Dirty Dancing

I tagged along to Nicole’s visit to her cardiologist yesterday and he had nothing but good news. Healthy heart, healthy arteries. The uncomfortable and unnerving heart anomalies are harmless, should disappear in a few months.

You might recall that all the health questions began at the New Beverly Theater last summer (July 13, 2007 - hold that thought). I didn’t manage to get back to the New Beverly until last month to see a midnight showing of “Dirty Dancing” which I had never seen before.

Like any sane person, I was deeply disappointed by the movie. I was honestly surprised at how bad it was, no one had warned me. As for the experience – seeing a 1987 artifact (for the first time) in a theater with a live audience of both fans and braying neigh-sayers in L.A. at midnight – memorable is not the word. It was a rollicking good time.

Before the show began, the theater manager addressed the audience. He may or may not have been the son of the former owner, Sherman Torgan. According to Reuters, “Torgan, who founded and ran the last remaining full-time revival cinema in Los Angeles, died Wednesday [July 18, 2007] of a heart attack while bicycling in Santa Monica.”

The manager told of future midnight shows and asked if anyone in the audience had never seen “Dirty Dancing” before. I and perhaps a couple others raised our hands and prompted audience murmurings of “Virgins…” I had heard a young gal (about as old as the movie) telling someone on her phone that she had seen the movie a hundred times but never in a theater, only on video, DVD, or cable TV.

A high point of the evening was the trailers before the film. I can’t remember all of them, but they included films in the same genre as "Dirty Dancing" like “Ice Castles” (1978) and the Village People vehicle “Can’t Stop the Music” (1980). Clearly (and perhaps fortunately) these won’t be coming to the New Beverly anytime soon, but the trailers were pretty funny.

So, “Dirty Dancing”. During the black and white, slow motion opening credits with the Ronettes song “Be My Baby”, I thought to myself that it might be a good movie. Moments later it turned out that Jennifer Grey’s character’s name was Baby. Ridiculous. If I had seen this movie in 1987, I would have at least been watching a hit movie from current popular culture. On the other side of the scale is a cluster of nightcrawlers groaning and cracking up, most of who knew that this was going to be a terrible movie.

In the film there are at least a half dozen indignant, square-jawed reaction shots of Patrick Swayze each time he is confronted with insult, class prejudice, general injustice, sexual arousal. Each instance was a cue for a wag somewhere near the back of the theater to murmur with urgency “Swayze…!” Yes, it eventually got a little old but it was funnier than I’m able to describe it (as in “You had to be there!”) and damn it, it made laugh during this freak of cinema.

The ‘60s music helped, but the rest of the music was insane. “She’s Like the Wind”? Sung by Patrick Swayze?

And certainly the moment that got the biggest laugh came when Patrick Swayze gave the out-of-nowhere line: “Nobody puts Baby in a corner!”

It was only weeks after my return to the New Beverly Theater that we learned the news of Patrick Swayze’s pancreatic cancer. Says Nicole, “That place is cursed.”

I hope I never see “Dirty Dancing” again, but this singular instance was probably the only reasonable opportunity for me to enjoy the experience. I had the time of my life.