"The kind of person I wanna be"

This may sound odd to some readers, but one of my most favorite movies is... "Dirty Dancing" starring Jennifer Gray and Swaze. I watched it every day for a whole summer when I was ten years old, and it left an imprint on who I wanted to become in life. Yes, it's probably not one of the best movies for a ten year old girl to watch, but, you have to understand that I grew up in an unchurched family. Remember that the world's standards, given with a few obvious restraints, are the standards by which things are considered normal.

I had a kinship with the girl who, like me, had her life charted out in academic accomplishment before her and, she was handed a philosophy of restraining help just to those who were in the same class as she. She abandoned those limiting rules because she saw real, human need. Even at ten I could understand this underlying point behind what happened to her in the movie.

This clip is of the last dance, and my favorite parts are not the typical romantic stuff. It's the little speech he gives at the very beginning and then, in the middle, how he goes to bring up his friends from the back of the auditorium to join in the performance. He had been practicing with them all year but wasn't allowed to perform it, and by bringing them up to the front, he made a statement of their worth and added to the overall effect, of course.



Oh, I forgot to add that it also taught me something else that became distinctly a part of who I am: how to dance. It's all couple dancing in this movie but by listening and watching it became very simple to see that dancing means just listening to the music to know how to move. It was a breakthrough to making it an art.