Why "Dirty Dancing" is the best girl movie ever

Unlike passive Katey, who spends "Havana Nights" either allowing or not allowing Javier to touch her, Baby is the one who initiates the affair with Johnny. "It's like she decided that she's going to be a seductress even though she's an ugly duckling," says Susanna Daniel, 28, a writer in Madison, Wis. Or, as Baby herself puts it the night she goes to Johnny's cabin, in the most thrilling lines of the movie, "Me? I'm scared of everything ... Most of all, I'm scared of walking out of this room and never feeling the rest of my whole life the way I feel when I'm with you." Then, giving legions of teenage girls the erroneous impression that a confession of love is usually a good idea leading to a positive outcome, Baby says, "Dance with me," and the next thing you know, as "Cry To Me" plays scratchily in the background, her peasant blouse is pressed to Johnny's bare tan chest, and his big tan hands are gripping her butt through her white jeans.

Yes, there are people who hate "Dirty Dancing," or who find it cheesy. But the rest of us not only don't change the dial when "She's Like the Wind" comes on the radio -- we actually turn it up. Such is the excellence of the movie that discussing it reduces intelligent and mature women into effusive seventh graders. "Oh my gosh, it just sings to me," says Ellen. "The music is so fabulous, the romance is so fabulous. It's just such a great thing. I just love it." Says Susanna, an ardent feminist, "I thought it was so romantic that she became a dancer and at the end he came back and rescued her."

Those of us who were in junior high when the movie came out had already bought into notions of romance but weren't as sure about sex, which sounded, frankly, kind of repulsive. "Dirty Dancing" changed all that. Emily Donahoe, 28, an actor in New York, says that the aforementioned white jeans scene was "when I actually felt something go off in me -- like 'Whoa, what was that?' 'Dirty Dancing' gave me a way into the whole world of sex and relationships and how normal the nerves and the goofiness were and how you could find someone who loved you and wanted you despite the fact that you were a jumpy mess."

The movie also served as a form of sex education for Susanna -- much to her chagrin. "My friends and I wanted to go see it, but my mom had heard things so she offered a compromise in which she took me to see it," Susanna remembers. "I really, really liked it, but there were parts where I was squirming in my seat. And then afterward my mom took me out for hot chocolate and she said, 'So did that turn you on? Did these parts make you aroused, because they did for me, and I think we should talk about it.' I denied any understanding of what she was saying."

Lest it seem like only girls were affected, Jesse Oxfeld, 27, an editor in New York, and his childhood friend Joel convinced their music teacher to transcribe the sheet music for "(I've Had) The Time Of My Life" so they could play a piano-sax duet at their sixth grade piano recital in suburban New Jersey. "It brought the house down," Jesse says. Peter Saunders, 32, a high school teacher in Washington, began taking jazz dance lessons after seeing the movie because, he says, "I was this chubby outcast high school kid, and I wanted to be Patrick Swayze." Recalling this, Peter began to dance in place and pat his chest while asking, "You know that great scene when he says, 'Feel the heartbeat? Guh-guh. Guh-guh.'" Then there's Antoine Wilson, 32, a writer in Los Angeles who along with his wife, Chrissy, blended irony and sincerity when they hired professionals to dance to "(I've Had) The Time Of My Life" at their wedding last spring. The routine, Antoine admits, "was both a joke and not a joke. There's something about that song that you can't shut out of your heart no matter how much irony you employ -- because [on your wedding], you are having the time of your life."

Undeniably, "Dirty Dancing" is a phenomenon: People repeat dialogue from it (my 19-year-old brother likes to break out "Nobody puts Baby in a corner" to show girls how sensitive, and down with their culture, he is); it's surprising if someone hasn't seen it; and it can be referred to, at the public and personal level, with the assumption that everyone will get the reference. The credit card company Capitol One has a commercial running now, 17 years after the release of the movie, in which a couple stands outside saying farewell while -- you guessed it -- "(I've Had) The Time Of My Life" plays in the background. And while other girl movies have become phenomena -- "Pretty Woman," "Clueless," "Bring It On" -- none of them feature hook-nosed heroines planning to enter the Peace Corps.

The only real problem with "Dirty Dancing" -- the dark side of it, if you will -- is, as Susanna puts it, "It was the first of several movies that I thought were teaching me about love when actually they didn't teach me anything. I thought, That's the way it's going to happen. Somebody's going to see me and think I'm special and pursue me despite how weird I act and how unappealing I might be." But, as Susanna now laments, "Men don't have time to go finding gems in piles of coal."

Some of us, of course, haven't yet come to terms with that painful truth. When I first saw the movie, Baby was, at 18, six years older than I was. Now she's 10 years younger than I am, and I still haven't met the thuggy, chivalrous man who'll tell me I'm the one thing he can't get enough of.

If I'm deranged in my hopefulness, at least I'm in good company. "I want my life to be like the dance at the end," says Ellen who, as you may recall, is 53. "It's got it all: beauty, skill, love, passion, parents begging forgiveness. And she does the jump and he lifts her up, and all of a sudden everybody starts dancing -- the races and ages and classes come together. I want everybody in my life to all of a sudden dance together and to have grace and style and be smiling. Is that too much to ask?"

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