I WOULD'VE CARRIED A WATERMELON: Oh, this is sad, even though it's not surprising: Patrick Swayze died today of cancer at the age of 57.
Dirty Dancing came out in theaters in August of 1987 -- a/k/a the summer I got my driver's license. Thus having limitless abilities to get myself to the movies, I saw Dirty Dancing 19 times in the movie theater. Part of that (ridiculous, I realize) number was obviously a reflection on the excitement of living in the Philadelphia suburbs, but more of it, I think, was the fulfillment of the shiksa goddess fantasy with gender roles reversed. Jewish high school girl goes on cheesy resort vacation with family, develops huge crush on hot goyische dance teacher, and when she goes behind her parents' backs to help said hot goyische dance teacher's shiksa friend who was knocked up by smarmy Ivy League Jewish guy to whom perfect older sister will subsequently relinquish her virginity, hot goyische dance teacher actually falls in love with her and convinces like 50 dancers to do cool oft-mimicked Kenny Ortega choreography up to the stage at the end of the summer in over-the-top display of undying affection? Are you kidding me? Retrospectively, I'm surprised I didn't see the movie 119 times.
Swayze's work didn't attact a whole lot of critical acclaim -- and I'm not arguing that it should have -- but he was in an unusually large number of movies that were seminal to our youth for one reason or another. Roadhouse, Point Break, Red Dawn, The Outsiders, and that movie about the only-mostly-dead sex at the pottery wheel that apparently sent registration in ceramics classes through the roof -- and believe me, it wasn't because Whoopi was looking so cute. I don't think I ever saw him in anything after his tranny-fierce turn in To Wong Foo with Love, Julie Newmar. (His dancing, by the way, was the real deal -- he trained at the Joffrey Ballet School, among other places, and he was a replacement Danny Zuko in the original Broadway production of Grease.)
Setting aside all the dirty dancing and the clay and the Wolverines, the thing I've always liked about Swayze was that he was married to a woman -- another dancer, Lisa Niemi -- whom he'd met when he was 19 years old, and they were still married when he died today, 34 years later.
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