Nobody puts Baby in a corner!

And that was that. Linda posts “in the corner” as a prompt and I’ve got Dirty Dancing front and center in my brain. Some things are too big to get around, too overpowering to ignore, and my teenage memories of this particular movie make branching out in another direction impossible. Might as well go with the flow as they say.

I was working in a movie theater the summer Dirty Dancing was released. We were allowed to sit in on movies during breaks and after work so there’s honestly no telling how many times I’ve seen this one if you were to add up all the fifteen minutes here, fifteen minutes there viewings. Tack on thirty years of “hey, look what’s playing on TNT, let’s watch” showings and we’re talking hundreds and hundreds of Nobody puts Baby in a corner moments.

Somehow it’s never lost its tearjerker effect, though. I know, I’m an easy mark.

I was talking with T-man this weekend about a show I’d heard on NPR about theaters and their response in the pandemic. They’ve been giants in the entertainment industry for so long, exerting enormous influence on movie studios regarding their production and release dates. They’ve been flat out unwilling to consider any kind of streaming access to movies – if studios wanted the theaters to carry their movies then they had to commit to no streaming platform access for seventy-two days. But the pandemic has thrown all of it into a tailspin. Suddenly there’s no guarantee movie theaters will even survive, and ones that do will most likely have to shift their approach to streaming access if they want to make it.

I don’t know how I feel about all this. Generally speaking I think greater access is a good thing. It’s unreasonable for theaters to hold movies hostage, forcing people to show up in their buildings at a certain time on certain days, especially when you consider even before covid some people weren’t able to leave their homes for various reasons. But there’s a tiny part of me that hates to see such a big part of my youth die off.

Linda hosts Stream of Consciousness Saturday. This week’s prompt is “in the corner.” Write about whatever the image or thought of “in the corner” brings to mind. Have fun!