Mind Your Own God Damn Business

***I’m not sure, but I think I write a Karate-Kid-related post once every three months. Get used to it, and get prepared for another one starting….NOW!***

A little insight into my resistance to pants:

I went over to my parent’s house tonight to see how they were doing. My dad and I chatted for a while, and he accidentally spilled his tea on the floor. I went into the bathroom and grabbed a towel to throw on it and blot it up. I was too slow, though. By the time I got back, my Dad was already hunched over the carpet, blotting up the tea.

With his pants and underwear, which he had removed. He told me that he saw no reason to waste a perfectly good towel on some spilled tea. He then calmly headed into the bedroom, dong swaying gently in the breeze, put on a clean pair of pants and went back to chatting like nothing had happened.

Welcome to life in the Castle residence (That’s my new name – I’ll explain later). You would think that after 28 years, my father’s cavalier attitude about nudity would stop surprising me, but it still always catches me just a little bit off guard.

I would also like to ask that all of you remember this story the next time that you come over to see me, and when I answer the door in boxer shorts and a hat, maybe be a little bit less sassy and a little bit more grateful that you can’t see my balls. Given the environment that I was raised in, I’m doing you more of a favor than you might realize.

Moving on.

I saw Dirty Dancing for the first time about 3 weeks ago.

As near as I can tell, “Dirty Dancing” is the female equivalent of “The Karate Kid” for girls in my age group. It’s a movie that every girl that is about my age thoroughly loved when they were young and still love now, but for completely different reasons.

Essentially, The Karate Kid seemed like a great movie when I was a little kid for the same reason that I loved a lot of movies when I was a little kid: At the beginning of the movie, the protagonist was someone who I could relate to and had problems similar to mine (albeit heavily exaggerated), but instead of just gritting his teeth and stumbling through those problems, the protagonist would go above and beyond anything I was capable of, and dominate every conflict in the movie.

Predictably, Daniel starts out as a kind of unpopular kid who can’t get the girl and gets picked on by dreamboat Johnny (so far, me) but instead of having to come to terms with being a dorky kid and settling for imagining himself coming up with really sweet burns while he’s walking home from school, Daniel kicks Johnny’s ass in front of everyone at the tri-state karate championship and then has sex with Elizabeth Shue (I haven’t done either of those things…yet. Call me, Liz <3!!!)

10 years later, that movie is still fantastic, but mostly because it's brimming over with unintentional comedy. Mr. Miyagi gives off a very strong "Asian pedophile" vibe, Daniel has a t-shirt with a picture of two pigs having sex with "Makin' Bacon" written underneath, the head of the Cobra Kai dojo screams things like "FEAR...DOES NOT EXIST...IN THIS DOJO! DOES IT?!" and tells Johnny to "sweep the leg" and "put him in a body bag!"

Most importantly, the song used in the karate montage, You’re the Best” by Joe Esposito is not only the best song ever, but should, in my opinion, be used in every movie montage, and I do mean EVERY movie montage.

Think about it. I mean, it’s an obvious pick for action movies, but I think it has some real potential in other places.

Footloose? Lady and the Tramp? The Breakfast Club? Any romance movie ever made? The montages would be immeasurably better with that song playing.

Did The Breakfast Club have a montage? I’m not actually sure. Whatever, that movie would still be better with that song in it.

So, yeah. The Karate Kid was a great movie when I was a little kid, and a great movie all over again for completely different reasons when I saw it again.

Dirty Dancing seems to be that way for girls.
Based on the reaction that I got when I told people that I hadn’t seen Dirty Dancing (a blend of confusion mixed with rage), I’m going to guess that all of you know the movie’s plot.

After seeing the movie and kind of paying attention, I can say with a fair amount of confidence that if I were a 12 year old girl at some point in the 80′s, I would have loved Dirty Dancing. I can also say as a 18 year old guy in 2008 that I love Dirty Dancing for completely different reasons that I assume girls also love it for. The music is comical, the plot seems a little thin, and Johnny Castle seems a little less dreamy.

I’ve just decided that I’m going to refer to myself in this blog as Johnny Castle. He’s awesome, and when I get caught blogging again, I’m really looking forward to explaining to a reporter why I chose to refer to myself as Patrick Swayze’s character in Dirty Dancing.

There was one moment that I didn’t quite know how to react to. The most famous line in the movie is “Nobody puts Baby in the corner”. Several people had told me about that line before I saw the movie and that Patrick Swayze’s character says it. I assumed that this meant that at some point in the movie, Johnny Castle was being put into a figurative corner of some sort, and, referring to himself in third person as “Baby”, he informed everyone that he would not be backed into it.
I was imagining an exchange something like this:

———-

CAMP DIRECTOR: Listen, Castle! I’ve had it with your shenanigans! I pay you to come in here and teach these people how to waltz and tango, not show up with your low-cut shirts swinging your pelvis around like you’re trying to mix a goddamn can of paint in those tight, tight jeans of yours!

JOHNNY: You paid me to teach these people to dance, and that’s what I’m doing!

CAMP DIRECTOR: You call what you do dancing? That’s preposterous! Dancing is graceful! Civilized! I’ve seen what you call “dancing, Mr. Castle, and I can only accurately describe it as dirty! You play by my rules or no rules at all, Johnny! You start waltzing, or you can waltz your skinny ass the hell out of my camp!

(Johnny seethes for a moment, the grabs his leather jacket off of a nearby chair and flings it over his shoulder. He storms towards the door, but whips around in the doorway, facing the camp director. He pauses for a moment and puts his sunglasses on)

JOHNNY: Nobody puts baby in the corner.

(Johnny slams the door. The sound of his car door slamming shut can be heard, followed by the roar of his car’s engine as he tears off)

———-

…something like that.

Imagine my surprise when it turned out that he was actually talking to someone else named Baby. Ok, I thought, no big deal. Someone is trying to put Baby in a figurative corner, and he let’s it be known that nobody will be doing that.

Wrong again.

It’s the last night of camp, some of the people from camp are singing a boring song. Baby and her family are watching it from a table that happens to be in the corner. Johnny shows up, says the famous line, they do a choreographed dance that 30 extras join in on, and everyone sees that they were wrong to be such tight asses.

First of all, nobody really put Baby in the corner. She was just sitting at a table near a corner, and I don’t really get the feeling that anyone demanded that she sit there.

Second of all, I assumed that Baby was somehow getting punished in the corner, or backed into a corner, or that it was somehow a figure of speech, and so it surprised me that she just happened to be sitting near a corner. If Baby had been sitting next to the salad bar, the line would have been “Nobody puts Baby next to the salad bar”. Am I even kind of doing a good job of explaining why the context of the line was a little bit different than I thought it would be?

Anyway, it was kind of disappointing for me. At the same time, it almost made it funnier. I think I need to start using that line. Anytime someone is somewhere and I want them to hang out with me, I can just say “Nobody puts (name of person) in the (location that they currently are)”.

The fact of the matter is, however, that I can talk as much trash as I want about the movie, but I went out and bought a couple of 2008 calendars the other day. One of them is that little Domo thing, whatever the fuck that is. The other is a Dirty Dancing 2008 calendar. The Domo one goes at my computer desk, but I put the Dirty Dancing one at the foot of my bed. It’s the first thing that I see when I wake up in the morning, so I can enjoy some quality time with Baby and Johnny Castle. Sweetening the deal even more was the poster included with the calendar, which I put up next to my computer desk. What I’m saying is that there aren’t many places in my room where you can look without seeing something Dirty Dancing related, so maybe I liked the movie a little bit more than I’m letting on. Or maybe I just think it’s funny. Who really knows?

I’ll leave you tonight with a special, topical video, but be forewarned: the content of this video is decidedly…dirty.

I also just thought of something else: This movie has a montage of Baby falling in love with the Swayze and learning to dance. A montage with a song playing over it that ISN’T “You’re the Best” by Joe Esposito.

Advantage: Karate Kid.

No shoes.

No pads.

NO FUCKING MERCY.