The Time of My Life

After lunch on the Saturday of the Dirty Dancing Themed Weekends, most of the guests would go downstairs to the ballroom for a viewing of the movie. After the film ended, I’d leave the bar upstairs and head down to run the trivia game. Believe me when I say that many of the fans I encountered knew way too much about the movie, so I had to come up with some pretty tough questions.

To be fair, I would always caution the guests that if they wanted to win the good prizes, they would have to know some obscure details. I’m not a communist, after all—I’m not giving the good swag away for nothing. To keep it even more fair, I also made sure that every guest knew they could win only a certain number of prizes so it would be fun for everybody. There were times when I met guests who knew so much about the minute details of the film that I would jokingly refer to them as members of the high council of the cult of Dirty Dancing. More on that later.

So there I’d be, holding a few pages of paper and a microphone, in front of a few hundred people fresh from watching the movie and eager to win some prizes. A few pages were typed, but most were in my generally illegible chicken scratch, which made them difficult even for me to read, especially in the dim light of the ballroom. I would read the questions, and one of the young banquet staff would try as best she could to identify the person with the correct answer. Sometimes that job went to a lovely woman named Peggy, one of the biggest Dirty Dancing fans I’ve ever met. A Dirty Dancing weekend frequent flyer, Peggy always tried to rent the Virginia Cottage, and when she did, she allowed other guests to come inside and take pictures. I still owe her a bottle of Moscato wine for all she did for guests out of the goodness of her heart.