16 September 2009
Patrick Swayze (1952-2009)
)Published on September 16th, 2009 @ 10:07:04 pm, using 513 words, 477 views
When I was 17, I skipped school and took the subway uptown from Chelsea hoping to buy a book, stand in line and get to see a man up close. It must’ve been a fairly important school day cause I remember sitting in on Ms. Fitt’s biology class 1st period. I stuck around for 2nd period, homeroom and then I was off in my torn jeans. Eager and ready to dodge whatever came after - armed with a fake note from home.
The book was City of Joy - The Illustrated Story of the Film, the line was to be formed at B. Dalton Bookstore on 52nd and 5th (I wonder if it’s still there) and the man was none other than Patrick Swayze. The one I can still see dancing just by pressing a button. The one, a student of mine called the man of her life (words filtered by me to become ‘well, not really cause that would just be sad’ but then again… yeah, kind of) just the day before he passed. We’ve all had them. Men of our lives who had it in them to reach the perfect balance between being and not being - at once safer and more exciting than boys our age. Handsome, worldly, inaccessible and entirely susceptible to the reins of our imagination.
R. and I joined forces this morning to remember Dirty Dancing and were amazed and delighted by the effortlessness that it required. We managed to reproduce entire chunks of dialogue and even a very specific bodily turn of Baby’s toward the end of the movie. Uncanny, really! We talked and talked about it, laughed at ourselves, recognized the movie for what it was: downright bad.
Yes, bad. Bad dialogue, cliché after cliché, lines written to make any self-respecting viewer cringe, the God-awful sister (Ugh!)… we could go on and on…
And YET… We LOVE it to this day!
It injected our adolescence with something it craved for… whatever that may have been (just as Twilight seems to be doing now.) Ask me not what, for I’ll admit to having been a typical teenager once (IF pressed) and deeply regret any damage, inconvenience or occasional nausea caused to innocent bystanders. Questionable likes and wants all vividly there in the old memory bank, most of which make me feel like I owe the world a formal apology.
Not so with Dirty Dancing. Nuh-uh. It was a pleasure then. It’s been relegated to a guilty pleasure since but it stands as a pleasure nonetheless. It hasn’t changed considerably in these 22 years and I suspect it never will.
It didn’t make us cringe this morning. It didn’t make me cringe yesterday as I watched random scenes looking at that man, dearly wishing he hadn’t gone so soon. It takes something truly special to turn something so clearly bad from a page and endear it to so many.
Long live Johnny Castle.
R.I.P., Patrick Swayze.
This post is the creative work of Iris Watts Hirideyo and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Patrick Swayze, Dirty Dancing, autograph, City of Joy, New York, men, adolescence, passing, B. Dalton, bookstore
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