I finally met a girl exactly like my mother -- dresses like her, acts like her -- so I brought her home. My father doesn't like her! Go figure.
The variety show informs the music audience that Kellerman's is much more than a mere hotel. The employee staff includes musicians and entertainers who organize and prepare such large events for the guests.
In the following scene -- which takes place eight days later -- Baby happens to enter the employees' bunkhouse, where she sees the employees' Sunday night "dirty dancing" party.
During those eight days, Baby was mostly alone, bored and unhappy. She had not wanted to come to Kellerman's on this family vacation.
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The joke that Stan tells about meeting a girl like his mother is quite funny. Also, the joke is relevant to Baby's attitude.
In an interview that screenwriter Eleanor Bergstein gave several days before the movie opened in 1987, the interviewer reported Bergstein's the fundamental importance of the contrast between Baby and Lisa Houseman:
Dirty Dancing had its genesis years ago in a more domestic image that fascinated Ms. Bergstein -- two daughters in the same family, one raised to be beautiful, the other brainy.Lisa intends to marry rather soon, whereas Baby intends to postpone romance and marriage so that she can prepare to develop a professional career. Baby will attend an all-women college for four years and then work abroad in the Peace Corps for two or three several years. Therefore, Baby is suppressing any romance yearnings she might feel while on this vacation.
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As the resort's Social Director, Stan is supposed to facilitate female-male acquaintances. He organizes fun events that attract people to interact with each other. In particular, the resort wants young women to feel that they receive some flattering male attention during their stay. Even the male waiters are instructed by Max Kellerman to romance the families' teenage daughters.
On the other hand, the social director tells jokes that cynically mock romance and marriage. The social director Stan's joke in the movie communicates the following ideas:
* Stan's father does not like Stan's mother.People who have been in love laugh merrily at the joke, because their love overpowers their cynicism. The husband in the joke dislikes some of his wife's habits, but he loves her nevertheless. Stan foresees that his girlfriend eventually will develop some of his mother's bad habits, but Stan loves his girlfriend and mother nevertheless.
* Stan's girlfriend is too similar to his mother.
* If Stan marries his girlfriend, then he eventually will not like her.
Baby, however, still has not experienced romantic love, and so the joke's cynicism disturbs her. She is afraid that her future boyfriend and husband inevitably will dislike her, and that she will dislike him likewise.
Because Baby aspires to become a career woman, another aspect of the joke bothers her. When Stan tells the joke, he is making fun of the opposite sex's -- his girlfriend's and his mother's -- unlikable bad habits. When Baby thinks about the joke, however, she fears that she herself might end up similar to her own mother. Baby feels that she will have failed in her own life if she ends up as a mere housewife, as an unaccomplished and boring middle-age woman who does not deserve respect from her husband or from her smart daughter.
I imagine that during the eight days following that variety show, Baby brooded about this joke and about the futility of trying to develop lasting happiness in romance and marriage. This sad worry preoccupied Baby until she happened to join the "dirty dancing" party.
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| Baby is about to begin experiencing romantic love, which will overpower her cynicism about male-female relationships |
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