Here I will summarize one such story, titled Same People, Different Story, written in 2010 by a woman whose pen name is Martine Boulanger. On the Fan Fiction website she has published six stories, five of which are based on Dirty Dancing. This story, Same People, Different Story is the first fan-fiction story tht she published on the website.
Boulanger's modifications of the Dirty Dancing story include the following:
1) Instead of the story taking place in 1963, it takes place in 1994.
2) Instead of Baby Houseman being 17 years old and about to enter college, she is a 22 years old and works as the professional driver of a Mac truck.
3) The Houseman family is rather poor. Baby has an older brother who was paralyzed as a child, and the family struggles to pay his special expenses.
4) Lisa is not Baby's sister, but rather her cousin.
5) In addition to working as a dance pro, Johnny takes care of the horses in the Kellerman resort's stable.
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| Baby Houseman is the professional driver of a Mack truck |
If she collaborated with an editor who taught her to write more tersely, she could write publishable romance novels. I'm sure that she writes very well in her native language (I think it is Dutch). Her Same People, Different Story is essentially a romance novel that needs much editing. Her readers at the Fan Fiction website wrote many review comments and apparently read though and mostly enjoyed the entire novel.
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Boulanger described herself as follows:
I'm a 32 years old [in the year 2015] girl who love big romantic stories with fun and sex in it (yes really but due to policies I won't post sex scenes in my stories ...======
I love writing about Dirty Dancing, my favourite movie of all times but gonna try to write fanfictions about other books/movies as well, please be easy with me on that!
I'm a horseriding/darts/swimming freak and love love.
I'm a very romantic soul and I'm spiritual as well, I always believe in the good of people.
I'm single, but my heart is taken. That means I'm not open for other guys, so you can try but will fail anyway.
I love tattoos, I have tattoos as well (it's one of my addictions so).
I'm very kind- warm-hearted who loves children, animals and people! Everyone is unique and everyone has a story, scars, bruises or any of that doesn't make a person ugly. Quite the opposite to me honestly, I find everyone interesting unless they make my life miserable. ...
A World of Mixed Feelings is my very first fanfiction (I was like a teenager at the time as well), my English wasn't that good back then. It's still not perfect I know but I'm from Belgium and Dutch native so forgive me for my grammar mistakes in my stories... hope you understand!
In an earlier article, I discussed a fan-fiction story, by another author, titled The Summer Before. In that article, I pointed out that many women who watch the movie Dirty Dancing do not identify with or even like the character Baby Houseman. Such women perceive Baby to be intellectual, wealthy and pampered. Such women identify primarily with the character Penny Johnson and would prefer that she become the romantic partner of Johnny Castle. Many fan-fiction stories portray a Penny-Johnny relationship.
Boulanger is likewise such a woman who does not identify with the movie's Baby Houseman. Instead of writing a Penny-Johnny story, however, Boulanger has changed the character Baby. Boulanger likes trucks, so she has made the character Baby like trucks. I suppose that Boulanger grew up in a financially struggling family, and so she has made the Housman family similar. The Houseman family in Boulanger's novel explicitly dislike rich people.
Boulanger's drastically modified Baby comes into Kellerman's resort through different circumstances, but then she becomes involved with the characters and the setting in a story that is similar to the movie's story. Boulanger's resort characters -- Johnny, Penny, Billy, Neil, Max, Robbie, Vivian, Moe, etc. -- are similar to the movie's characters.
In general, most of the movie's major events happen in the novel. Penny becomes pregnant and is scheduled for an abortion, and so Johnny needs a replacement dance partner. And so forth.
On the other hand, many events in the novel do not happen in the movie. For example, Kellerman's resort has a stable for horses that the guests can ride, and many of the novel's events involve taking care of and riding the horses.
In Boulanger's story, Baby's family comes to vacation at Kellerman's resort not at the beginning of the story, but rather in the summer's final week. Baby's cousin (not sister) Lisa arrives long before the arrival of Baby's parents (Jake and Marjorie) and paralyzed brother (Lewis, he is paralyzed below his waist). Cousin Lisa's father Robert (brother of Baby's father Jake) is the doctor in the story.
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To give you a sample of Boulanger's writing style, I have lightly edited (mostly cut out her wordiness) her first chapter (of 67 chapters) and provide it as follows:
I, Frances "Baby" Houseman, am a girl of 22 years old day. .... My parents and brother called me Baby and it didn't occur to me mind. ....=======
I'm a truck driver. ... There aren't many women doing this for a living, but I just love to do it. I always have loved trucks. ... I love this job I am doing now, driving trees back and forth. Easy done and easy money.
My parents aren't rich, and my brother can't walk. He's paralyzed after an accident when he was a child. I help them out. I love my parents to death, and they're very proud of me.
I give them the half of my salary, and still I can live almost like a rich girl. I save money too for my brother. The house we're living in is very old. My brother, Lewis, needs to stay downstairs, because my parents can’t lift him up the stairs anymore. So I save the money for him and my parents to buy a better place ...
I also love horse-riding and dancing. ...
Every Sunday I do horse riding. I don't have a horse of my own, so I need to go to a riding school. I would love to have a horse, but I know I can't take care of it with the job I'm doing now.
Before I started to be a truck driver, I was a dancer. I was not an instructor, but I competed in contests and won first place four times. My dance partner was Peter Mooijweer, who also was my only boyfriend I ever had. When I was 16 years old, I found out he was cheating on me, and afterwards I did not dance anymore.
I always thought Peter and I were meant to be. My folks tried to get me back on dancing, because they know I love to do it, and also it earns a lot. But I really didn't want to anymore. I still love to see people dance, but I hate to do it myself.
Being unemployed for almost a year, I decided that I wanted to do something I love to do and could help my family with too. And so I started to learn to be a truck driver.
At first it was difficult to get a job, especially for a woman, but I was lucky to bump into my boss when I was 18 years old. ... I have been doing this kind of work for three years now, and I still love to do it. I started with an old Mack truck, which I still have and love to drive very much.
So, Baby has been working as a Mack truck driver for about three years. Then the truck company where she works, located in New Jersey, assigns her to take over a regular job of delivering supplies to Kellerman's resort in the Catskills Mountains, two or three times a week. Because of the job's importance, she is given a brand-new, much larger Mack truck than the old Mack truck she had been driving.
Because the one-way trip to Kellerman's takes seven hours, she has to sleep overnight in her truck's cabin (which is quite spacious and comfortable) whenever she makes a delivery trip. (Boulanger imagines the distances from New Jersey to the Catskills to be much longer than they actually are.) So, during these repeated delivery trips to the Catskills, Baby gradually becomes acquainted with Kellerman's employees.
Johnny falls madly in love with Baby at first sight. Boulanger's portrayal of Johnny's infatuation is common to romance novels. Johnny is captivated by Baby's beauty. Women who enjoy reading romance novels enjoy imagining the hero's intense desire for the heroine. So, I suppose that many women would enjoy that aspect of Boulanger's novel.
Baby likes Johnny from the beginning, but she tries to control her emotions because she is afraid that her feelings again might be hurt as badly as when her dance partner and boyfriend Peter Mooijweer cheated on her when she was 16 years old.
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Baby is a very nice young woman. She does not intend to join the Peace Corps and to "save the world", but she is devoted to helping her family, especially her paralyzed brother. Baby gives half of all her pay to her family. The Houseman parents and children all love each other and do not develop any internal conflicts during the story.
In the novel, Baby and Johnny have plenty of sex, usually in the truck's cabin, but the sex is not described explicitly.
There is no obvious reason why Boulanger wrote a paralyzed brother into her story, so I assume that she herself in her own real life has a paralyzed brother. In her story, Penny falls in love with the paralyzed Lewis. All the characters expect that Penny and Lewis will have a satisfactory sex life together despite Lewis's paralysis from his waist down. I think that Boulanger described such surprising expectations based on her experience with her own paralyzed brother.
The novel's conflicts involve mainly Neil Kellerman, who is portrayed as a villain who causes worry and trouble for Johnny and Baby.
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Essentially this is a romance novel written with the gimmick of being based on the movie Dirty Dancing but with Baby Houseman being a 22-year-old professional truck driver. Baby is a nice young woman who is devoted to her happy family. Baby's niceness and beauty captivate Johnny Castle's heart. The novel describes continually Johnny's passionate love for Baby.
Although Baby's feelings were hurt when she was 16 years old and her dancer boyfriend cheated on her, she learns to trust Johnny's faithfulness, and so she falls completely in love with him.
I will not reveal the novel's ending, but I will say that it is happy ending.
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