Dirty Dancing

The confines of the corner

Nobody puts Baby in a corner,

and we’re off. What we remember in this summer blockbuster along with the well-choreographed, supposedly spontaneous break-out professional dancing, is that Baby’s lover, the rough around the edges, smoldering, good guy in leather from the wrong side of the tracks, Johnny Castle, saw in her what her family could not/would not. He saw first, the woman she was becoming, despite them, and he took a risk to love her and suffer the consequences of class hierarchy and its pretense that it sees us all as equal.

Frances “Baby” Houseman, called out her father for his hypocrisy, the assumptions he’d made about Johnny and Robbie, the ‘good-looking,’ preppy med student and all the goings on of the younger set when the grown-ups had gone off to bed. That Baby idolized her father and then discovered he was just a man was neatly tied up with his gentle embrace at the end of the movie. They’d get to stay a family and continue their upward trajectory, while Johnny is fired from the best paying gig he’s ever had for mixing with her.

But what happens next? Does Baby’s father open his eyes to the world anew? Consider his bias and prejudice? Or does Baby love him just the same, as the man of his caste, as the man of privilege he is, and find herself moving in the same circles, with the same mentality just on the fringes, the black sheep, so to speak, of her family and community.

I have taken to upsetting my friends with bigoted and racist parents and family as I am unable to just allow it all to be as it was. When I simply pressed my lips and held my tongue watching them exalt these people that I knew held beliefs that ruin peace and destroy hope. I share posts and articles, interrupt biased trains of thought, shut down the bullshit with less grace than I’d once given.

I am fucking hurt because I knew. When you grow up with rage and quiet, dissociation and loneliness, you learn to watch tiny details reveal what words may not. There is a hovering above, a holding of one’s breath as you wait not for the other shoe to drop, but for an avalanche of lies held up by spit and nervous perspiration to come rushing, taking every lie and truth with it until there is just void that vibrates, causing your body to tremble until you vomit.

The string of untruths that lead to holding hands across America with people who don’t want to touch you or be near you or consider you equal, the lecherous neighbor, uncle, pastor getting away with predation against children because he can’t be satiated without the ambrosia of youth, eating our young to stave off the inevitability of our mortality, the neighborhood watch that wants to be sure you stay in your lane, on your own side, wherever it is they are not, turns out not to be buried in fluffy cotton candy, but has instead been washed to the surface by violent toxic rains.

These girls, so loved by their fathers, don’t necessarily change these men, rather witness their fathers fall deeper in love with their progeny, fight mercilessly to protect their daughters, their own daughters, the creamy, delicious center of the patriarchy’s sticky donut. White girls and women are to be protected at all costs, if protection means being locked in the gilded cages of their fathers, brothers, uncles, and sons, given a long leash, but tied up, nonetheless.

Some of these girls have been my friends, reassuring me that their beloved dads and their myopic vision of the world, are harmless, and if not harmless, somehow not dangerous, not violent, not upholders of a system that draws a line across the tracks, across the races, and across the castes. They hold space for the gents who give them a leg up, tell them they deserve more than others who were simply not born of the same privilege, cannot really see their privilege because it is the water.

They are both, Baby and Lisa, her older sister, daydreaming of domestic bliss and a good match with an equally entitled man of affluence, of a protected class of women, and the conversations they have about equality for all can remain just that, dinner banter.

Johnny was still fired for besmirching Baby’s good family name, even though she made the decision to tango with him of her own accord. Now wiser, an illicit affair and experience under her belt, she can now return to the world that only a chosen few inhabit and ‘change the world.’

The wrong side of the tracks in Dirty Dancing meant the working poor, the laborers, the lower rung of the white working class, and many of the people I know recall these men and women from which they are descendant. They tell me about the struggles of their grandparents and lineage, how they came to these United States with nothing and built themselves from scratch. Their families were never given any handouts they tell me, that they deserve everything they’ve earned, and that the presumption that they ‘owe’ what they’ve earned, working tooth and nail to some two-bit nothing is not fair.

We root for the Johnny’s and the Johnny’s don’t root for us. I also feel sentimental when I watch that closing scene in Dirty Dancing. I am thrilled for Frances in her grown-up dress, being ‘considered’ and not ‘assumed to be’ by her family, yet I cannot say with certainty she is going to leave the frame and do good for all mankind. I know she will have the opportunity to choose for how long and where and when she’d like to give a damn. I know that she may tire of the good fight. I absolutely hope she will not.

I want her/us to have love and romance and maturity and grace and space to grow and become, and I also wish the Baby’s of the world saw the rest of us multidimensionally, wished for our lives the same that they wish for their own, recognized when they have failed us, when they haven’t held the door, haven’t carried the watermelon.

The scene where Baby, carrying the watermelon into the smokey afterhours barracks of the Catskills resort, invited her and viewers into a world they didn’t recognize, that was more visceral and electric than the organized, manicured lives they were meant to saunter into. Here, she felt out of place, shy, unsure. Her eyes, wide, searching, she discovered another layer of experience she’d likely not have come in contact with had she not been wandering, seeking. This is her Heart of Darkness, this is her walk into the Black Forest, this is her self-discovery.

I want to believe that Baby was a dreamer, someone full of hope, who might change the trajectory of her lineage, ending generational trauma, rewriting ideology and belief systems that maintain oppressive hierarchies, but suspect she just wanted to dance, to come close but not step into the flow, then retreat to the safety of her position. Johnny enthusiastically shared his hopes to revolutionize the dance program for next summer only to be told to slow his roll, that progress would come slowly, that he would not lead, that no one would follow, and finally, for patronizing with the clientele, he would be let go.

Johnny would return to the House Painters and Plasterers Local 179 bitter at dreams deferred and Baby would make her way to Mount Holyoke to study the economics of underdeveloped countries before joining the Peace Corps. They’d each remember that summer, for decidedly different reasons, and the soundtrack would play as the credits rolled.

The patriarchy is so infantilizing of girls and women, coddling and placating, and some embrace the handfeeding, pampering that proximity to power offers. It feels safer than standing in one’s own strength, little David facing a Goliath. In preparation for the blows, some fawn and fold the laundry, some flee and hide from headlines, and some harden to withstand the wild swings and assaults.

Black women and girls, brown women and girls, with the sprinkling of anti-Blackness and colorism that permeates all discourse on women’s rights and value lose the opportunity to be seen as the hero, the Baby grown up, the ugly duckling-to-swan ingenue lifted out of the water, secretly discovering their womanhood, their sexuality, their strength without judgment, without prejudice, slurs, insults, tropes.

I too daydreamed to those movies about love and romance and self-realization, and also believed that finding a boyfriend, a man who could understand me would be the answer to my burning questions about what I was to do with this one precious life. I didn’t see the lattice, the system presenting only this as a solution to my happiness, didn’t realize that it was all shoving cake into my teeth, telling me what was delicious, sharing the only thing on the menu.

I don’t like to be picked up, lifted. Men often try. I am small but heavier than I appear, and sometimes caught completely unaware, someone will come up behind me and try to lift me from my elbows. Despite feeling exhilarated by the climactic lift at the end of the movie, the attempt made throughout, it also struck me with terror. It is not that I am afraid to fly, but that I would like to use my own wings. I want to set myself in motion, to see us all set in motion of our own accord, using our own gifts.

In all the ways we are able, we need to stop putting in the corner, the people we are most afraid to listen to, to learn from, to give voice. Just because it has always been done this way, does not mean it must always be. And while some may feel safe at the table, if we cannot all dine there, we are not.