I Carried a Watermelon: Dirty Dancing and Me

A couple of nights later, Baby is reluctantly hanging out with the hotel owner’s grandson, smarmy Neil, who has taken a bit of a shine to her. By chance, she stumbles upon Penny, who is crying in a deserted kitchen. Baby runs to find Johnny, who comes to get his dance partner, and learns that Penny is pregnant by sleazy, spoilt waiter Robbie (who is by now romancing Baby’s sister, Lisa). Billy has found a back-street abortionist who will take care of Penny’s problem (it’s 1963, and so there are very few safe options open to her), but it costs $200, which they don’t have, and he is also only available on the night when Johnny and Penny have to perform a show dance at another hotel, the Sheldrake. Baby borrows the money from her father (without telling him what it’s for) and also steps up to fill in for Penny on the night.

This means she must very quickly learn the dance, with Johnny as her teacher and partner. As they work together, we feel the tension building– both sexual and fearful – can she pull this off? Finally, they go off in Johnny’s bashed-up old car to dance the mambo at the Sheldrake, while Billy takes Penny to have her pregnancy terminated. Apart from one small fluff on the dance floor, Baby gets through it. They are elated, but when they get back to Kellerman’s late at night, they find Penny bleeding and in agony. The abortionist botched the job.

Baby runs to get her father, who treats and reassures Penny, but is horrified that Baby is hanging out with people he considers to be reckless and unreliable. He gets the wrong end of the stick and thinks Johnny is the father of Penny’s baby, and is suspicious that he and Baby seem to know each other well. In his most ‘upright and loving father’ tone, he forbids her from having anything more to do with the dancers.

Baby defies her father, going straight to Johnny’s cabin, where she asks him to dance. This becomes one of the greatest seduction scenes of all time. After some earth-shattering sex, they start a relationship. How could they not?

Meanwhile, a lonely older woman, Vivian, who has been paying Johnny for private dance lessons and anything else that ‘comes up’, discovers this new relationship, and in a fit of jealousy, accuses Johnny of stealing purses and wallets around various Catskills resorts. Max Kellerman tells the Housemans he is about to fire Johnny, and Baby has to step in and reveal – in front of everyone – that she has been spending her nights with him, as this is the only alibi he has to prove he is not the thief.

Later, it is revealed that an elderly couple, the Schumachers, are responsible for the thefts, but Kellerman fires Johnny anyway for his forbidden liaison with a guest, and so he leaves the resort and Baby with tears in his eyes. Eventually, everyone realises that Robbie was the one who got Penny pregnant, and Lisa breaks it off with him. There is a great deal of misery all round, and Baby has some home truths to tell her father about prejudice, and snobbery, and what it takes to be a decent person.

It seems the summer has come to a bad end, and not just for Baby, but for everyone. Is this the end of an era? A wider loss of innocence? Max Kellerman seems to think so, as he laments times gone by – are cosy family resorts which feature wig trying on sessions and ballroom dancing lessons going to survive? Are they simply too old-fashioned?

But what’s this? It feels like the future has come to claim its place at the table. For at the evening talent show, on the last night of the season, Johnny Castle returns! Making a bombastic entrance, striding through the room for all the world like a man who hasn’t just been fired, he finds Baby sitting with her parents in the audience. He takes her out of The Corner nobody should have put her in. They spontaneously perform their mambo routine so perfectly – including the impressive lift Baby couldn’t manage at the Sheldrake (amazing what a life-changing shag can do for your confidence) – that everyone, even Max Kellerman and Baby’s dad, agree they are perfect together, that Johnny is a good man, and Baby is her own woman. The whole audience are up and dancing and they all have the time of their lives.

And breathe. Well, I didn’t check anything until after I’d finished. I just blurted it all out from memory. It was quite exciting, and hopefully, a helpful reminder as we take a deep dive into one of the greatest films of all time. Please do watch it though (who needs an excuse?), as it stands the test of time, and repeat viewings. It really is a phenomenal piece of work. Written by former dancer Eleanor Bergstein, drawing from her own life experience, filmed with a small budget ($4 million, which is nothing in feature film land) and a total lack of belief from the very studio that made it (they wanted it to go straight to VHS), it has grossed over $200 million worldwide, spawned multiple remakes, including a long-running live show, and thousands of articles, tribute events, wedding dances, proposals and even academic papers. It has also affected my life in the most unexpected ways.

Although I was not truly conscious of it until much later, in some respects I Carried a Watermelon cleverly started writing itself before I was even aware of my desire to explore and celebrate Dirty Dancing in real depth. A few years ago, I took part in a live show where the premise was you wrote a love letter to something very important to you, and then read it out for the audience. I chose Dirty Dancing, seemingly out of the blue, but once I started writing my letter I saw that I meant every word. I took it to the gig, stood up and delivered it, and I was amazed by the response. I thought people would simply laugh at me, but in fact I had a line of women, and some men, waiting afterwards to thank me, and hug me, and tell me how much it meant to them too. I looked for the letter when I started writing this book, and found it tucked away deep in my computer files. I read it again and still felt that burn of passion coming off the page. That letter became the start of this book.

What I began to realise, as I wrote my letter, was that Dirty Dancing has somehow shaped me and my choices, insinuating itself into my life in unexpected ways – it has shaped my sexual preferences, my attitudes to social class, good character, politics, love, relationships, casual sex, abortion, father/daughter issues and, of course, my understanding of whether it’s possible to learn a complicated dance routine to perform in public in only a matter of days, at the same time as losing your virginity and ensuring an old, thieving couple is prosecuted for their crimes. All off the back of carrying a watermelon.

But why do I love Dirty Dancing? Would it be too much to say it’s like the wind … through my tree? Yes, maybe, but it wouldn’t be far off. It has everything – daughters and fathers, sisters, neglected wives, fear of how a pregnancy will affect your career, low-life scum and rich wankers, and how to handle them all. It’s like an instruction manual for girls – well, middle-class girls anyway. Girls like me. ‘Normal’ girls who sometimes have a bit of a yen to get out there and do something a bit crazy. Nice girls who suddenly get an urge to carry a watermelon and get dirty with the ‘wrong’ sort of man.

I’m so glad Dirty Dancing got made, when it so nearly didn’t – Eleanor Bergstein struggled to find funding for her script for years, and eventually had to shoot the whole thing over a few autumn weeks in a cold and rainy hotel resort in Virginia, on half the budget she had originally intended. I’m so glad it was released, when it so nearly wasn’t – the company that stumped up the money couldn’t initially see much potential beyond ‘straight to video’ and so it might have fallen by the wayside. And the fact that there is an abortion storyline right at its heart meant that it lost sponsorship money – but still Bergstein bravely resisted calls to change her film and remove the abortion. She was clear that we should not ever be complacent about our rights as women, and I think she has been proved 100 per cent correct in this regard.

I’m so happy that Dirty Dancing is now widely getting the more serious recognition it deserves, when it so easily may not have. It was dismissed for years as an enjoyable but largely insignificant piece of entertaining fluff – a commercial hit, yes, but nothing more – when in fact it is an important rite-of-passage story for girls. The female lead, Baby, is about as active in the story as it is possible to be. She makes it all happen. Every last moment is down to her, from the funding of an illegal abortion to the offer to fill in and learn the dance, to the extraordinary first seduction, and then the exoneration of Johnny as a thief. She drives the entire plot.

It has been much observed recently that things ‘girls like’ are often trivialised when compared to things ‘boys like’ – that stuff for women is romantic, domestic and ultimately insignificant, whereas stuff for men may be entertaining but also has ‘universal themes’ or an ‘important message’. I can’t think of another film I’ve seen that has more universal themes, or a more important message than Dirty Dancing. I’m so glad I’ve found this way of obsessing about it a little more, and a load of new people to do it with.

In its way, it is a feminist manifesto – a story with a heroine who has to defy her family, stand up for her principles, save the man she loves, and is finally lifted up in a floaty pink dress – you can still be a powerful woman in a floaty pink dress, after all. And you should never put up with being put in a corner, no matter how you’re dressed. I’m glad it came into my life all those years ago, and I promise not to neglect it again. So, I’m wearing my Kellerman’s t-shirt with pride (bought off the merchandise stand at the live show), even though it’s slightly too small. That way, a little bit of it is always close to my heart, reminding me that nobody puts Baby in a corner. Thanks for being there, Dirty Dancing – I was a Baby when we met, but just look at me now.

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It was the summer of 1990, when everyone called me Katy and it never occurred to me to mind. Mainly because that was my name. I was 11 years old. The world felt new, my secondary school uniform felt newer, and as it was a weekend I was told that if I wanted to, I could stay up to watch this film I’d barely heard of on TV called Dirty Dancing.

I liked films with dancing in them – like Bandwagon, Singin’ in the Rain, and Top Hat, with Gene Kelly or Fred Astaire. My favourite films were Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music, where women on a mission turn up and sort some people out. I liked the big numbers and sassy romantic story-lines, the up-against-the-clock drive when characters put their differences aside to pull together for the Big Show, the finale. I knew I liked the old stuff best. I could take or leave Grease, frankly – it’s always struck me as a bit cold. Rizzo was all right, but Rizzo was meant to be a schoolkid and she looked like she was 45 and already on her third divorce. So even though this so-called Dirty Dancing was intriguing, I wasn’t expecting much. I could always turn it off if I didn’t like it.

Well.

I’m not sure I moved a muscle for the entire duration of the film. It’s possible I held my breath. When it finished, I went straight upstairs for I couldn’t bear to break the spell by talking to anyone. I lay in bed, staring at the glowing star stickers on my bedroom ceiling, tracing them from one to the next. I was trying to remember every moment and relive it. My body was alive with some unspecified but powerful energy. My mind was blown.

Scenes flew across my memory like shooting stars with such speed and brightness that I couldn’t keep hold of them for long. It was a feeling. A heartbeat. And my heart was beating out of my chest. The opening – the family’s arrival at the hotel – inauspicious in some respects, but with the promise of something more as porter Billy and Baby bond over unloading the bags. Then the tingle of the opening bars to ‘(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life’, played slowly on the piano, a tease of the magic yet to come, as Baby makes her way up to the main house to ‘look around’, and later glimpses Johnny being told off by Max Kellerman (‘no funny business, no conversation, and keep your HANDS OFF’). That opening dance number, where Penny and Johnny burst into the room and show what they can really do left me almost panting. The stage is set – this magnificent, talented man, pulsating with passion, but with a bad attitude, is breathing the same air as our Baby. The anticipation of what would happen next was almost too strong to handle …

And then, and then, oh and then that staff after-party – still my favourite scene – the sense of stepping into something ripe but forbidden, too good to turn back now. The dancing – like nothing I had ever seen before, raw and direct, primal. I felt hot thinking about it. And giggling and hugging myself over that line, ‘I carried a watermelon’, as Johnny curled his lip and Baby scolded herself for being so naff. I felt I could so easily be her. It was coming back to me in flashes – the impossibility of the task ahead of Baby – learning to dance to a professional standard in five days; the build-up of tension between Baby and Johnny, so perfectly paced – you knew what was going to happen, but you couldn’t wait to see it – the delicious inevitability of it. And then that sex scene – the confidence of Baby now! To pull him in, to make it happen. Could a girl really do that? Could she just go and get a man if she wanted him? I couldn’t believe it.

The twists and turns, the injustice of the stealing accusations against Johnny – I felt it burn within me, just like Baby did. She had to save him, I totally understood that – I would have done the same. The sick twist of heartbreak as he leaves her, the bleak wasteland that follows, as if life will never have colour again. And then the triumph of his return! He comes back! To find her! And to lift her high in the air, to show everybody what an amazing woman she has become. Oh god – I wanted to be Baby. I wanted it all to happen to me. I had to see it again. As soon as possible. I wanted this feeling to last forever.

But cruelly, the experience was fleeting and unrepeatable, it seemed. I had not thought to record the film off the telly as I watched it. I could not have foreseen the effect it would have on me, and now I was kicking myself. I didn’t have the resources to video everything on the off-chance that it would radically re-order my emotions and inform my destiny. Nobody had that many blank videos at their disposal, surely – where would I store them, for god’s sake? These were just some of the confused, racing thoughts zig-zagging through my overwhelmed and overheated brain. I couldn’t believe I had lived before Dirty Dancing. I couldn’t believe anything had mattered.

At first, I had to hold the memory of it within myself. I couldn’t afford to buy it, and renting a video was an occasional treat, with the choice of film very much a committee decision involving the whole family, and I didn’t detect quite the same level of enthusiasm in the house for Dirty Dancing that I was barely keeping under control. I had to wait.

Then, a few months later, I spotted it in the terrestrial TV schedule. The excitement was immense, and I made sure I was ready. I found a tape that had an episode of Tomorrow’s World on it, followed by the second half of an old football match. They would be sacrificed in order that this might become The Dirty Dancing Tape. I carefully peeled back the old sticker, and replaced it with a brand new one, on which I wrote ‘DIRTY DANCING – DO NOT WIPE’ in thick black ink. I crouched before the VCR player in readiness at the appointed time, lined it all up, and pressed record.

As soon as the film finished on TV, I immediately rewound the tape to check it. I pressed play. Please, please be there. It was. OK, for some reason, the first five minutes were missing, which was frustrating, but predictable considering our somewhat capricious video machine, which seemed to delight in mysteriously switching channels mid-record, or ending the recording early for no apparent reason, or just turning off altogether, so it had to be watched like a hawk. But the bulk of the film was there. I had done it, it was mine. IT WAS MINE. And nobody could take it away from me. I had caught the magic in a net.

So I watched it all over again. Twice in a night. It didn’t feel excessive, it felt right. Because now it was available for me to view whenever I wanted to. And I wanted to. A lot. I watched Dirty Dancing after school. Every. Single. Day. For THREE MONTHS, until my concerned father confiscated and hid the tape, and it very much occurred to me to mind.

It took me a week to find it, discreetly rummaging in every drawer, ransacking then replacing the contents of various cupboards. I have always been an obsessive person – bloody-minded, stubborn, relentless in my pursuit of what I think should rightfully be mine. I am, to put it mildly, tenacious. I knew that the confiscated Dirty Dancing tape was somewhere in the house. I felt in my bones that my dad would not be so cruel, so callous as to throw it away entirely. I understood on some level that he was trying to save me from myself – perhaps encouraging me to widen my viewing habits. Or to do some homework. But life was different now that Dirty Dancing was in it. It was my lifeblood. I had to have it. It was my drug of choice. And so, I continued the search – of course I did.

And then, one night I got lucky – I had almost given up, but I had a hunch, and so I returned to a previously searched area. My diligence was rewarded. Pulling back an old garden chair, I gasped, and felt a quickening in my belly, as I caught sight of a familiar black plastic corner, tucked at the back of the junk cupboard under the stairs, behind a huge sack of dry dog food the dog wouldn’t eat but my dad wouldn’t throw away. Could it be? Could it really be? I reached into the cobwebby darkness, the musty, meaty, slightly sulphurous smell of old dog food wafting unnoticed into my nostrils. What did I care for that? I was holding Dirty Dancing in my hands again.

My elation is hard to describe. I had done it. I hadn’t given up, and I had found it. The urge to watch it right there and then – to gorge on its sunlit perfection and wipe my chin afterwards – was strong but I had to bide my time: it was past 11pm when I made my glorious discovery, and though the house was quiet, I couldn’t risk being caught. Trembling,I forced myself to place the precious tape back in its meaty-smelling hiding place, kissing it first, and went back to bed quivering with anticipation. Within a few hours, I would be watching Dirty Dancing again.

By now I was 12, and allowed to be at home alone after school until my parents finished work. Tomorrow would be just such a day. Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. Such sweet joy tomorrow would bring. I would arrive home from school at 4.15pm. My parents would usually arrive around 6pm. That was my window. I needed 1 hour, 46 minutes to watch the whole thing, which was tight, but if I fast-forwarded through the opening credits, I could do it all, rewind it, and have it safely back behind the bag of dog food before anyone knew what had happened.

I barely slept. I couldn’t concentrate at school. Baby, and Johnny, and Penny, and all the others were waiting for me. I crashed through the door, dumped my bag, and breathlessly retrieved the one and only copy of Dirty Dancing I could ever hope to possess (videos were bloody expensive in those days). I put it on. I pressed play. I licked my lips and sat down on the sofa. I was ready. It began.

Oh my god, every minute was still perfect. I sunk into it, let it envelope me. I felt safe but also excited. Perhaps this is what love feels like, I thought. As the film ended I once again felt that heady sense of being invincible. I could do anything. I was just like Baby, and there was a Johnny out there for me somewhere.

Until one day – disaster! The tape broke, and it stuck at the point where Johnny defiantly says, ‘You just put your pickle on everybody’s plate, college boy …’ and would not move on from there, no matter how many times I ejected the tape and wound it on manually with a coin. I tried to move it the other way, thinking I could get beyond the glitch. It seemed to work for a moment – I could feel the tape spooling on nicely, but then there was an ominous clicking sound, and peering inside the black box, I could see it was now hopelessly tangled. Oh god. OH GOD.

I held the VHS tape limply in my hands like a beloved deceased hamster. Should I bury it? With a full service? I couldn’t believe it. It was gone. A piece of me went with it – partly because I loved Dirty Dancing so much, and partly because I had ripped my nail trying to fix the tape, and the torn part had dropped inside.

I filled the vacuum as best I could. There was no internet at this stage, of course, or maybe there was, but it was of no use to me as it merely connected a few military bases, American universities, and a clutch of badly-dressed geniuses in garages sending each other strings of numbers that meant nothing. So I survived by being creative – I found coping strategies to keep it alive within me. I forced my best friend from school to allow me to act out my favourite scenes in my living room. (I should clarify here, it was the dancing scenes I wanted, specifically the tuition scenes – I did not wish to recreate anything sexual with my best friend, though she may have been more nervous of where this was heading than she let on.) I co-opted my little sister into the game whenever I could. She was up for it, being a fan herself, but I always took it too far, until people were broken.

I had of course made a taped copy of the full soundtrack, which I had borrowed from the library. God, how I loved those songs; they introduced me to a whole new genre of music. ‘Hungry Eyes’ by Eric Carmen still makes my heart flutter, and the stomach-drop of pain you feel as Solomon Burke sings ‘Cry to Me’ hits me every time. ‘In the Still of the Night’ by Fred Parris and The Satins is a crooning delight. I had never heard songs like this before, and they excited me. Not to mention ‘(I’ve Had) the Time of My Life’, with that immensely distinctive half-time chorus opener, which then picks up a nice little groove you can’t help but move to.

And then there is the also wonderful but slightly less acknowledged second soundtrack, which features some of the more obscure Latin dance tracks, for the true enthusiast – I had to order it specifically from the library, and I made a tape of that too. I had all the dances tracks at my disposal now, and I used them to the point of wearing them, and myself out. All day at school, I would badger my best friend to come over, and when she relented, we would do the ‘Hungry Eyes’ rehearsal montage with Penny over, and over again (oh, how I wanted a red leotard with a little gold belt, and black fishnet tights, and gold sandals), with her standing in front of me, ‘teaching’ her the moves. I was too bossy to be Baby – I had to be Penny. For some reason, I always loved that whole sequence, starting with Penny looking at Johnny with great meaning over Baby’s head – this is the moment where we see how high the stakes are for them. This has to work, it just has to.

My best friend, though, was soon fed up with her role. She liked Dirty Dancing well enough, but I managed to eclipse her with my obsessive behaviour – I took it to an unnecessary level. I wanted it all the time, to the exclusion of all else. Finally, when pushed to the limit of her tolerance and Latin dance abilities, she refused to participate any longer. Or even come to my house for fear of an ambush. My sister also had other interests to attend to. And so, now I was alone with my madness.

My requests for a new shop-bought copy of the Dirty Dancing video, with a real cover and everything, to replace the mangled tape, for my birthday, and then at Christmas fell on deaf ears – clearly an enforced separation was now underway and probably for my own good. Dirty Dancing was again forbidden, and we all know how effective that is when keeping teenage girls from the object of our desires. Dirty Dancing was my unsuitable first boyfriend, my leather jacket relationship, my staff-guest liaison, and my parents were stepping in to preserve my honour. I wouldn’t have access to my own copy again for another seven years.

Of course, tape or no tape, the film still influenced my real-life crushes. I ought to confess at this point that, until the moment Johnny Castle came into my life, my first real love was Michael Jackson. This was the late 1980s, and though people thought he was weird, there was not yet any hint of the full horror that was to come. I wrote him long, long letters. I read Moonwalk – the official biography – several dozen times. I even tried to ‘trick’ International Directory Enquiries into giving me his phone number by calling 151 from the phone box at Amersham station on my way home from school, and saying as convincingly as I could that ‘a man named Michael Jackson has called and left no number – I believe his address is Neverland Valley Ranch, Santa Barbara, California, USA’, and then waited patiently as they confirmed what I had deep down suspected but could not bring myself to admit – that the number was, indeed, listed as ‘ex-directory’. True story.

Johnny represented a new kind of man for me – unequivocally heterosexual in an old-fashioned ‘movie star male lead’ kind of way: tough, strong, emotionally closed, waiting for the touch of a good woman to open him up. I’d seen them on film before, but they were usually either cowboys or played by Tom Cruise. Johnny had old school sex appeal, he had swagger, he had improbably 1980s clothes and musical tastes, given that he lived in 1963. He was wary and cautious to begin with – a man of few words – but then once you got to know him, he opened like a flower. He had vulnerabilities, he had talent, he had the moves. And he was clearly very, very good at sex.

This was all very well, but it had to remain in the realms of fantasy, because as I looked around me, there seemed to be few men of my age (12) that could really match up. The boys at my school were perfectly fine, if you liked competitions to see how long you could hold your hand over a Bunsen flame without crying, extended belching displays where we had to also ‘smell the burp’, and having your burgeoning breasts commented on at every possible opportunity. But Johnny was a ‘real man’, to use a now outdated and probably somewhat toxic phrase. I was done with studied ambiguity – I wanted a hunk. Narrow-hipped, long-haired, feminine-featured men with a suggestion of eye-liner were no longer my bag. Nothing wrong with them, but they did not push my buttons. I wanted someone who hid their sensitivities under a gruff exterior. I wanted someone who might throw a punch under certain circumstances, especially if some ‘Robbie the Creep’ type was to impugn my honour. I wanted a project. Just like Baby, I wanted to sort someone out. I wanted a diamond in the rough.

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.