Kimmie’s living room was purple. The swamp cooler kept the air cold. Here, with her mother in the next room and my mother a few blocks away, I could dance to the soundtrack from Grease. I pretended to know the lyrics as well as my friends, who could sing every note of “Totally Devoted to You” into hairbrushes or an empty paper towel tubes. They compared how many times they had seen the movie. They played “Pink Ladies” and I played along blindly. I hadn’t seen Grease. My mom wouldn’t let me.
Through elementary school and junior high I pieced parts of the movie together, a quilt stitched with Rizzo’s coiled smile in one corner and the “Hand Jive” frenzy in another. Eventually, I saw the movie from start to finish—snuck via HBO at a friend’s house. During those years my mom’s refusal to let me see Grease became a symbol of how I felt she tried to control me. One day, I let her know.
The subject was You Never Let Me Do Anything. I was in high school and fighting with my mom. We went back and forth rehashing the 10,000 ways my life was boring and unfair. Thinking I had the perfect example of her controlling ways, I told her it was ridiculous I couldn’t watch Grease when it first came out in theaters.
“I didn’t like that the girl had to change to get the boy.”
Oh.
I stopped and thought about what she said. It was true. Sandy changed who she was to gain the friendship of the Pink Ladies and the love of Danny. She went from yellow-cotton Noxema wholesome to bobbleheaded 4-inch stilleto-wearing smoking sexpot in the final scene. Danny joined the track team, but in the end the varsity sweater was trashed in favor of black leather. Sandy was good enough for Danny during summer days and oh-those-summer-nights—why not when they met again at school? If Danny Zucco were Darth Vadar with a chin-dimple, he would have succeeded in getting Sandy Skywalker to join the Dark Side of the Force. Their car takes off flying from the school carnival, no doubt on a mission to oversee the final phases of Death Star construction.
For my mom, it wasn’t a good vs. bad issue even though the heroes of the movie were the rebels. She wasn’t worried I’d form my own bananaseat bike gang with matching satin baseball jackets (although I entertained the thought). Elements of the movie certainly clashed with her values and I can see why she wouldn’t have been thrilled to drop off her second-grader at the Cooper Theater downtown to witness twenty-something actors pretending to be high school boys Blue Mooning.
When my kids are grown I don’t want them to think any man or woman is worth their 180 degrees. The songs are catchy, the status is cult—but the message is one I can live without.
