This past weekend was a straight JAM. My birthday was Friday, complete with dinner, drinking and much enjoyment of all things fun and totally awesome, which is to say, ME! Ha ha, I’m so modest and sweet and sexy and badass all at the same time. How do I do it?!
Saturday night was Ben Folds at the House of Blues courtesy of my fantastique (yes, I intended to use French spelling and, no, I’m not a communist) girlfriend, Cathy, who, I am required to say by law, is right 99.9 percent of the time. I am not required to say that she is amazing to the power of awesome, but omitting that fact would be like putting Baby in a corner and NOBODY puts Baby in a corner (more on that in a sec).
Bottom line: the whole weekend rocked. But, what exactly do you do on Sunday night after a long, relaxing weekend when you are still awake and dreading having to go back to work the next day? Naturally, you go to dinner, wait until pretty much every video place in town is closing and then rifle through movies and tv shows at said stores as quickly as possible until you find something worth watching before checking out as they lock the doors behind you, natch! It was SO worth the effort.
First, I want to mention my phone conversation with Movies: The Store, the really cool video place on Richmond at about 5 minutes until 10pm. C and I were at Borders and thought that it would be silly to spend $30 on a movie we’d never seen, so I called Movies to see if they were open or would even be willing to remain open an extra 5 minutes or so to rent us something. This is what I got:
Me: How late are you guys open?
MTS: We are closing in 5 minutes at 10.
Me: Five minutes? Damn!
MTS: Dude, we’d stay but we are going to catch a movie right after we close.
Me: No worries. Thanks so much!
Seriously, how awesome is a store that probably would hold the door for you if they weren’t going out to see the very thing they sell? It’s symmetry and logic and stars colliding to create black holes and all that science shit that means perfection in the universe without even trying.
Anyway, as we made our way to checkout with some probably crappy $30 movie, we saw the $8 bin and, lo and behold, to what did our wondering eyes appear but the 20th anniversary edition of Dirty Dancing. I might have expected Havana Nights, but not the original. This, I am told, is a favorite of C’s youth, which made it an automatic buy. Out the door we went armed with Baby, Johnny, that guy from Law & Order and Newman from Seinfeld – all in one movie together!
It should be noted – oh, and I noted it – that it is curious the two seminal dance flicks of a generation (meaning Gen X, not you Gen Y kids who have to live with Honey, Step Up and Step Up 2 the Streets – hell, you didn’t even get Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo!) – Dirty Dancing and Saturday Night Fever – both had male leads named Johnny. Also, Jennifer Gray and Patrick Swayze were in Red Dawn together as well, which doesn’t matter except that it is one of the dumbest movies I’ve ever watched and…WOLVERINES!!!
We unwrapped the packaging and found inside a booklet containing Dirty Dancing merchandise. Items included posters, CD’s, talking pens, projector keychains, a 2008 calendar (year of the DVD release) and apparel, which is the point of this whole blog post.
Oh, you thought you were going to get a detailed review of the DVD or some insight into youthful rebellion and the modern class system or a discussion on the pains of growing up in the turbulent 60’s as portrayed in the film? HA HA HA!! Have you ever READ this blog before? Oh, you haven’t? Ok, well…uh…what I write about on here are things like ninjas and light rock songs from the 70’s and the genius of Dear Abby, so you might want to reconsider why you are here. Seriously. If you hate vikings and vaginas and vikings with vaginas, this is NOT the place for you. Ok, glad we got that sorted out. Anyhoo…
Before I get to the apparel, let me just point out the honorable mention of this merchandise package, Dirty Dancing: The Video Game. I wish I could make this crap up, but check out the description:
Have the “Time of Your Life” with the new Dirty Dancing video game. Work alongside the team of the Kellerman’s resort, through a fantastic variety of fun minigames and earn camp dollars to purchase Dirty Dancing memorabilia, cabin furnishings and the all-important dance lessons with Johnny and Penny. How will you fare in the end-of-season dance contest?
I’m nearly speechless, but if you know me (and you do you sassy little mynx!), you know that will never happen even if my vocal chords were severed and my throat ripped out by that guy in American werewolf in London, you know, when he was a werewolf.
So, back to the apparel. There were message tees and classic logo tank tops. I was halfway surprised they didn’t have leotards given the proclivity of those in the film. During the “teaching Baby to dance” montage (shockingly similar to the “teaching Rocky to be black” montage in Rocky III, which both utilized songs with “eyes” in the title – coincidence? I think not!), C noticed a startling amount of leotard usage which prompted me to wonder (out loud because I’m annoying like that) why they would be wearing leotards and fish net stockings for rehearsal and why Baby would bring those items to a summer retreat in 1963, long before the Olivia Newton-John aerobics craze of the early 1980’s. Moving on.
My favorite item of apparel in the mini catalog was, as you might imagine, a thong. Yes, a thong. No, it’s not because I like women’s underwear. I swear, if I had a nickel for every time you came on here and perverted what I was trying to say, I’d be rich and famous and full of win. In fact, you should just pay me for that rude remark. Yes, I heard it because I’m spying on…I mean…you know what, nevermind. Let’s forget we ever talked about this. Look, a squirrel!
You know, nothing says “classy” like Dirty Dancing written across the front of your panties. Now, I can’t read the tiny writing all over the rest of the undies, but I assume they are clever quotes from the film or clever takes on them like:
You’re about to have the time of your life.
Welcome to my playpen…baby.
This is my dance space.
Put your pickle on my plate, college boy.
I’m known as the catch of the county.
I carry a watermelon!
See how perfectly those work out! They should hire me to write things on women’s underwear. It would have to be before someone put them on though, because I have a girlfriend and I’m not a total perv despite your heinous assertions to the contrary. If I did get such a job, I wouldn’t want to be limited to simply writing catchy one-liners or hilarious witticisms. Maybe poetry or algebra equations or even random verses from the Bible though “He wept” is all I can remember at the moment and I’m not sure that would be the hottest phrase to see on your girl’s drawers. But, I must press on in this new career and seek out all avenues of opportunity because, NOBODY PUTS BABY IN A CORNER.
See how I did that? I wrote this completely nonsensical paragraph that was really a total waste of pixels just so I could tie up the whole blog with a quote from the movie. Damn, I’m good. It was so completely worth it. It’s like that time I wrote a blog post about Dirty Dancing and how they sold thongs in their catalog insert and…wait. What just happened? Either I’m in the Matrix and they just changed something or I’m caught in a temporal causality loop like that episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Those are the only two things it could possibly be. Or I just forgot what I was doing and that’s crazy talk. My money is on the causality loop because it’s like a black hole and those things are the BALLS!