I Carried a Watermelon: Dirty Dancing and Me. Katy Brand

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      Of course, tape or no tape, the film still influenced my real-life crushes. I ought to confess at this point that, until the moment Johnny Castle came into my life, my first real love was Michael Jackson. This was the late 1980s, and though people thought he was weird, there was not yet any hint of the full horror that was to come. I wrote him long, long letters. I read Moonwalk – the official biography – several dozen times. I even tried to ‘trick’ International Directory Enquiries into giving me his phone number by calling 151 from the phone box at Amersham station on my way home from school, and saying as convincingly as I could that ‘a man named Michael Jackson has called and left no number – I believe his address is Neverland Valley Ranch, Santa Barbara, California, USA’, and then waited patiently as they confirmed what I had deep down suspected but could not bring myself to admit – that the number was, indeed, listed as ‘ex-directory’. True story.

      Johnny represented a new kind of man for me – unequivocally heterosexual in an old-fashioned ‘movie star male lead’ kind of way: tough, strong, emotionally closed, waiting for the touch of a good woman to open him up. I’d seen them on film before, but they were usually either cowboys or played by Tom Cruise. Johnny had old school sex appeal, he had swagger, he had improbably 1980s clothes and musical tastes, given that he lived in 1963. He was wary and cautious to begin with – a man of few words – but then once you got to know him, he opened like a flower. He had vulnerabilities, he had talent, he had the moves. And he was clearly very, very good at sex.

      This was all very well, but it had to remain in the realms of fantasy, because as I looked around me, there seemed to be few men of my age (12) that could really match up. The boys at my school were perfectly fine, if you liked competitions to see how long you could hold your hand over a Bunsen flame without crying, extended belching displays where we had to also ‘smell the burp’, and having your burgeoning breasts commented on at every possible opportunity. But Johnny was a ‘real man’, to use a now outdated and probably somewhat toxic phrase. I was done with studied ambiguity – I wanted a hunk. Narrow-hipped, long-haired, feminine-featured men with a suggestion of eye-liner were no longer my bag. Nothing wrong with them, but they did not push my buttons. I wanted someone who hid their sensitivities under a gruff exterior. I wanted someone who might throw a punch under certain circumstances, especially if some ‘Robbie the Creep’ type was to impugn my honour. I wanted a project. Just like Baby, I wanted to sort someone out. I wanted a diamond in the rough.

      But this was a side issue. As I look back, I can now see that while Johnny Castle was a formative type for me when it came to men, my real crush was on Baby. It was all about Baby. She was called Frances; my middle name is Frances. And the similarities didn’t end there – o-ho no. We both had a fire in our bellies for social justice and human rights – she was joining the Peace Corps; I did a 24-hour sponsored silence in aid of Oxfam (much welcomed it seemed at the time, by parents and teachers alike … in fact, there were enquiries as to whether, in return for a larger donation, the period of silence could be extended). She liked wearing cut-off denim shorts, I liked wearing cut-off denim shorts. Mine were home-made though, and a little less ‘neat’ than Baby’s.

      In fact, I had gone a bit nuts with the scissors one day and hacked up my best jeans, cutting each leg from the knee into a long, jagged point that each reached to mid-calf. My horrified grandmother, who was looking after me and my sister that afternoon, could only look on and whisper, ‘Are you sure you’re allowed to do that to your clothes, Katy …?’ The reflection in the mirror when wearing them made my actions instantly regrettable, although I felt I had to style it out to save face in front of Grandma. Frankly, I looked like an extra from Oliver!, but nonetheless I wore them stubbornly to the park and library that day, and tried to look nonchalant and vaguely superior to anyone I caught sniggering.

      That night, I cut the jagged pieces off, creating a wonky and uneven but more traditional denim short, and then stuffed them in a drawer and pretended to my parents I didn’t know where they were. They never saw the light of day again (the jeans, not my parents). How I coveted Baby’s beautiful pair, with their perfect turn-ups and smoothly flattering cut through the hips. The dream pair of denim shorts still eludes me to this day, but I will never stop looking.