When it comes to eighties movies, I’m not as solid on Dirty Dancing as I am on Fletch, but I watched it recently with my children, because what I remembered about it as I flipped through OnDemand Family Movies was the Kellerman’s song, and I had definitely forgotten how much of the plot hinges on back alley abortion. I think the rating is only PG-13, whatever that means, but my eight-year-old felt it should have been R. When I asked him why, he explained it was because a boy and a girl were in bed together “totally naked” (though this is implied) and the staff kids are dancing together in a way that suggests “they must be in love with each other.”

In the last scene, when Baby finally nails the lift and regains her father’s approval, I can identify with Jerry Orbach for a moment—in part because I too am a doctor,* but also he decides to admit his huge, cruel mistake only because he’s feeling powerful and energetic, and he’s in a crowded room where no one is paying attention to him. “When I’m wrong, I say I’m wrong,” he tells Johnny, and I bet he actually believes himself when he says it. I’m wrong all the [darn] time–I went ahead and edited my language so Christine won’t have to do it in her Facebook comment—but whenever I realize it, I tend to have these tedious internal conversations about it, more or less on the level of pairing wine with food. Then, as with food and wine, I eventually realize I am either too uninformed or too tired to pursue the matter. I would like to think if I had misjudged Johnny and Robbie, and hadn’t had too much Pinot Noir or Gewürztraminer–depending on the dish–to articulate my mistake, I would have done the same thing.

Once in a while, though, I fixate on something trivial–I may have bored or offended someone at dinner the night before, or blogged ungrammatically. I might start thinking about one of my mistakes on a long drive, and Brad might ask, “Watcha thinking about?” “Nothing,” I might say, since I know husbands like this answer better than anything very complicated. (“What I’m planning to cook later” is also acceptable.) I had a thing like that happen on the way back from the Rochester camp bus drop-off yesterday. Some time ago, in a post about establishing intellectual authority over one’s children—a pursuit I will have to abandon after the Dirty Dancing debacle, I used an abbreviation for the word microphone. I started with “mike” but I didn’t care for its informal, un-capitalized look, so I changed my spelling to “mic.” That looked better and more familiar to me, but I had no idea which spelling was correct. I’m chagrined that this preference puts me at odds with Ben Yagoda, and aligns me with layers in bed who are not blankets, but like me, the “c” spelling is rooted in hip-hop. So maybe there’s no mistake after all.

*pretend