina. Still a believer.

Sarah Sweeney is the author of the essay collection Tell Me If You’re Lying. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, Hobart, Oxford American, the Boston Globe, the Rumpus, Gay magazine, and elsewhere. She just finished a second book about Swayze, movies, and men. Find her online at www.sarah-sweeney.com and on Instagram @itssarahsweeney.