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. This information was shocking, like learning that God resided quite nearby and was up for visitors.
I got out my atlas and circled the blue dot with a pencil. Just a small circle, so I could find it again. Lake Lure. Kellerman’s. There it was: an actual place that could be located on a map.
I wanted to go, but I hesitated. Was this a strange thing for a grown woman to do? I didn’t care. I didn’t hesitate long.
Like all other teenage girls in the late eighties, I acquired most of my knowledge about life from Dirty Dancing. It gave me a glimpse of the future. I saw that the future held romantic lake-lifts and awkward watermelon-carrying. I knew that this future would involve tempestuous older dance instructors. 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 would dance the final dance at a crumbling Catskills resort. Nobody would put me in the corner.
As a Californian, I had no idea what the Catskills were. They did not seem to resemble the enormous and awe-inspiring Sierras. They seemed to contain a lot of summer camps and pretty lakes. Families on vacation, all in bathing suits. Lots of greenery. Lots of communal meals. This was not the way my family traveled. I was intrigued. I understood this to be “the East Coast.”
So I was Baby, I decided. But we were all Baby. 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. We swapped stories about when we had first seen it. We reflected on how completely and wonderfully it had warped our understanding of life. We sang along with the songs, pounding our chests in mock-melodrama. We loved the montages: Baby learning to dance. We were all wearing those long cut-offs. We were all on those stairs.
But before college, when I was first Baby, I was Baby with my friend Anne, and we would hole up in her T.V. 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. Readjusting her wet tank top. Pushing back her hair.
The VHS tape gathered dust. We worried that we might wear it out.
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. 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.
And then we grew up and stayed close and became fairly different people, but also the same. We both teach English. And then, this spring, Anne’s mom died suddenly. 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. Sometimes she would tell us to get up and go outside – “Really, you guys. 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.
Anne’s mom was so bound up in Dirty Dancing that it seemed impossible that she was dead. The movie was still around. 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.
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. The gorge reminded me of a canyon in Montana where I had worked over the summers in college. 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. 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.
The gorge was peppered with vacation cabins and ruins. More of the former than the latter, but the ruins seemed to be there to remind me of Kellerman’s and of other places that no longer exist. One house had been almost completely taken back to nature, overgrown by brush. But it still stood there, slightly crooked under its greenery, right next to the road. I passed an abandoned inn in the style of a Swiss chalet, its windows boarded up, and then, further down the road, an old motel. The motel had beautiful lattice work, maybe from the middle of the century, maybe from about the time of Dirty Dancing.
These places were closed, probably never to reopen. And then there are the places that just exist for summer and are closed otherwise. These places have a particular light and temperature, and when these things change, the places go into hibernation until the next season. The nearby town of Cherokee has a Christmas theme park that’s only open in the summer. Santa’s Land. In the winter, the town is cold and gray, but in the summer, it vibrates with people, and its river fills with children in inner tubes.
We say that an off-season vacation destination is dead. It ceases to live, and then it comes back to life, like a character in a Greek myth. This happens very suddenly, sometimes in just a day: the weather warms, and people arrive in throngs, as if controlled by some sort of invisible force, to populate a deserted place. When I drove into the parking lot of the Lake Lure Inn in the late afternoon, I saw that the people of summer had not yet arrived.
I asked the woman at the reception desk if there were many more people at the hotel. “No,” she said. “Not very many. It’s quiet tonight.”
“How many rooms are taken?”
“Nine,” she said. “Out of eighty.”
“Is the restaurant open?”
“No, she said. “Not until next weekend. Sorry.”
I dropped my bag in my room and then took a walk through the lobby. The hotel had Dirty Dancing themed cabins – Baby’s Bungalow and Johnny’s Cabin – but I chose a standard room in the main hotel building. I wanted to see what I could sense of the movie without any obvious tourist trappings. The trappings go far beyond a few cabins. In mid-August, Lake Lure will host the fifth annual Dirty Dancing Festival, which includes dance lessons, “Watermelon and All-Ages Games,” and a lake lift competition.
The Lake Lure Inn took me back further in time than I had intended. Built in 1927, it operated as a luxury resort and as a rest and recovery location for soldiers during World War II, some of whom still supposedly roam the hotel as ghosts. When I told an English friend about this detail, she laughed. “What, ghosts from the forties? The ghosts in this country only date back to the forties?”
For me, the ghosts of Lake Lure only date back to 1963, which is when Dirty Dancing is supposed to take place. Of course, the movie’s rather eighties soundtrack – including, of course, Patrick Swayze’s “She’s Like the Wind” – generates a sensation of accidental timelessness. The story is itself a memory. It’s told as a flashback, although it’s not clear from how far in the future Baby, or maybe finally Frances, speaks. There’s only Jennifer Grey’s voice-over, which insists on, but fails to register, the passage of time.
The hotel’s lobby was filled with old grandfather clocks and broken music boxes, the walls lined floor to ceiling with portraits of society dames and paintings of nymphs frolicking in streams. Heavy mahogany furniture. In one corner, a vase of peacock feathers and an old globe, browned with age, the ocean and land faded to almost the same color. Tiffany lamps. A player piano labored away, played by invisible hands. The movie’s staff stayed here, and some of the restaurant scenes were shot in the restaurant, including the pickpocket scene. Those Schumachers. The dance practice scenes were filmed in the hotel’s old mirrored gymnasium, but now the room has been renovated into an event space.
I walked across the street and along the beach, a man-made stretch of sand peppered with red lifeguard chairs. There was a playground off to one side with a waterslide that went right into the lake. And there it was: the lake. It looked like the movie. I thought: Of course it does.
The beach was gated, and the gates were locked. There were only a few other people around. A man walked past.
“It’s not open yet?” I asked.
He shook his head. “No,” he said. “Not till next weekend.”
Summer would start next weekend, and not a moment sooner. Down at the end of the beach, in the distance, a small wedding was wrapping up. The bride struggled to move around in the sand in her fluffy dress. By gathering up the layers of fabric in her arms and walking very deliberately, she was able to make it out to the water’s edge, where she stood for some time, looking off at the mountains as the DJ packed up his equipment. I wondered if she had chosen to get married here because of the movie.
It’s strange to see an actual place when you’ve seen it represented before. You struggle to determine which is real: the thing itself or its image. There seems to be some disagreement about whether the movie’s lake-lift scene was absolutely, certainly filmed at Lake Lure or somewhere in Virginia, but one thing is certain: Lake Lure is only part of Kellerman’s. The crew also shot some of the scenes at the Esmeralda Inn in Chimney Rock and at a nearby Boy Scout camp, which is now gone. Many of the resort’s buildings are actually the Mountain Lake Lodge in Pembroke, Virginia.
Dirty Dancing is based on writer Eleanor Bergstein’s own experience of a summer romance in the Catskills. But by 1987, the resort of her youth had been torn down, and there was nowhere in New York that resembled this lost place. So Kellerman’s is a composite. Lake Lure, something that stands in for something else.
In the early evening, it looked like it would rain, but then it did not. It was still a bit cold out once the sun went down. I walked around the outside of the hotel and sat by the pool, which had a view of the lake. I bought some reproduction vintage postcards of the hotel at the gift shop. Like all old postcards, they looked like a painting and a photograph merged into one. These images depict neither the hotel of the movie nor the hotel of the present. They depict an unknown place, a place before what I know. I thought I would send one to Anne.
Before I went up to bed, I snuck into the closed dining room and sat down at one of the tables, where I stayed for a while, in the semi-dark, looking out at the quiet town. On the walls were black and white photographs of the hotel in the twenties and thirties. I watched the headlights of cars as they drove into town, off to my left, and then kept driving, past the lake and the gas station and the ABC liquor store at the edge of town, and then off into the distance. They were all going somewhere else. As I fell asleep, I heard geese honking out on the lake.
When I got ready to leave after lunch the next day, I saw that I had a flat tire, which kept me in Lake Lure a little bit longer than I intended, and as I sat in the parking lot and talked to the guys who were changing my tire, I thought this must be a final manipulation of time. I did in fact get back home by early evening, and the next day I started to fill my car with all the things I would need for New York, where I would spend the summer.
As I was packing, Anne was boxing up her childhood home so it could be sold. All of her mother’s things went into boxes. Some of these boxes will be kept, and some will be given away. I wondered if the VHS tapes were still there in the house, stored away in the cupboards in the television room. I suppose that another generation of teenagers will watch movies in that room. Maybe they will watch different movies.
The things that take hold of you when you’re young do so in a way that few things can as an adult. You still come to love new things when you’re older, but never with the same sense of total identification. As you become more yourself, you resist total identification. It seems odd, perverse, self-annihilating. I think this is why, even now, no one I know really makes fun of Dirty Dancing. We may mock it, affectionately, the way you mock a sibling you love, but there is a sense that our youth can’t be separated from it, and to reject it would be to reject a part of ourselves.
Before I left for New York, I watched it again. Because it was a way of mourning. Because it was a way of knowing something. And because it was time for summer to start.
Tags: beauty, childhood, dirty dancing, magic, movies, susan harlan
I loved this! My best friend from high school and I were also obsessed with Dirty Dancing, and we went on a quest to find Lake Lure in college (my friend attended Virginia Tech, which isn’t too far from the camp). We were disappointed to find that the lake had dried up and was nothing more than a small, swampy pond. Good to know that the lake has returned since then!
Never mind, I just realized that the place I visited was Mountain Lake Lodge, not Lake Lure (http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/travel/returning-to-mountain-lake-minus-the-lake/2014/08/07/7b3d1556-168a-11e4-9e3b-7f2f110c6265_story.html).
Dear Susan Harlan:
If anyone is wondering, the Dirty Dancing Festival mentioned in this piece starts TOMORROW: http://www.dirtydancingfestival.com/attend/schedu…
anyone? road trip? kind of not joking here.
Um, I AM GOING TO THIS. I’m leaving tomorrow with friends. We went last year and it was delightful.
I would love to hear about it if you’d like to drop me a line! Thanks. I am JEALOUS.
I think you need to pitch a write-up of your trip to The Toast. Not even kidding. Please. Please. Please.
Dirty Dancing was what I watched on the broadloom suburb floor of my grandmother’s new house, in a subdivision in Muskoka, surrounded by trees and the deeply rural. I can still vaguely remember the smell of her house, the baseball games and General Hospital at 3:00pm, and the long, long hours between here and there.
This is the perfect article to remember that. Thanks.
A couple of years ago I went on vacation to NC with my boyfriend and three of his friends. We actually stayed in a house right on Lake Lure, and I still tell people that we went there because Dirty Dancing is my boyfriend’s favorite movie. Hint: It’s not.
Umm, Dirty Dancing was filmed at Mountain Lake, near Virginia Tech/Blacksburg. I was actually in high school there at the time, and several of my friends were extras. I don’t know who started the Lake Lure rumor, but unfortunately it is just not true.
It was filmed at both locations, which she covers in the article, and is also covered here, on Wikipedia:
So, um:
I’m listening to “FU-GEE-LA” right now and this is perfectly synced, so thank you.
This is beautiful. I’m so glad you wrote this. I didn’t see Dirty Dancing until I was (practically) an adult, but I fell in love with the film and went to the Dirty Dancing festival last summer (and will attend again this year because it was incredibly lovely! and everyone was so sincere in their affection for the film! and I am a grad student at Duke and only a mere 3.5 hours away!). Watching it last summer was kind of bittersweet, though; reproductive rights in NC have been under siege recently, and the film’s abortion politics were a kind of scary reminder of how far we’ve fallen since.
Anyway, this is all to say thank you for writing this. I’m going to share this with the folks who are joining me for the festival tomorrow – and if any other Toasties are there, let me know! Come say hi! I will be the one carrying the watermelon, being like the wind, and having the time of my life.
Recently rewatched Dirty Dancing (again!) and I was struck by how abortion-positive it was and how it could never get made in today’s climate. The movie doesn’t judge Penny for choosing to have an abortion… Indeed, no one – not Baby, Johnny or what’s his name, Johnny’s cousin try to persuade her not to get an abortion. Having a child is simply not an option. Penny doesn’t show any regret or indecision about her choice, either. The problem is that it’s an illegal abortion that goes terribly wrong. The audience has complete sympathy for Penny and the danger she is in as a result of the back alley procedure. Baby’s dad doesn’t judge Penny for having the abortion either. In fact, he’s mad at Robbie at the end, not because Robbie got Penny pregnant, but because he was a first prize douchebag in failing to take responsibility for his part in her pregnancy (Ie help her get an abortion).
This was so delightful, I love that feeling of trying to explore a gone-away place that has lived mostly in memory, in fantasy, and deciding how it lives up to that. It is like walking by maybe not your childhood home, but like a treehouse or something else more special from memory.
I remember one Christmas shopping expedition I spied some sort of collector’s edition of Dirty Dancing and knew my mom would love it – since I was out with her, I told her “look away! I found your gift!” when I was at the checkout – which she obediently did for about five seconds, then as they’re ringing it up “what? dirty dan?”
“I said don’t look!”
and the clerk intervenes “yes. Dirty Dan. He’s a farmer. A friend of mine.”
Which stills causes us to giggle about. Maybe I need to watch it again.
The movie was still around. How could anything connected to it not be?
This is also roughly how I feel about Patrick Swayze.
I don’t know what it is, but seeing something written by someone who lives…very near me (probably, I live in the NC mountains and all the geography pointed out is how I get to Lure) makes this immediate. I’m a little young to have a connection to Dirty Dancing, but my mother holds a lifelong love of Patrick Swayze that includes a poster of him wearing unclasped overalls and nothing else on the back of my parents’ bedroom door. I’ve never asked my dad how he feels about that; I’m not sure I want to know.
This comment doesn’t have much to do with the subject matter, but I still feel connected to it by a million little strings of emotion, and now I’m sitting at my desk with a full heart. So thank you, Susan Harlan.
How weird, I used to live in Lake Lure & didn’t know about its connection to the movie. My mom & step-father worked at a place on the water, but I don’t know the name…nothing was like I thought it would be when I visited Asheville recently, my memory may not be as good as I thought.
I'm listening to "FU-GEE-LA" right now and this is perfectly synced, so thank you.
Oh man, this has made me so nostalgic for when I spent a week at a camp in Lake Lure. We attempted to the lift in the lake, but it was too deep. They took us on a boat ride to see the remnants of some old cabins used in the movie. This was so beautiful, Susan, and gave me all the feels. I can’t wait to go back home- I miss it.
Oh man, this has made me so nostalgic for when I spent a week at a camp in Lake Lure. We attempted to the lift in the lake, but it was too deep. They took us on a boat ride to see the remnants of some old cabins used in the movie. This was so beautiful, Susan, and gave me all the feels. I can't wait to go back home- I miss it.
You know, I never saw the film as a kid, but I worked on the West End show for its last 6 weeks in town, and it was the first time I came out and was known by my colleagues by my new male name and pronouns. I will defend both film and show to the hilt, because it’s totally bound up for me in my ‘coming of age’ despite not knowing anything about it until I was … um … 25.
It was the most magical 6 weeks of my life – very much like that holiday where ‘real life’ doesn’t seem to exist, and you’re both more and less yourself than you’ve ever been before.
Everything got harder after that, but god, those 6 weeks. Thanks for giving me another chance to think about that time 🙂
This was beautiful, so sad and sweet
This was so beautiful. I have to admit. I wasn’t allowed to see this movie when I was young. I finally saw it in college, part of my, “I’m away from my parents lets watch all the TV and movies I can!” education. But I was never into it. Maybe by then, I’d lost the sense of romance that you need to properly love this movie. But whatever the case, I love this essay. It’s so beautiful and sad. But mostly a lovely testament to the stories that give our lives a narrative arc.