'Dirty Dancing' didn't simply come with some superb dance scenes, however a stark abortion sub-plot with Penny. Whatever happened to her?
Dirty Dancing, the original film and not the laughably abominable ABC remake, is ready as classic as vintage movies get. Sure, it's got a unusual relationship between a tender woman and an older dance instructor who's more like a touring gypsy than a "bonafide" boyfriend subject matter dude, but let's no longer fear ourselves with that.
The movie, in spite of its name, wasn't about dancing, it used to be extra about abortion, and that has everything to do with what happened to Penny.
The film, in case you recall, used to be set in 1963, which is a long way from a accident. According to the Chicago Tribune, that is the similar yr that the Society for Human Abortion was once established in San Francisco. They caused an uproar all around the nation after they challenged National legislation through freely providing up data on secure birth control and abortion for American girls. Stopping yourself from sporting a toddler to full time period used to be pretty much a no-no back then.
Anyone who sought after to get a procedure completed had to depend on the kindness of expert docs, and that used to be only in extra "forgiving" portions of the country. If you weren't in the ones areas, more frequently than now not you had been getting backroom operations carried out through less-than-scrupulous and less-than-skilled practitioners. To paint a picture of ways dodgy it used to be: In the '40s some 1,000 ladies on a daily basis died from abortions that were carried out incorrectly.
Although Dirty Dancing was set in 1963, it came out in 1987, when the abortion debate was at an all-time prime thanks to President Ronald Reagan who used to be vocally very, very pro-life. In truth, it was once one of his biggest campaign platforms and he advocated a constitutional amendment that may've made all abortions unlawful, unless it used to be conducted to save a mother's lifestyles. How serious he used to be about seeing that goal come to fruition, however, was once called into question by pro-life advocates.
Many imagine Reagan spewed anti-abortion rhetoric to appeal to certain voter demographics and it labored like a charm, but it surely nevertheless re-kindled the long status social debate. Penny's persona in Dirty Dancing used to be at the center of it. When she discovers she's pregnant with Robbie the Creep's kid, she goes to a doctor in a close-by the city to have an abortion. Problem is, Penny does not have enough for the process. That's where Baby comes in.
The child of well-to-do conservative Jewish oldsters, Baby lies to her father to get the $250 needed for the operation as a way of ingratiating herself with "the cool crowd." Penny's abortion is going horribly fallacious as it was conducted by a dude who used a "dirty knife and a folding table." Penny's left bleeding and in unspeakable pain, which forces Baby to enlist the assist of her father yet again, as a result of he is an actual doctor.
When he discovers the fact, he calmly, and with dignity, is helping Penny out and cares for her, and then scolds Baby accordingly. But why he scolds her is the place the movie actually makes a daring statement: he says not anything about Penny's decision to have an abortion, but is angrier because his daughter lied to him and is striking around a host of people who don't have their proverbial crap in combination. That's nuts for a period of time when less than 40 percent of Americans thought abortion below any circumstance used to be OK.
Penny's subplot was once such a sore spot for producers that screenwriter Eleanor Bergstein had to fight to include it in the final cut.
What happened to Penny from Dirty Dancing?
The personality in the movie used to be sooner or later replaced by way of Baby for the giant summer time dance, and she or he and Swayze (I do know his name is Johnny Castle however he's Swayze, all right?) live/frolic happily ever after.
But what about the actress who portrayed Penny Johnson, Cynthia Rhodes. What did she move on to do?
Being a dancer on-screen opened up different opportunities of identical roles for the performer. She was in Xanadu and Flashdance, different cult classics, and played the apple of John Travolta's eye in the maligned sequel to Saturday Night Fever, the Frank Stallone directed bomb, Staying Alive. Her last on-screen function was in the 1991 Curse of Crystal Eve. After marrying songwriter Richard Marx, however, she left Hollywood and acting behind.
Cynthia, instead, fascinated by raising their three youngsters, and was once with Richard Marx till 2014, when the couple divorced. She had not anything however good issues to say about her Dirty Dancing co-stars Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey: "First of all, Patrick is a trained dancer, and I think, for a long time because he’s such a fabulous actor I don’t know if people ever really took him seriously… He floored me. And Jennifer… she’s such a natural. And such a hard worker."
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