Remembrance

Dear friend,

In 1987, my husband and I watched Dirty Dancing. We didn’t know about the controversies surrounding the name of the movie and the abortion subplot. Nor could we have anticipated that it would have such a strong following several decades later. The movie contained great music, acting, and dancing. Set in the 1960’s, it ushered in some nostalgia for a time our parents remembered well—an era we were born into.

It’s one of my all -time favorite movies. Of course, my husband knows this but imagine my surprise and delight when he planned an anniversary trip for us to Mountain Lake Lodge in Pembroke, Virginia; a destination he kept as a surprise because it’s where they filmed major portions of the movie. A two-week vacation. Just the two of us. I might mention; he’s never taken off a full two weeks from work. Never. So, this was a special trip—celebrating forty years of matrimony. The details of the trip were kept secret, and he revealed them step by step, from location to location as we drove toward the east coast. We stopped in Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Tennessee, West Virginia, Maryland, D.C., and Virginia. At the lodge, we stayed in a quaint cabin with an inviting back porch where we soaked up the breathtaking view of the mountains. We stood in the same spot where the Housman family parked and unloaded their luggage in the opening scene. We twirled around in the gazebo where Penny gave dance lessons. We looked out over an area of the lake (now completely dry) where Johnny and Baby did the famous lift. Pictures, memorabilia, and behind the scenes facts hung in the main lodge. And we couldn’t have asked for better weather with unusually cool temperatures for that time of year. The entire experience was surreal. I loved every minute of it. That’s not to say there wasn’t a snag or two, but with an attitude of gratitude and some flexibility, those snags served as savory spices that simply enhanced the memories made.

Perhaps you’ve never seen the movie. Perhaps you never want to see the movie due to personal convictions. That’s okay. The reason I’m sharing this part of my life is because remembering where we’ve been, what happened while we were there, and holding on to the lessons from the past move us toward a better tomorrow. Our nation experienced intense birthing pains in the 1960s; a time when people fought against dramatic changes while others embraced them. At the time, it seemed as if everything was falling apart. In a way, it was because you can’t put new wine into old wineskins. (Matthew 9). New wine needs to ferment, and in biblical times that process expanded the old wineskins until they cracked or burst, spilling the new wine and ruining the old wineskin. We can’t go back to the roaring twenties, the industrious forties, the prosperous fifties, the swinging sixties, or the excess of the eighties. It’s a new day. But we must remember what those decades taught us because if “we, the people,” which is terminology found in the preamble of the U.S. Constitution, want a better tomorrow, we must not forget the ills of deceptive power, insatiable greed, and political manipulation.