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| An article in The Arizona Republic on January 9, 1988 |
Not till about the 100th time she sat through Dirty Dancing did Mallory Longworth notice the pickles.I found this article on Newspapers.com
On the surface, this is a fairly simple movie. Boy meets girl, boy and girl mambo, boy and girl mambo all night (nudge, wink).
But subtleties are at work here, Longworth says. Nuances. Undercurrents. Things that could draw her to Dirty Dancing 145 times -- and counting. The kinds of thinks that could help her lose 50 pounds -- and counting.
The kinds of things that turned Longworth, a resident of Ann Arbor, Mich., into the unofficial mascot of Dirty Dancing, which got her featured in Newsweek, which prompted the maker of the new Dirty Dancing videocassette, which was released Wednesday, to send her a fruit basket and free tape this week in appreciation.
Things like kosher dills.
Patrick Swayze, dance instructor and mambo macho man at a Castkills resort in New York, is catching an earful from Mr. Kellerman, the camp commandant. Robbie .... chips in something snippy of his own.
"You just put your pickle on everybody's plate, college boy," Swayze sneers, "and leave the hard stuff to me."
Cut to Longworth, Diet Coke in hand, sitting side-eyed in a theater. "It took me probably 100 times before I realized there was a plate of pickles sitting there," she says. "I thought he was just being obscene."
Which is not necessarily a bad thing. Dirty Dancing became a surprise hit largely because Swayze became a surprise hunk. Lesli Rotenberg of Vestron, producer of the movie and video, calls her telephone the "Patrick Swayze hot line." All 25,0000 copies of a Swayze poster sold out in about the time it takes to pin one to a wall.
Dirty Dancing certainly has been a boon for Vestron Pictures, a branch of the company that owns Vestron Video, a once-foundering video-distribution company. The film marked Vestron Pictures' entry into producing, a move that the parent company hoped would provide quality products for Vestron Video to distribute. ....
The movie opened in August [1987]. Twenty weeks later, it's still n the top ten nationally.
Suzanne Jamroz, manager of an AMC theater in suburban Detroit, said, "Most of the people coming to see it now have already seen it a couple of times."
Longworth, "in my 30s," has beaten that mark in one day, sitting through a morning show, coming back around six and returning again at midnight.
The immediate attraction was Swayze, said Longworth, finance manager for WIHT-TV, an Ann Arbor station. Then the entire movie became a companion and a caloric substitute. Se saw Steel Dawn, Swayze's next picture, but only once: "It was the most awful movie I ever saw in my life."
Her loyalty is reserved for Dirty Dancing. "I go when I get depressed," she said. "If I don't have anything to do, whatever, I'll go. I leave the theater feeling so up. It's just a postive statement about being in love."
Longworth, 5-foot-2, began a diet shortly before the movie's release. "I found that being at home made me want to eat. So I decided I had to get out." With theater concessions less tempting than leftovers, she was dropped to a size 16.
Longworth's father has not quite understood. Years ago, he kept her away from Elvis Presley movies because "anybody who could move like that had to be an evil influence on a young girl." Now his daughter has become semi-famous for watching dancers whose moves would make Elvis' sideburns curl.
I have not lost any weight by writing this blog.
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