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.
Besides my clothes, I tried to get Dirty Dancing into my life in any way I could. I begged and pleaded to go on a family holiday to a resort, in the Catskills, where I now knew through painstaking research (again, pre-internet – I had to actually ask things, of actual humans standing in front of me. Can you imagine? The horror) was the area in upstate New York known for its holiday resorts where the fictional Kellerman’s nestled. It was made very clear to me that I might as well ask for the moon on a stick, because flying from London to the US to an all-inclusive resort for three weeks for a family of four was (a) prohibitively expensive, and (b) wouldn’t happen even if we won a million pounds, as the idea of going for enforced cha-cha lessons and group aerobics sessions in the lake with a bunch of strangers was really considered a kind of hell in our household.
So it was a campsite in Cornwall again, like last year, and the year before. And don’t get me wrong, these were enjoyable holidays full of freedom, clear waters, hot sand and thick clotted cream, but with the best will in the world, it was not Kellerman’s. And I wanted Kellerman’s, badly. It wasn’t that I thought I would somehow actually find Baby and Johnny, and Billy and Penny, and carry a watermelon and have to dance at the Sheldrake at incredibly short notice. I wasn’t completely insane. But I wanted my own Baby experience, and to do that, there must be staff, and an element of ‘backstage’ to stumble in on. There needed to be staff quarters to be caught in. There had to be some rules for me to disobey, and someone to compromise my reputation with. And although there was a jolly old Cornish couple who ran the campsite shop, and a guy ‘on reception’ who honestly looked like a retired pirate, who could perhaps be termed ‘staff’, they didn’t live onsite, and even if they did, the chances of me coming across the three of them engaged in some sort of sweat-laced-dance-off-cum-orgy in the early hours seemed slim, though perhaps I underestimate them.
It was mostly roaming the ancient, pagan Cornish landscape for me, trying to find other children who would willingly participate in spontaneous, free-style dance lessons. It was fun, but not satisfactory. I had a longing for romance and drama, and something magical to happen by moonlight. And one year, as unlikely as it sounds, I got it.
We visited the Minack Theatre to see a production of Guys and Dolls. It is a spectacular outdoor auditorium, cut right into the rocky cliffs, where the audience sits on smooth stone benches and the performers play in front of the backdrop of the Atlantic Ocean. On a clear night at the right time of year, halfway through the show the sun sets and the moon rises, glittering on the water, kissing everyone with a pale silver. This was just such a night. And even better, we were staying over that day with a school friend of mine and her family in a large cottage right next to the theatre itself.
The show was so beautiful that afterwards I floated back to the house in the dusky light, my head full of songs and a new crush on my hands: Sky Masterson. I was not being disloyal, I told myself, for this was surely only a holiday romance, and Johnny was where my heart lived. But Johnny was at home.
My friend and I were sharing a room. We sat on the wide window seat with the old wooden sash frame pulled up high, so the warm night air would envelop us and we could hear the sea. We wanted to keep the feeling going for as long as we could. And then we heard it – singing, men singing, the sound will-o’-the-wisping to us across the twilight. They were cast members, singing songs from the show.
We froze on the window seat – this was the dream. Was it in fact, a dream? The bedroom overlooked the garden, with a path that wound its way down to a low stone wall and an iron gate at the end. Two men were now silhouetted against the full moon, the shapes of their costumes – sharp suits and trilby hats – clear against the pale brightness. They stopped at the end of the garden, and looked towards us. Straight at us. We ourselves were picked out by the low glow of a night light inside, behind us. There was a pause. We held our breath. And then they started singing again, this time just for us, songs from the show: a medley.
This was it. It was happening. This was as close to backstage at Kellerman’s as I was going to get on England’s most westerly point. In fact, across the now near invisible horizon, lay Kellerman’s itself, just 3,000 miles away as the crow flies. It was enough. I was transfixed. I wondered if we should steal out of the house, trip down the path, and try to inveigle ourselves with these men, perhaps there would be a cast party somewhere, perhaps there would be dancing, perhaps there would be a call for me to step in on stage to cover a cast member who needed time off for a tricky personal medical procedure that had to be kept hush-hush, perhaps, perhaps, perhaps … But then the singing stopped, the men waved to us and moved on, their crisp outlines smudging into the night.
We had been, and there is simply no other word for it, serenaded. SERENADED, for god’s sake. For the rest of the holiday, I would lie on my inflatable mattress in our canvas tent, listening to the August rain and trying not to touch the sides, feeling all my feelings. It was the same feeling as I got when I watched Dirty Dancing – a tingle of magic, the sense of a million possibilities glittering before me.
The next obvious step in my obsession was to enrol in some actual dance classes. A short distance away from home, in the next town, there was a small dance school, which offered lessons in ballet, tap, modern, and something called ‘national’, which was basically learning the national dances of the various countries of the world – a singularly useless skill, but undeniably good exercise. I was naturally disappointed to find that the merengue, the salsa and the mambo were not on offer, but I made do. It was a start. After all, this was