On a cloudless Sunday in late July, there was a smashed watermelon strewn across the otherwise pristine front lawn of the Mountain Lake Lodge. Perhaps it was a surprise there weren’t more.
The Lodge goes through roughly 100 watermelons during its peak summer months, when it hosts guests from all points of the globe for a series of Dirty Dancing-themed getaways. (Much of the movie was filmed at the Lodge, an able stand-in for the script’s fictional Catskills resort.) On any given year, the Lodge welcomes over 1,000 fans for these events; this year, which marks the film’s 30th anniversary, they added another weekend due to increased demand.
Who could’ve imagined this would be the legacy of a movie whose initial test screenings were so bleak that it almost went straight to video? After producers took a gamble with a theatrical release, Dirty Dancing became one of the highest-grossing movies of 1987, producing a Grammy-winning original song and overnight stars in Patrick Swayze (as sultry Johnny Castle) and Jennifer Grey (as idealistic Baby Houseman). Now people flock each summer to see the lake where Johnny and Baby practiced their lift—and the Mountain Lake Lodge is all too happy to welcome their devotees.
“A couple years ago, I was out front and a lady fell to her knees,” recalls the Lodge’s head bartender Michael Richardson (affectionately referred to among guests as “Bartender Mike”). “I thought she was having a stroke, so I rushed over to her, and she had tears streaming down her face. She just started crying out, ‘I can’t believe I’m finally here!’”
In the film, Kellerman’s Mountain House is located in upstate New York. But the movie itself was shot at the Lodge, in Pembroke, Virginia, and various areas of Lake Lure, North Carolina. (The ballroom where we see Baby and Johnny’s final dance, complete with Baby’s corner, was actually a converted gym located in North Carolina, which has since been demolished). Most of the Lake Lure locales are now gone, but some major ones—the gazebo, the main sand stone-front hotel and dining room, the front lawn, the kitchen, the Houseman family cabin—can still be found at Mountain Lake. The only thing that’s missing is the lake itself: thanks to both its location on a fault line and seismic activity, it slowly started draining in 1998 and was dry within 10 years.
Guests arrived for the third Dirty Dancing weekend of the summer, the last weekend of July, in lashing rain—perfect weather for donning a “Nobody Puts Baby in a Corner” sweatshirt. Check-in was beneath a flat-screen TV boasting a “Welcome to Kellerman’s” graphic, where a lanyard-strung laminated weekend itinerary and maps to the cabins came with the news that the evening’s costume contest and gazebo dance had been moved to the barn due to inclement weather.
At dinner in the Lodge’s farm-to-table restaurant, Harvest—the scene of many Houseman family meals in the film—a group of women in matching tousled Baby wigs and assorted Baby costumes (peasant-shirted Baby, watermelon-carrying Baby, ballroom-dance finale Baby, and lake-lift Baby were all accounted for) ate alongside a man clothed in Johnny’s all-black attire and a woman wearing the side-swept hairdo and dark pencil skirt of bungalow bunny Vivian Pressman. Afterward, two ladies channeling Mr. and Mrs. Schumacher (the film’s infamous wallet-lifting geriatrics) led the way, with a feigned, aged saunter, towards the barn. The dirty dancing was about to begin.
“This just seemed like the craziest thing we could possibly do,” said one of the wig-wearing Babys, who came with a group of childhood friends from England all celebrating their 40th birthdays. An Irish guest, Niamh, brought sisters from Dublin and London, and a sister-in-law from New York City. Tony and Lori drove from Buffalo, New York—Dirty Dancing was their “dating movie” when they first got together; the film’s 30th anniversary is also theirs. Best friends Niki and Nicole (those impeccably costumed Schumachers) watched the film obsessively while growing up together. “It took us 20 years to get up this mountain,” Niki said.
Peggy, from Emporia, Virginia, immediately loved the film when she first saw it in the theater. She’s attended the Lodge’s Dirty Dancing weekends every summer since 2012, and arrived this year with her daughter Tara and 9-year-old granddaughter Anna. “My husband and I always came here together,” Peggy said. “I lost him in May. It was hard coming back in June, but I’m gonna keep on. I already have reservations for next year.”
After unleashing 30 years of pent-up dirty dancing—let’s just say the cocktail-fueled “Love Is Strange” floor-crawling re-creations were plentiful—the crowd headed to the basement to watch the film that started it all. Fans whooped at favorite lines, like “I carried a watermelon”; the decibel level during the love scene was overwhelming. It all culminated with a conga-line dance through the aisles during the final sequence.
“At last night’s party, we got to dirty dance a little without being judged and looked at,” Lori said the next day. “I actually went into the hotel room afterwards and just cried. It was so freeing, oh my gosh.”
“Are y’all having the time of your lives?”
That was Bartender Mike’s standard greeting throughout the weekend, including at the beginning of his movie location tour Saturday morning. Thanks to the disappearing lake, we could walk to the very spot where Johnny lifted Baby, marked by a metal-ringed anchor and a set of cinder blocks that held the floating platform Swayze and Grey stood on between takes. It’s a straight shot from the still-standing dock where actor Lonny Price’s Neil Kellerman lays his notoriously creepy “I love to watch your hair blowing in the breeze” line on Baby.
Stories of Swayze’s easygoing manner were peppered throughout the tour. “He favored Pilsner Urquell, and he’d get a six-pack and go sit outside,” recounted Mike, who has made it his mission to collect first-hand accounts and facts about the film from every local he could find. “If you were walking by, he’d ask you if you wanted to sit down and have a beer with him.” Area residents were recruited as extras and crew; one woman who worked on the film as a hairstylist still proudly shows off pictures of Swayze playing with her nieces and nephews.
The tour ended at Dirty Dancing Remembered, a two-room cabin on the resort’s grounds devoted to behind-the-scenes photos and ephemera. Guests huddled in the section honoring Swayze, who died of pancreatic cancer in 2009, sniffling and pulling tissues from a conveniently wall-mounted box. A hotel ledger signed by Swayze hangs on the wall; his room, 232, begins booking out a year in advance.
It’s a well-told tale at the Lodge that room 232’s shower curtain has gone missing “about 50 times over the years,” Mike explained. “Even though a 30-year-old shower curtain would be disgusting.” Just this summer, a fan took the Swayze obsession a step further: around 2:00 A.M., the metal numbers from the door of his room were pried off with an Allen wrench.
The Lodge’s kitchen is home to Penny’s corner, where Baby discovers the dance instructor, played by Cynthia Rhodes, huddled and crying in the film. (Guests beg to be snuck in to take photos there at all hours of the night.) It’s also residence to the one person at the Lodge who was present 30 years ago during production: executive chef Michael Porterfield. “Chef Mike,” as he’s known, has one very impressive claim to fame: he once gave Patrick Swayze a ride down the mountain on his motorcycle. He still owns that bike, and has declined a few generous offers for it, too—though “more people have offered to buy the seat.”
Swayze, who insisted everyone call him by his nickname, Buddy, drank in the kitchen with the crew at night, while Chef Mike recalled that Grey—who stayed at the main hotel with her then-boyfriend and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off co-star Matthew Broderick—had her seafood brought in from nearby Blacksburg. “We had a lot of high-school girls working here as bus girls,” Mike said. “Anything [Broderick] touched, they took. We ran out of saucers, knives, forks, spoons, glasses, coffee cups.”
He also pointed to the spot in the kitchen where Neil peruses the contents of a refrigerator with Baby. (The actual fridge from the film currently resides on Chef Mike’s front porch.) If you look closely behind the Matzo balls in that scene, he said, you’ll see empty 9mm cartridges, earplugs, and a bottle of Tabasco sauce, all planted by the Lodge kitchen staff.
Saturday afternoon was reserved for dancing lessons. But Anthony and Dana, from Cleveland, Ohio, were holding their own dance party on the porch of their cabin, thanks to the industrial-size speaker they brought from home. “This trip has always been my dream,” said Dana, as the couple swayed to The Ronettes’ “Be My Baby”; they were the first and last ones on the dance floor the prior night.
Over at the Virginia Cottage, a.k.a. the Houseman family’s cabin in the film, its weekend residents—a group of nine new friends brought together by a social media-savvy Dirty Dancing fan named Rene—were playing cards. The ladies paused their game for a chat around a crackling fire, in what had been staged for the film as Baby and her sister Lisa’s bedroom. The movie played on their TV beside us, showing a scene of the rained-in Housemans—shot feet away in the adjoining front room. The full Dirty Dancing experience.
On Sunday morning, the sun finally returned, inspiring a mad crush of guests circling the property in an effort to snap a few well-lit photos before checkout. Friends instructed body-suited and cutoff-clad subjects to “Suck in! Lean back!” on every makeshift bridge and staircase, while watermelon-toting women ran amok and tiny specks in the distance faux-lifted among the lakebed’s weedy overgrowth. Some even announced plans to visit two nearby off-site locales from the film: an old golf course, scene of Baby and Johnny’s pre-lake lift, and the Cascades National Recreation Trail, where Baby and Johnny practice dancing on a log.
Mountain Lake Lodge staff are often asked to point out the location of Baby’s corner; they must respond that it was fashioned temporarily in a North Carolina gym, and no longer exists. But 30 years on, and even without the lake that named it, Mountain Lake Lodge has created its own fictional universe for several weekends each summer, where Dirty Dancing is real and nobody even comes close to getting put in a corner.
“It’s fun to be goofy about it, and just enjoy being goofy about it,” said one of the Houseman cabinmates during that rainy Saturday card game. “Not having to be mom. Not having to be wife. Just having the time to say, ‘Hey, take my picture!’ or ‘Now we’re gonna dance!’ Just absolutely enjoying pretending.”
“And it’s pretty awesome to look out and see Kellerman’s right there.”
