You can hear the throbbing music all the way down at street level, and as you climb the stairs you can feel the temperature rise. On the third floor a dozen couples are grinding their hips into each other, sweating in the heat of the room and the moment.
It`s an interesting line-up-an amusing display of rotating swaybacked derrieres-many awkwardly trying to sway in sync. While watching the various sets of hips rotate, you can`t help but draw inferences about the talents of the various individuals in, let`s say, more private quarters.
”How close should we be?” asks one woman, still bumping and grinding into her partner`s crotch.
”That`s strictly between you and your partner,” says instructor Marcus Davis, with a sly smile. He thrusts his pelvis forward in the air and demonstrates the proper technique.
It`s the kind of move that got you kicked out of high school sock hops, if you had the guts to go public with it.
But now a doctor, a lawyer, a dental hygienist, an ad agency media director and even an accountant are not only making such moves in public but are taking classes to learn how to do something you might think should come naturally.
You have to wonder what all these folks were doing when you were holed up in the basement with your teen honey-ostensibly listening to records.
They probably were poring over books well on their way to becoming single young professionals, the perfect candidates for Tuesday and Thursday night classes at the Learning Annex, where the dirtier you can dance the better.
The classes are just part of this dirty dancing craze that is still rockin` around the nation, even though it`s been nearly a year since the movie, by the same name, was released last August and brought in $100 million at the box office. Since then, dirty dancing has been bumping and grinding its way into everything and everywhere-nightclubs, records, ballparks, Oprah Winfrey`s show, learning centers and even industrial conventions.
NO SIDE EFFECTS
Perhaps part of the appeal is that dirty dancing allows you to act out or observe sexual fantasies on the dance floor that don`t carry the side effects of real sex. It`s the ultimate big tease.
And ”it`s a way to be erotic in public,” says Cook County Hospital physician Maury Berger, who is in the Learning Annex class.
”It`s fun, and everyone wants to look good on the dance floor,” says another classmate, ad agency media director Jamie Coren.
Christina Monika, a yoga instructor who is taking the class, looks at it from a practical standpoint: ”It`s the closest thing to safe sex.”
But ”Dirty Dancing” movie choreographer Kenny Ortega takes it even one step further: ”It`s like having sex with your clothes on-and in some cases it`s even better, because with dirty dancing there`s a real trust and intimacy and communication involved.”
Now that would be a novel approach to sex.
LOTS OF HIPS AND DIPS
To the uninitiated, dirty dancing involves plenty of grinding hips, dipping bodies and lots of swaying, swinging and crawling around each other in what can be best described as a vertical version of what teenagers do in the backseat at a drive-in.
Perhaps dirty dancing`s appeal to young teens is the free license to do in public what they do in private anyway, and for the older folks it`s the nostalgia.
Ortega, 38, says he can still remember those ”dirty dogging” dance parties in garages when he was in high school in Redwood, Calif. But today he can barely keep up with all the dirty demands.
”Every day there are more requests for me to come judge some contest or go to some convention with a dirty dance theme,” he says, rattling off ballroom conventions and industrial product shows being held in Texas, Connecticut, Hawaii and Las Vegas. ”It seems to be the most popular theme for big parties this year, and the movie was recently reopened in Paris.”
Even Chicago`s Comiskey Park, in conjunction with a local video store, sponsored a dirty dancing night earlier this month, complete with clips from the movie, dancers who performed before the ballgame and giveaways of records, cassettes and tour tickets.
THE GREAT WHITE WAY
Ortega says there`s now talk of releasing dirty dancing instructional books and videos and even staging a dirty dancing production on Broadway.
Dirty dancing combines some Latin steps and some from `60s classics like the swim and the pony, but the best moves of all are the dirty ones-the
”grind,” the ”dirty dip” and the ”drag the lip”-where the man dips his partner into a back bend and then traces a line, with his lips, from his partner`s stomach up to her neck.
”Take your time, take your time,” Ortega instructs one of his dancers who is demonstrating a slooooow lip drag on a special segment of Oprah Winfrey`s show, as Oprah and the crowd giggle and gasp like a bunch of adolescents.
The movie itself was based on a pubescent, cornball love story featuring just about every Cinderella-complex cliche in the book: A doctor`s teenage daughter comes ”of age” during a 1963 summer vacation at a Catskills resort. There the daughter, Baby (played by Jennifer Grey), goes against her father`s wishes when she falls in love with street-smart dance instructor Johnny Castle (played by Patrick Swayze,) who was born on the wrong side of the tracks and is not winning any points with Daddy. Johnny takes Baby to the resort staffers` underground dance parties and then coaches her as his partner when his regular one has to drop out. In the meantime, Baby loses her virginity, both figuratively and literally, and there`s plenty of dirty dancing.
The dance sequences are the best thing in the movie, along with the `60s music soundtrack that has now invaded the radio waves and gone platinum seven times, prompting RCA to release a second album called ”More Dirty Dancing.” A CAST OF THOUSANDS
Merry Clayton, Eric Carmen and the Contours, of the classic Motown era, are all part of the national dirty dancing tour that was kicked off this summer in the Catskills. Also on the tour is Bill Medley, who, along with Jennifer Warnes, sang the movie`s theme, ”(I`ve Had) The Time of My Life,”
winner of the Academy Award for best song.
The tour comes for one night only to Poplar Creek June 26. It will feature a special guest performance by Lou Brockman and Ellen Werksman, professional dancers who won the dirty dancing contest held on Winfrey`s show after ”dancing like that for years at Gaffer`s at Broadway and Diversey.”
The couple also promote dirty dancing contests at Kicks on 66 in La Grange, Schooners in Harvey and Apple Mango in Addison.
Tickets are still available for Poplar Creek ($20 in the pavilion; $15 on the lawn) at Ticketmaster outlets or by phone charge at 559-1212.
MADE FOR TV
If you miss the tour, you can still catch the dirty dancing weekly television series that is scheduled to air this fall on CBS, starring Melora Hardin and Patrick Cassidy (brother to Shawn and David).
”There`s a built-in audience for a show like this,” says Steve Tisch, executive producer of the TV pilot. ”The movie`s demographics show it appealed to girls 9 to 15 and women from 30 to 45,” he says. ”The younger girls identify with Baby, who wasn`t the prettiest girl, but still got the guy. They think, `If it happened to her it can happen to me.` The older women probably like it for the nostalgia. They can look back at part of their lives in the `60s when both they and the times were a lot more innocent.”
In what seems an obvious contradiction in terminology, the words
”innocent” and ”clean fun” are used most often to describe the phenomenon by those affiliated with the production, who will even go out of their way to tell you dirty dancing isn`t dirty after all.
(Think about it: Would you go see a movie called ”Clean Dancing?”)
”It`s a way to get close without getting in trouble,” says Dorian Sanchez, one of the lead dirty dancers in the movie and choreographer of the national tour. ”People at that time thought it was naughty, but it`s really not. It`s just good, clean fun.”
That should come as a real relief to all those parents of lip-dragging teens. –
