The gorge was peppered with vacation cabins and ruins. On my way to Lake Lure, I had the same sense, as if these creatures were off wandering in the woods, just beyond what I could see. Montana was so green I thought it must be a land of Green Men who might appear at any moment and challenge you to a knightly quest. The gorge reminded me of a canyon in Montana where I had worked over the summers in college. The 74A from Asheville is a two-lane highway that follows the Rocky Broad River through the Hickory Nut Gorge, past farms and fields of yellow flowers, past the towns of Fairview and Bat Cave and finally Chimney Rock, which counts as a completely different town despite its location only one mile from Lake Lure. How could anything connected to it not be? And so I decided to set off for Lake Lure, thinking that if I could drive into the mountains, and into summer, maybe I would find something resembling the past. It’s beautiful out!” – and sometimes she would just walk past us, naked, and go take a swim in the pool because she was always taking naked swims in the pool.Īnne’s mom was so bound up in Dirty Dancing that it seemed impossible that she was dead. Sometimes she would tell us to get up and go outside – “Really, you guys. When I found out, I was sitting in my office, going over lecture notes between classes, and I thought of all those afternoons watching Dirty Dancing, and I thought of her mom coming in and out of the room while we sat in front of the television. And then, this spring, Anne’s mom died suddenly. Had I been forced to testify in a court of law, I would have sworn that “Hungry Eyes” was the most beautiful song ever recorded by man.Īnd then we grew up and stayed close and became fairly different people, but also the same.
#DIRTY DANCING LOCATION NORTH CAROLINA MOVIE#
We also played the movie soundtrack on the tape player in Anne’s room, which was wallpapered with pink flowers and always smelled like whatever perfume were trying out. room and eat White Castles with spicy mustard and rewind the lake lift scene countless times, Jennifer Grey going up and then down, over and over. We were all on those stairs.īut before college, when I was first Baby, I was Baby with my friend Anne, and we would hole up in her T.V. We loved the montages: Baby learning to dance. We sang along with the songs, pounding our chests in mock-melodrama.
We reflected on how completely and wonderfully it had warped our understanding of life. We swapped stories about when we had first seen it. And we were all still Baby in college, when my friends and I ordered Chinese food and re-watched the movie again and again, cross-legged on mattresses on our dorm room floors. I understood this to be “the East Coast.” Families on vacation, all in bathing suits. They seemed to contain a lot of summer camps and pretty lakes. They did not seem to resemble the enormous and awe-inspiring Sierras.
Nobody would put me in the corner.Īs a Californian, I had no idea what the Catskills were. I would dance the final dance at a crumbling Catskills resort. And I knew that the scenes of my life would be set to “I’ve Had The Time of My Life.” In this future, which would be my future, I would wear sparkly high-heeled dance shoes and a skirt that twirled out into a flat line. I knew that this future would involve tempestuous older dance instructors.
I saw that the future held romantic lake-lifts and awkward watermelon-carrying. Like all other teenage girls in the late eighties, I acquired most of my knowledge about life from Dirty Dancing. Was this a strange thing for a grown woman to do? I didn’t care. There it was: an actual place that could be located on a map. Just a small circle, so I could find it again. I got out my atlas and circled the blue dot with a pencil. This information was shocking, like learning that God resided quite nearby and was up for visitors. I had been living in North Carolina for five years before anyone told me that Dirty Dancing was filmed at Lake Lure, a summery vacation spot just a couple of hours away from me.
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