On this day in 1987 the movie Dirty Dancing premiered. It is funny to look back now being 16 when this movie came out. I was working at a summer day camp and remember vividly seeing this with my friends at Promenade Mall. My 16 year old niece is the same age that I was at that time, working at summer camp for the first time this year. She was also a bus captain, just like I was back in 1987.

In July I went to a cottage resort with my friends. We booked the cottage back in January. We had no idea at that time that we would have been in a stay at home, provincial lock down for the most of the next five months. Thankfully the provincial guidelines allowed us to keep our booked time away from the city.

On the way home from a restful cottage stay we were driving and listening to the radio when the theme song from Dirty Dancing came on, “I’ve had the time of my life”. My friend sitting in the front sit alongside me says to me, “I wonder if Baby and Johnny are still maried?” I stopped singing and looked at him and said, “Baby and Johnny got married?” It is one of my all time favourite movies and I can recite parts of the movie by heart, but I thought I missed something somewhere along the way.

I asked him, “What makes you think they get marrried?” He replied that he likes to think about what happens to the characters at the end of a movie or book that he reads. That got me thinking and the conversation continued. I started to think about the all characters in the movie and what happened after that summer in 1963.

Baby – Did she go home from the Catskills, ditch the name Baby and start calling herself Frances, since she was no longer in the corner and no longer a baby but a woman? Did she join the Peace Corps and change the world?

Johnny – Did he go home after losing his job, but getting the final dance with Baby and the apology from her father to join the local 179 House painters and Plasters union? My friend’s suggestion was that he became a choregrapher for the Radio City Rockettes.

Did they get together after the summer was over or was it a summer fling? I am thinking probably not. I wonder if Baby’s father could come around and accept Johnny as a worthy suiter of his daughter.

Let’s say they did stay together and get married. They would have had their honeymoon in Kellerman’s and maybe started a new tradition bringing their kids there each summer. Maybe Max’s nephew takes over and realizes that no one in the mid 60’s is interested in dancing the Pachanga afterall.

Rabbit. I jumped into the rabbit hole and then I thought about Penny. Was she able to have children after what happened to her in that back alley clinic? I know, now I have you thinking about what happened to them after spending the summer in the Borscht Belt. (google that if you don’t know what it is).

Later on after I dropped my friends off another song came on the radio, “Don’t you forget about me” which of course had me thinking about the characters after they left detention that fateful Saturday in the Breakfast Club.

John Bender (Rebel) – Claire asked if he would say hi to Brian in the hall on Monday when he was with his stoner friends? How about Clarie, would she acknowledge him in the hall while walking with her preppy friends?

Would Andrew (Jock) recognize and acknowledge Allison in the hall when he is walking to the football field with the jocks? Was Allison really as weird as she led us to believe or did she just wanted to be accepted for who she was, just like all of us who feel like an outsider in life.

And Brian? Would he go back to his books and A+ studies or would he realize that he can live life on the adventurous side without carrying a flare gun to school.

And there you have it folks. Writing this has left me with more questions than answers to some of my favourite movies. I may need to circle back to this with some other what happened to….

Like the ubran legend of the movie Grease that Sandy really dies in at the beach when Danny couldn’t save her and the rest of the movie is her dream sequence? Have you heard that one?

What movie(s) have you thinking about their happily ever afters?