I Carried a Watermelon: Dirty Dancing and Me

So I watched it all over again. Twice in a night. It didn’t feel excessive, it felt right. Because now it was available for me to view whenever I wanted to. And I wanted to. A lot. I watched Dirty Dancing after school. Every. Single. Day. For THREE MONTHS, until my concerned father confiscated and hid the tape, and it very much occurred to me to mind.

It took me a week to find it, discreetly rummaging in every drawer, ransacking then replacing the contents of various cupboards. I have always been an obsessive person – bloody-minded, stubborn, relentless in my pursuit of what I think should rightfully be mine. I am, to put it mildly, tenacious. I knew that the confiscated Dirty Dancing tape was somewhere in the house. I felt in my bones that my dad would not be so cruel, so callous as to throw it away entirely. I understood on some level that he was trying to save me from myself – perhaps encouraging me to widen my viewing habits. Or to do some homework. But life was different now that Dirty Dancing was in it. It was my lifeblood. I had to have it. It was my drug of choice. And so, I continued the search – of course I did.

And then, one night I got lucky – I had almost given up, but I had a hunch, and so I returned to a previously searched area. My diligence was rewarded. Pulling back an old garden chair, I gasped, and felt a quickening in my belly, as I caught sight of a familiar black plastic corner, tucked at the back of the junk cupboard under the stairs, behind a huge sack of dry dog food the dog wouldn’t eat but my dad wouldn’t throw away. Could it be? Could it really be? I reached into the cobwebby darkness, the musty, meaty, slightly sulphurous smell of old dog food wafting unnoticed into my nostrils. What did I care for that? I was holding Dirty Dancing in my hands again.

My elation is hard to describe. I had done it. I hadn’t given up, and I had found it. The urge to watch it right there and then – to gorge on its sunlit perfection and wipe my chin afterwards – was strong but I had to bide my time: it was past 11pm when I made my glorious discovery, and though the house was quiet, I couldn’t risk being caught. Trembling,I forced myself to place the precious tape back in its meaty-smelling hiding place, kissing it first, and went back to bed quivering with anticipation. Within a few hours, I would be watching Dirty Dancing again.

By now I was 12, and allowed to be at home alone after school until my parents finished work. Tomorrow would be just such a day. Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. Such sweet joy tomorrow would bring. I would arrive home from school at 4.15pm. My parents would usually arrive around 6pm. That was my window. I needed 1 hour, 46 minutes to watch the whole thing, which was tight, but if I fast-forwarded through the opening credits, I could do it all, rewind it, and have it safely back behind the bag of dog food before anyone knew what had happened.

I barely slept. I couldn’t concentrate at school. Baby, and Johnny, and Penny, and all the others were waiting for me. I crashed through the door, dumped my bag, and breathlessly retrieved the one and only copy of Dirty Dancing I could ever hope to possess (videos were bloody expensive in those days). I put it on. I pressed play. I licked my lips and sat down on the sofa. I was ready. It began.

Oh my god, every minute was still perfect. I sunk into it, let it envelope me. I felt safe but also excited. Perhaps this is what love feels like, I thought. As the film ended I once again felt that heady sense of being invincible. I could do anything. I was just like Baby, and there was a Johnny out there for me somewhere.

Until one day – disaster! The tape broke, and it stuck at the point where Johnny defiantly says, ‘You just put your pickle on everybody’s plate, college boy …’ and would not move on from there, no matter how many times I ejected the tape and wound it on manually with a coin. I tried to move it the other way, thinking I could get beyond the glitch. It seemed to work for a moment – I could feel the tape spooling on nicely, but then there was an ominous clicking sound, and peering inside the black box, I could see it was now hopelessly tangled. Oh god. OH GOD.

I held the VHS tape limply in my hands like a beloved deceased hamster. Should I bury it? With a full service? I couldn’t believe it. It was gone. A piece of me went with it – partly because I loved Dirty Dancing so much, and partly because I had ripped my nail trying to fix the tape, and the torn part had dropped inside.

I filled the vacuum as best I could. There was no internet at this stage, of course, or maybe there was, but it was of no use to me as it merely connected a few military bases, American universities, and a clutch of badly-dressed geniuses in garages sending each other strings of numbers that meant nothing. So I survived by being creative – I found coping strategies to keep it alive within me. I forced my best friend from school to allow me to act out my favourite scenes in my living room. (I should clarify here, it was the dancing scenes I wanted, specifically the tuition scenes – I did not wish to recreate anything sexual with my best friend, though she may have been more nervous of where this was heading than she let on.) I co-opted my little sister into the game whenever I could. She was up for it, being a fan herself, but I always took it too far, until people were broken.

I had of course made a taped copy of the full soundtrack, which I had borrowed from the library. God, how I loved those songs; they introduced me to a whole new genre of music. ‘Hungry Eyes’ by Eric Carmen still makes my heart flutter, and the stomach-drop of pain you feel as Solomon Burke sings ‘Cry to Me’ hits me every time. ‘In the Still of the Night’ by Fred Parris and The Satins is a crooning delight. I had never heard songs like this before, and they excited me. Not to mention ‘(I’ve Had) the Time of My Life’, with that immensely distinctive half-time chorus opener, which then picks up a nice little groove you can’t help but move to.

And then there is the also wonderful but slightly less acknowledged second soundtrack, which features some of the more obscure Latin dance tracks, for the true enthusiast – I had to order it specifically from the library, and I made a tape of that too. I had all the dances tracks at my disposal now, and I used them to the point of wearing them, and myself out. All day at school, I would badger my best friend to come over, and when she relented, we would do the ‘Hungry Eyes’ rehearsal montage with Penny over, and over again (oh, how I wanted a red leotard with a little gold belt, and black fishnet tights, and gold sandals), with her standing in front of me, ‘teaching’ her the moves. I was too bossy to be Baby – I had to be Penny. For some reason, I always loved that whole sequence, starting with Penny looking at Johnny with great meaning over Baby’s head – this is the moment where we see how high the stakes are for them. This has to work, it just has to.

My best friend, though, was soon fed up with her role. She liked Dirty Dancing well enough, but I managed to eclipse her with my obsessive behaviour – I took it to an unnecessary level. I wanted it all the time, to the exclusion of all else. Finally, when pushed to the limit of her tolerance and Latin dance abilities, she refused to participate any longer. Or even come to my house for fear of an ambush. My sister also had other interests to attend to. And so, now I was alone with my madness.

My requests for a new shop-bought copy of the Dirty Dancing video, with a real cover and everything, to replace the mangled tape, for my birthday, and then at Christmas fell on deaf ears – clearly an enforced separation was now underway and probably for my own good. Dirty Dancing was again forbidden, and we all know how effective that is when keeping teenage girls from the object of our desires. Dirty Dancing was my unsuitable first boyfriend, my leather jacket relationship, my staff-guest liaison, and my parents were stepping in to preserve my honour. I wouldn’t have access to my own copy again for another seven years.

Of course, tape or no tape, the film still influenced my real-life crushes. I ought to confess at this point that, until the moment Johnny Castle came into my life, my first real love was Michael Jackson. This was the late 1980s, and though people thought he was weird, there was not yet any hint of the full horror that was to come. I wrote him long, long letters. I read Moonwalk – the official biography – several dozen times. I even tried to ‘trick’ International Directory Enquiries into giving me his phone number by calling 151 from the phone box at Amersham station on my way home from school, and saying as convincingly as I could that ‘a man named Michael Jackson has called and left no number – I believe his address is Neverland Valley Ranch, Santa Barbara, California, USA’, and then waited patiently as they confirmed what I had deep down suspected but could not bring myself to admit – that the number was, indeed, listed as ‘ex-directory’. True story.

Johnny represented a new kind of man for me – unequivocally heterosexual in an old-fashioned ‘movie star male lead’ kind of way: tough, strong, emotionally closed, waiting for the touch of a good woman to open him up. I’d seen them on film before, but they were usually either cowboys or played by Tom Cruise. Johnny had old school sex appeal, he had swagger, he had improbably 1980s clothes and musical tastes, given that he lived in 1963. He was wary and cautious to begin with – a man of few words – but then once you got to know him, he opened like a flower. He had vulnerabilities, he had talent, he had the moves. And he was clearly very, very good at sex.

This was all very well, but it had to remain in the realms of fantasy, because as I looked around me, there seemed to be few men of my age (12) that could really match up. The boys at my school were perfectly fine, if you liked competitions to see how long you could hold your hand over a Bunsen flame without crying, extended belching displays where we had to also ‘smell the burp’, and having your burgeoning breasts commented on at every possible opportunity. But Johnny was a ‘real man’, to use a now outdated and probably somewhat toxic phrase. I was done with studied ambiguity – I wanted a hunk. Narrow-hipped, long-haired, feminine-featured men with a suggestion of eye-liner were no longer my bag. Nothing wrong with them, but they did not push my buttons. I wanted someone who hid their sensitivities under a gruff exterior. I wanted someone who might throw a punch under certain circumstances, especially if some ‘Robbie the Creep’ type was to impugn my honour. I wanted a project. Just like Baby, I wanted to sort someone out. I wanted a diamond in the rough.

But this was a side issue. As I look back, I can now see that while Johnny Castle was a formative type for me when it came to men, my real crush was on Baby. It was all about Baby. She was called Frances; my middle name is Frances. And the similarities didn’t end there – o-ho no. We both had a fire in our bellies for social justice and human rights – she was joining the Peace Corps; I did a 24-hour sponsored silence in aid of Oxfam (much welcomed it seemed at the time, by parents and teachers alike … in fact, there were enquiries as to whether, in return for a larger donation, the period of silence could be extended). She liked wearing cut-off denim shorts, I liked wearing cut-off denim shorts. Mine were home-made though, and a little less ‘neat’ than Baby’s.

In fact, I had gone a bit nuts with the scissors one day and hacked up my best jeans, cutting each leg from the knee into a long, jagged point that each reached to mid-calf. My horrified grandmother, who was looking after me and my sister that afternoon, could only look on and whisper, ‘Are you sure you’re allowed to do that to your clothes, Katy …?’ The reflection in the mirror when wearing them made my actions instantly regrettable, although I felt I had to style it out to save face in front of Grandma. Frankly, I looked like an extra from Oliver!, but nonetheless I wore them stubbornly to the park and library that day, and tried to look nonchalant and vaguely superior to anyone I caught sniggering.

That night, I cut the jagged pieces off, creating a wonky and uneven but more traditional denim short, and then stuffed them in a drawer and pretended to my parents I didn’t know where they were. They never saw the light of day again (the jeans, not my parents). How I coveted Baby’s beautiful pair, with their perfect turn-ups and smoothly flattering cut through the hips. The dream pair of denim shorts still eludes me to this day, but I will never stop looking.

Besides my clothes, I tried to get Dirty Dancing into my life in any way I could. I begged and pleaded to go on a family holiday to a resort, in the Catskills, where I now knew through painstaking research (again, pre-internet – I had to actually ask things, of actual humans standing in front of me. Can you imagine? The horror) was the area in upstate New York known for its holiday resorts where the fictional Kellerman’s nestled. It was made very clear to me that I might as well ask for the moon on a stick, because flying from London to the US to an all-inclusive resort for three weeks for a family of four was (a) prohibitively expensive, and (b) wouldn’t happen even if we won a million pounds, as the idea of going for enforced cha-cha lessons and group aerobics sessions in the lake with a bunch of strangers was really considered a kind of hell in our household.

So it was a campsite in Cornwall again, like last year, and the year before. And don’t get me wrong, these were enjoyable holidays full of freedom, clear waters, hot sand and thick clotted cream, but with the best will in the world, it was not Kellerman’s. And I wanted Kellerman’s, badly. It wasn’t that I thought I would somehow actually find Baby and Johnny, and Billy and Penny, and carry a watermelon and have to dance at the Sheldrake at incredibly short notice. I wasn’t completely insane. But I wanted my own Baby experience, and to do that, there must be staff, and an element of ‘backstage’ to stumble in on. There needed to be staff quarters to be caught in. There had to be some rules for me to disobey, and someone to compromise my reputation with. And although there was a jolly old Cornish couple who ran the campsite shop, and a guy ‘on reception’ who honestly looked like a retired pirate, who could perhaps be termed ‘staff’, they didn’t live onsite, and even if they did, the chances of me coming across the three of them engaged in some sort of sweat-laced-dance-off-cum-orgy in the early hours seemed slim, though perhaps I underestimate them.

It was mostly roaming the ancient, pagan Cornish landscape for me, trying to find other children who would willingly participate in spontaneous, free-style dance lessons. It was fun, but not satisfactory. I had a longing for romance and drama, and something magical to happen by moonlight. And one year, as unlikely as it sounds, I got it.

We visited the Minack Theatre to see a production of Guys and Dolls. It is a spectacular outdoor auditorium, cut right into the rocky cliffs, where the audience sits on smooth stone benches and the performers play in front of the backdrop of the Atlantic Ocean. On a clear night at the right time of year, halfway through the show the sun sets and the moon rises, glittering on the water, kissing everyone with a pale silver. This was just such a night. And even better, we were staying over that day with a school friend of mine and her family in a large cottage right next to the theatre itself.

The show was so beautiful that afterwards I floated back to the house in the dusky light, my head full of songs and a new crush on my hands: Sky Masterson. I was not being disloyal, I told myself, for this was surely only a holiday romance, and Johnny was where my heart lived. But Johnny was at home.

My friend and I were sharing a room. We sat on the wide window seat with the old wooden sash frame pulled up high, so the warm night air would envelop us and we could hear the sea. We wanted to keep the feeling going for as long as we could. And then we heard it – singing, men singing, the sound will-o’-the-wisping to us across the twilight. They were cast members, singing songs from the show.

We froze on the window seat – this was the dream. Was it in fact, a dream? The bedroom overlooked the garden, with a path that wound its way down to a low stone wall and an iron gate at the end. Two men were now silhouetted against the full moon, the shapes of their costumes – sharp suits and trilby hats – clear against the pale brightness. They stopped at the end of the garden, and looked towards us. Straight at us. We ourselves were picked out by the low glow of a night light inside, behind us. There was a pause. We held our breath. And then they started singing again, this time just for us, songs from the show: a medley.

This was it. It was happening. This was as close to backstage at Kellerman’s as I was going to get on England’s most westerly point. In fact, across the now near invisible horizon, lay Kellerman’s itself, just 3,000 miles away as the crow flies. It was enough. I was transfixed. I wondered if we should steal out of the house, trip down the path, and try to inveigle ourselves with these men, perhaps there would be a cast party somewhere, perhaps there would be dancing, perhaps there would be a call for me to step in on stage to cover a cast member who needed time off for a tricky personal medical procedure that had to be kept hush-hush, perhaps, perhaps, perhaps … But then the singing stopped, the men waved to us and moved on, their crisp outlines smudging into the night.

We had been, and there is simply no other word for it, serenaded. SERENADED, for god’s sake. For the rest of the holiday, I would lie on my inflatable mattress in our canvas tent, listening to the August rain and trying not to touch the sides, feeling all my feelings. It was the same feeling as I got when I watched Dirty Dancing – a tingle of magic, the sense of a million possibilities glittering before me.

The next obvious step in my obsession was to enrol in some actual dance classes. A short distance away from home, in the next town, there was a small dance school, which offered lessons in ballet, tap, modern, and something called ‘national’, which was basically learning the national dances of the various countries of the world – a singularly useless skill, but undeniably good exercise. I was naturally disappointed to find that the merengue, the salsa and the mambo were not on offer, but I made do. It was a start. After all, this was the Home Counties – Latin dance was really not a thing. But I did all of it, even the national dancing – all day Saturday, and Wednesday nights. And I loved it.

It may not come as a huge shock to learn that I was not deemed physically suitable for an internationally successful career as a prima ballerina, but I could definitely do modern or jazz dance pretty well, and tap too. I could feeeel the music. G-gong. G-gong. I could move to it naturally, instinctively. I felt that if I had to step in at any point to help a dancer in anguish, and thereby meet the love of my life, I would be OK. I would do Johnny proud, and we would then have excellent sex. I was prepared.

Our dance teacher wasn’t Penny by any stretch of the imagination, but she taught us the basics and was mostly encouraging in a terrifying kind of way. And she certainly made no secret of her opinions on our figures. On one occasion, she burst into the cramped changing room during our lunch break to find us all eating various bars of chocolate. Her face reddened in disgust, and she jabbed a finger at each of us in turn, punctuating her warning that, ‘They. Will. Make. You. Fat.’ A jab for each of us. I was munching a Bounty in a particularly bovine way at the time, and her unexpected accusation landed heavily. I suddenly felt ashamed and guilty. I finished the Bounty though. I wasn’t about to waste it.

Each year my dance school would host a local show called ‘the Choreographic’ and we pupils would have the opportunity to design our own routines and perform them for members of the public. There would be prizes and cups, and one horrifying event where we would have to spontaneously choreograph and perform a three-minute dance, onstage, to a piece of music we had never heard before. The risk of humiliation was high, and failure almost certain, and it was the only compulsory category. Whether it was meant to be enjoyable, or simply an expression of our dance teacher’s sadistic streak we will never know, but it scared the living shit out of everyone. Everyone except me. Because I was prepared.

By this point, dance improvisation was basically my hobby. At home, at the weekend, I would wait for everyone to leave the house, on errands or trips out, and beg to stay behind so I could play music as loudly as I was able on our HiFi stack and choreograph my own routines. I use the term ‘choreograph’ lightly – it was more a case of me just flinging myself about as wildly as I could, having cleared the furniture to make an acceptable dance space. It was absolute primeval abandon. A casual passing observer, catching the display through a window, might even be alarmed. But god, it felt good. It was total release, and I felt connected to Dirty Dancing through it. I felt I understood what made those characters tick. I felt part of their world. I was Dirty Dancing. And incredibly, that year, I won the Improvisation Cup at the Choreographic. This was mainly down to the fact that I had managed (by chance) to strike a pose right at the very moment the music stopped, which was accidental but impressive, since we had never heard it before. But it was also because of Dirty Dancing – it had made me bolder, braver. So, when the music started, I just danced, and I didn’t care about anything else.

The white heat of my besotted first encounter with the film began to fade when I was around 13. It had lasted two years – longer than some marriages – and I think made a foundation stone for the rest of my life. My obsessive tendencies were unexpectedly transferred around this age when I quite suddenly became a fundamentalist evangelical Christian, which lasted until I lost my faith at 19, after starting a theology degree.

I would like to say that I fell in love with Jesus, but if I’m honest, I fell in love with the worship band leader at my church. I managed to get myself into the band so I could moon at him from close quarters, though my love was firmly unrequited. Frankly, Jesus barely got a look in. I was ‘with the band’. Finally, I had made it backstage, where I liked to be, and still do. Dirty Dancing had given every backstage area a romantic flavour for me – the glamour, the secrets. And the band leader was a man of few words, a little gruff, but with his own damage and vulnerabilities. He was talented, but had seen a lot of trouble. His family life was tough. I think you know where I’m going with this …

Yes, Dirty Dancing has provided the template for my emotional life, my romantic life, my sex life and even my marriage. It inspired a love of dancing that has continued to this day: for better, for worse. It was like having a cool older sister, or a glamorous but slightly drunk auntie who will tell you a bit about life – about men and women, and the way we lock together, and then twirl apart. It showed me what it felt like to be a teenage girl, and how you become a woman. It goes beyond my experience, and has affected so many like me, and unlike me.

And of course, it gave us all something to say whenever we are stuck for words: ‘I carried a watermelon.’ So many people have now told me they’ve gasped ‘I carried a watermelon’ in an awkward moment just to ease the tension. Those four words have now entered the mainstream lexicon. It’s a phrase that has influenced our culture – you can buy (and I have) t-shirts, mugs, water bottles and more with it printed on. It’s even the title of a book … This is a huge achievement for any writer, so congratulations to Eleanor Bergstein – there aren’t many who can boast that four words conjured from their own imagination would become a phrase known and loved by so many people. But there’s so much more to say. Follow me …