Baby eats like her father, not like her mother

The Paste website includes an analytical article written by Stephanie Burt and titled I Carried a Watermelon: Food in Dirty Dancing. The article begins:

You may think that the 1987 film Dirty Dancing is about coming of age, dance lifts, and Patrick Swayze’s arms in a tank top, and true, you’d be partly right. But it is also about the mid-century culture of the Catskills, and that resort standard included family vacations, dressing up (beige, iridescent lipstick and coral shoes included) for dinner, and fancy dining to go with the fancy duds.

However, in DD (if you’ve watched it more than 20 times, you get to abbreviate), there is the added bonus of food symbolism, illustrating character attributes, and of course, sexual innuendo ....

Burt analyzes insightfully the movie's references to pickles, pot roast, watermelons, rice pudding, beets, cabbage roll, fruit salad, sweet gherkins, toasted bagels, Jujubes and "spaghetti arms". For me, Burt's most interesting commentary is about the Houseman family's breakfasts.

Grapefruit vs. breakfast plate

This is subtle, but the morning after the good doc saves Penny’s life and Baby’s changes forever, the breakfast choices illustrate the family divide. Baby and her father are enjoying a hearty breakfast plate, while the clueless Lisa and her mother are daintily deconstructing grapefruit halves.

Does this mean that saving lives and doing the horizontal mambo works up an appetite? Or that nobody “in the know” would ever eat grapefruit for breakfast? You decide.

Burt has made here a valuable contribution to the literature about Dirty Dancing. Although Burt does not illustrate her breakfast comparison, I will provide the relevant screenshots here.

Jake chowing down a breakfast platter.
Marjorie "daintily deconstructing grapefruit halves". 

Baby already has chowed down half of her breakfast platter.
Lisa has daintily deconstructed only one segment of her half-grapefruit.

Part of the explanation for the appetite differences is that Jake and Baby did physical work during the night.

* Jake medically examined and treated Penny's pelvis.

* Baby sexually dry-humped Johnny's pelvis.

Also, Baby is planning to sneak back to Johnny's cabin after breakfast to hump him a lot more, all day.

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In contrast, Marjorie and Lisa slept all night, and so a little grapefruit gives them all the energy boost they need to start their day of relaxing all day in lounge chairs by the swimming pool.

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Beyond the consideration of calorie expenditures, the breakfast differences illustrate that Baby routinely emulates her father whereas Lisa routinely emulates her mother.