I assume that every family with several small children has a cache of movies that tend to come out on rainy days when all those kids are cooped up inside.In my case, I am the eldest of four children who were born within five years of each other.Given that we didn’t get along terribly well when we were kids, rainy day movies needed to be unanimously approved in order to avoid complete chaos.
There were a couple of approved choices in my family, but by far, the favored contender was “Dirty Dancing.”
Let’s take a look at some of the themes and players that show up in Dirty Dancing, shall we?
Baby Houseman: recent High School graduate who plans to attend a liberal arts college for women, where she will study economics and then join the Peace Corps.
Blurring of class boundaries: Baby’s dad is a doctor.Patrick Swayze’s Johnny is a working-class dance instructor.They fight crime.They fall in love.
Botched back-alley abortions: Penny, Johnny’s dance partner has become pregnant with Robbie’s fetus!Baby lies to her father and gets the cash so that Penny can have an illegal abortion!It goes badly, and Baby’s physician father gets called in to fix it! (This is one of the many times at which it pays to not overthink things in the Dirty Dancing world.I’m not sure how Dr. Houseman “fixed” things without taking Penny to a hospital.)
Lisa: Baby’s sexually liberated older sister, who makes poor decisions about who to sleep with when she decides that Robbie is “the one.”She also has a great line about Baby not caring “who I hump, as long as they’re on the right side of the Ho Chi Minh trail!”
Sexy midnight dance parties that no one in a position of authority EVER finds out about, even though Baby managed to find them about 15 minutes into the movie.Enough said.
As you can see, “Dirty Dancing” has all the elements that you would want your young children reveling in every time they’re trapped inside by a rainy day!I’m not sure why my mother ever let us watch it, given her rather conservative political leanings, but I’m glad she did!Because although I see all of the stuff above as an adult, as a kid, “Dirty Dancing” was all about the music and dancing.
Have you ever listened to the Dirty Dancing soundtrack?It’s amazing!“She’s Like the Wind,”“Hungry Eyes,” “You Don’t Own Me,” and of course, “I’ve Had the Time of My Life.”The soundtrack of Dirty Dancing is the most 80’s version of the 60’s that has ever been created!It’s magical.Patrick Swayze sings on it.
And of course, we can’t leave out the dancing.The dancing is the hottest best part of the movie:
And of course, the grand finale, which is hands down The Best ending of any dance movie ever.
She nails the lift, you guys! I love this movie! I hear that it's raining right now in Southern California, so if you're back home, I suggest you curl up with a rainy day movie, and you'd be hard-pressed to do better than "Dirty Dancing."
Feeling guilty about liking a song is dumb. Sometimes I eat chocolate frosting right out of the container with a spoon and I don't feel guilty about that either. You know why? Because it's good. One of my very favorite things to do is to get in my car on a day when I have nothing to do and drive down to the beach. I don't necessarily want to get out at the beach, I just want to drive down PCH for as long as I can until my feet start to fall asleep from driving. I stop off at the Secret Spot in Huntington Beach for a PB&J smoothie with no bananas and then I take the long way home. When I'm driving in the car, I like to have all the windows down and I like to play the radio at a loud volume. I sing along at the top of my lungs and pretend that I'm the star of a music video. Sometimes it's a really happy video and I'm smiling and declaring my independence at the top of my lungs and other times, I'm angst-filled. I bite my nails during instrumental breaks and look longingly out at the horizon. It's truly one of the purest joys in my life. So I don't care that much that sometimes people look into my car and judge me because I'm blasting uncool songs.
Do you have any toast? Because these are the jams.
Fefe Dobson, Everything
I bought this CD before mp3s were the thing and I'm pretty sure that this is the ONLY song that I listened to on it...but it got so much play that I'm sure it was worth the $9.99 I probs paid for it at Target. I totally dig the way that this song starts out kind of soft and whispery in the beginning when she's talking about how sometimes she gives into her sadness. SOMETIMES I GIVE INTO MY SADNESS TOO. When I give into my sadness, I usually curl up in bed and do naps or watch marathons of Cold Case or whatever is on TV, but this song makes me think that instead of giving into the sadness, I can issue an ultimatum...and then the music picks up to back up that choice. Listen boy. If you're ready to be my everything, you better step the fuck up because I'm not going to wait for you forever...this time. Bonus points for this video too because it stars the cast of The Perfect Score, a movie that I also do not feel guilty about watching.
We The Kings, All Again for You
OH MAN THIS SONG. Okay, first, just listen to it. Have you ever heard it? I'm guessing you probably haven't. And so, I have to confess that I was listening to this song obsessively right around the time that I was reading the Twilight saga (which I pretty much despised) and I was maybe contemplating how I could improve the storyline between Bella and Jacob, which I think SMeyer totally screwed up. Listen, the first line of this song is I couldn't sleep last night / I walked alone / on the beach where we always used to roam...in my head, it will always be about Jacob and Bells on the beach at La Push. And I HATE that this song makes me think fondly of those two, but this is their song and for me it will always be all about the part of the book when Jacob imprints on Bella*, but then decides to let her choose who she will love in order to show her that he really does love her and then in the end, she decides that dying for love is stupid and she wants to grow out of the whiney, selfish teenager she is and have an adult relationship with someone who isn't a sparkly cupcake-breathed dead guy.
*I know this part of the book doesn't exist anywhere but in my heart.
Michelle Branch, Goodbye to You
I discovered this song at the end of the Buffy episode called "Tabula Rasa." MBranch appears at the Bronze and while she's wailing out this jam, Willow and Tara call it quits and Buffy and Spike do some hot secret makeouts which we all know are the best kind, espesh when they are accompanied by feelings of failure and self-loathing. In my own life, this song is totally the story of my breakups with the first boy I loved...all the angst I felt at finally walking away, and of desperately wanting him to want me still even though I knew that it wasn't going to work. SO MUCH ANGST. And I dig the stubbornness. It does hurt to want everything and nothing at the same time, and I did want what was his and what was mine. I want you but I'm not giving in this time. In my car, I always manufactured some fake tears while singing that part. I am REALLY good at music videos.
The Wreckers, Cigarettes
This song is about ending a relationship that sucked and knowing that you probably stayed with it for too long. I personally think The Wreckers are a good band so I'm not even sure there's anything here to feel guilty about AND YOU KNOW THAT I DON'T, but I'm sure the number of times I've listened to this song on repeat^infinite is supposed to be embarrassing? It's all about jumping in the car with a pack of cigarettes and nowhere in particular to go, something that I did a lot at one time in my life. I love the chorus. someday maybe somebody will love me like i need / and someday i won't have to prove it / somebody will see / all my worth but until then i'll do just fine on my own / with my cigarettes and this old dirt road. I know people think that smoking is gross, and I don't really do it anymore but I think there's something sexy about the independence in this song...I'm alright on my own and I'm going to smoke these cigarettes and what are you gonna tell me about it? NOTHING. *smoke smoke smoke* (And I like to music video this one because I can use the cigarettes as a prop, which just gives me so many more options when I'm emoting in the front seat.)
Ashlee Simpson, Pieces of Me
I used to watch her reality show and think that if I had my own reality show, I would want to be like her. I love singing this song. It's so fun and when she sings OOOOOOOH, IT FEELS LIKE I CAN FINALLY REST MY HEAD ON SOMETHING REAL / I LIKE THE WAY THAT FEELS, I like the way it feels too. (Side note, when I was in the 7th grade, I had A GIANT crush on her guitar player, who you can see standing to the right of her in most of the band shots. He played Pop Warner football with my brother and I was a cheerleader and I used to secretly hope that he would notice me when we did our special cheer for them after their games. Later, when we were in high school, he was in a band with this guy from my school and they played at our Sadie Hawkins dance, which had a cartoon theme and he was dressed like Theodore from The Chipmunks and I was really into it. About four years ago, I was next to him on the treadmill at 24 Hour Fitness and I kept stealing glances at him as he ran, thinking MAYBE JUST MAYBE this is my moment.)
So. I have a confession to make. Although I have a MA in English Literature, my favorite books are often somewhat less than.....academic. So let us talk for a moment about Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park, a book that I have destroyed four paperback copies of through numerous re-reads.
I read Jurassic Park for the first time when I was in fourth grade. I was an "advanced reader," and I had a really supportive teacher who occasionally had Silent Reading parties on Fridays. We were welcome to curl up anywhere in the classroom, bring a pillow, blanket, whatever, and just read for the entire day. For a socially-awkward, bookishly-inclined kid, this was pretty much the ideal situation. My jam for nearly all of those silent reading parties was Jurassic Park.
Let's talk about all the reasons why Jurassic Park is the shit:
Science is cool, kids! The first few times I read this book, I had to do it sitting next to an encyclopedia. I learned how to pronounce "deoxyribonucleic acid" from this book. I learned what an embryo is. I learned more about genetics from Jurassic Park than I learned in AP Biology in high school.
The kids. Re-reading Jurassic Park as an adult, I have less resonance with this point, but at the time, I was totally enamored of it. Tim and Lexi? They were competent! Lex was a sports nut, and Tim was a proto-hacker! They were complex, well-rounded characters, and it was the first time that I had ever encountered a child that was written in that way. I really loved seeing characters that I could relate to at that age: kids are more complex than most children's or YA lit gives them credit for.
Heck yeah dinosaurs! There's a great line from Dr. Grant's perspective in this book that talks about how children take power over these giant skeleton fossils in museums by learning to call them by name, like spells or prayers. I had dino-fever as a kid, and although I had mostly outgrown it by the time I was old enough to read this book, Jurassic Park triggered a nostalgia that I didn't yet have a name for. Plus, dinosaurs are cool. Everyone knows that. Speaking of cool....
Ian Malcolm. Now, I'll admit that my love of this character is irrevocably sealed by my love of his hotness characterization in the film. Malcolm's dialogue is one of the best things about Jurassic Park. He was my first snappy comeback regarding whether or not I enjoyed watching sports: "Grown men swatting little balls, while the rest of the world pays money to applaud." I mercilessly plagiarized this line in high school persuasive essays. I never got called on it, due to either (inexcusible!) ignorance of Jurassic Park on the part of my teachers, or (understandable) admiration at my mad quoting skillz. I promise that I learned mad citation skillz later in life, Mr. Donde. Malcolm has the bitchiest, sassiest, smartest one-liners, he wore all-black (for efficient heat radiation!), he was a cutting-edge (for the time) mathematician, and he had a thing for Dr. Sattler's legs (which I totally understood a few years later.) I basically wanted to be him between the fourth and eighth grades. And then I wanted to be the Vampire Lestat (definitely more about that later.)
