Saturday, January 24, 2009

What is it about movies, anyway?

Dirty-Dancing-movie-04.jpg


Last night I was all jacked up on cacoa -- I had my super smoothie in the morning and then popped an energy bar later, followed with a bowl of chocolate mousse with maca in it.

Why?  I am not sure!  I know better than to ingest that many superfoods that late in the day, but I was craving chocolate, and the cravings beat out my better judgement.

So. At about midnight I began watching Dirty Dancing, and I figured that since I've seen it a million times, it wouldn't draw me in and I'd hopefully get tired along the way.

But no.  I was COMPLETELY absorbed by the movie, I was totally drawn in and felt as though I was watching it for the first time.  I also noticed that the other night when I ended up watching Eyes Wide Shut (umm, I think I was on a superfood high that night too!) with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman.  The first time I saw that movie, I absolutely hated it.  But the second time around, many years later, I actually enjoyed it.  I took so much more from it than I had the first time, or maybe I have just changed, who knows.

So that made me realize that I should watch all of my favorite old movies again, because who knows, I might enjoy them even more than I did the first time!  I have probably seen Pretty Woman a cazillion times, and yet I always get drawn back into the fairy tale. Dirty Dancing had a different message, or at least it did to me last night, for all I kept thinking was how one young girl can change a man's life forever. Could literally change the path of his life by altering his perception of the world just a little.  Just a smidge.

I recalled the first time I saw the movie, at the movie theatre in Hanover in the early 80's.  I know this because I went with my first boyfriend, and we dated my junior and senior year of high school.  We actually went to see a different movie, but it was sold out, so we went to Dirty Dancing, which we hadn't heard of.  It wasn't a big movie at that time -- I mean, it didn't get a lot of press.  It was what you would call a sleeper.  That was also the first time I ever heard that term, because as we were walking out of the theatre, my boyfriend commented that he'd liked it, and that it was a sleeper.  I asked what that meant, I thought he was being funny, and we never really discussed the movie any further.  (I wracked my brain, and all I can picture is us walking out the door, I remember looking at the movie poster in the glassed in thing and commenting about how lucky it was that we'd gone to see it, because I'd never heard of it, and then he called it a sleeper.  My memory goes blank there.)

What I thought was fun last night was that I was Baby's age at the time I first saw the movie, and I know I felt exactly as she did, and it was neat to be able to return to that time, if only briefly, and try to remember who I was, what I felt, etc.  I have to suspect that the movie hit me as a one million percent love story, whereas last night I was more tuned into the way the mother was treated by the father, or how the rich boys get respect no matter how nasty they are, or how when you have been beat down and put down, you start to believe that you don't matter.

Instead of looking at Patrick Swayze as a love interest, I looked at him from a mother's perspective.  Because of course I know exactly what it is like to have a son who believes he is as other's see him.  And I thought, what one event, what one person, what tiny miracle will it take to change the course of Charlie's life forever?

We are so often always thinking the wrong thing.  While Baby thinks that Johnnie would never be interested in her, Johnnie is so down on himself it never even occurs to him how Baby perceives him.  Even at the moment she bares her soul to him, he is still confused, still not sure why a girl like her would want anything to do with a guy like him.

It's really all about power.  If you give your power away, then you are powerless.  Powerless to understand what is going on in your life, powerless to believe in yourself.  Power. Less.

By the time many of us begin our spiritual journey's (and this is an assumption that everyone actually does), we have let so many things pass us by in our lives and we never had a clue. I look back and think, OH!  If only ... but it doesn't work that way. Youth is not necessarily lost on the young, but it certainly isn't used strategically!

But how can it be?  Life, like anything else, is something we participate in with very little training.  We have parents, but we also have our own personalities, which conflict with the guidance of our parent's right from the get-go.  Does this make any sense?  None!  Think if our course in life was like a game of Monopoly, where the rules of the game were given to us at birth, and we went around the board, over and over and over and over and over and over and over, and wherever we land dictates the path of our future.  That would suck!  Because you would know whoever got Boardwalk and Park Place would have it made in the shade, while you have to suffer through years of cheap properties with pathetic rents.

So I guess that life without such constrictive boundaries and boring rules is a much better option, even if it takes us half our life to figure out a teeny part of the purpose of our existence on the planet!

And ... I would have to make a blog entry that makes sense, or at the very least kept within the boundaries of my title!

AND THAT WOULD BE WRONG!


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