Every Night Movie

Grease is the word, is the word that you heard
It's got groove it's got meaning
Grease is the time, is the place is the motion
Grease is the way we are feeling

Grease is in heavy rotation over here. I actually tried it on the girls a year or so ago, but M nixed it pretty quickly. Then Other E got her into the soundtrack. Then she went to a slumber party a few weeks ago where they watched it, and she came home hooked. We rented it the other night as a family movie (our membership allows us three movies at a time, which translates into an E movie, an M movie, and either a Mommy movie or a family movie, depending on how into my book I am). Now E is completely enamoured as well. Plus E has a fever (again), which means all screen time rules go out the window, and we watch Grease over and over.

Summer lovin' had me a blast
Summer lovin', happened so fast
I met a girl crazy for me
I met a boy, cute as can be

E made me print out the lyrics for "Summer Nights," and she walks around reading/singing them. She holds auditions and she gets the part of Sandy; then she has rehearsals (M is currently in two plays; E is suggestible). Both girls are amazed that I know every word to every song.

But now there's nowhere to hide, since you pushed my love aside
I'm not in my head, hopelessly devoted to you
Hopelessly devoted to you, hopelessly devoted to you

I'd forgotten that Grease is about sex. But you know, it's kind of like Asterix: it operates on different, and bizarrely appropriate, levels for each of us. E knows that it's about a boy and girl who like each other, but are really different. M gets that Rizzo thinks she's pregnant and is worried. I know what Rizzo means when she tells Danny to go flog his log, and I appreciate the complexities of American sociosexual dynamics at play in Danny's implied pasts with Rizzo and Cha-Cha, not to mention Sandy's costume shift from virginal white to skin-tight black with red stilettos.

Because, really, Grease is the meta-text of (white) American culture. It's all there. James Dean meets American Graffiti meets Welcome Back Kotter meets Happy Days meets Frankie and Annette meets 90210 (or perhaps 90210 is really the meta-text, for surely Kelly and Dylan's summer idyll when Brenda is in France derives directly from Sandy and Danny on the beach in the opening sequence to Grease, except, of course, that Kelly has sex, because it's the 90s, not the 70s riffing on the 50s). But Grease is even more than that: It's "The Gift of the Magi," except things work out, because, after all, we're talking Hollywood American meta-text, not the gloom and doom of the literary past. It's the romance of the automobile. It's Rogers and Hammerstein, with Ado Annie backing up Laurie. It's homosocial bonding. (And I always liked Rizzo best, and, overall, I'd take Kenickie.)

But, finally, Grease is John Travolta, for whom the word I keep coming up with is sinuous. The things that guy did with the length of his body? The dimple in the chin? The brilliant salvageable-sanitized-bad-boy trio of Vinnie Barbarino, Tony Manero, and Danny Zuko? When he and Olivia Newton-John dance through that fun house, two long lines of sinuously twisting black, they're the ones that I want.

Next rental? Saturday Night Fever, for sure. But not with the kids.

I got chills.
They're multiplyin'.
And I'm losin' control.
'Cause the power
you're supplyin',
it's electrifyin'!

You better shape up,
'cause I need a man
and my heart is set on you.
You better shape up;
you better understand
to my heart I must be true.

Nothin' left, nothin' left for me to do.

You're the one that I want.
(you are the one i want), o,o, oo, honey.
The one that I want.
(you are the one i want want), o,o,oo, honey.
The one that I want
(you are the one i want want), o,o, ooooo
The one I need.
Oh, yes indeed.