We didn't get home until 1 a.m. Richmond time (I don't know why, but no matter what airline we are flying or from where we are traveling, we always seem to end up on that last flight in to RIC:  11:55 arrival.), but as that was really only 10 p.m. local time where we woke up this morning, that wasn't so bad.

I finished watching Grease on the plane to Richmond, and, as promised, here is my review:

Yes, this is the Grease from 1978 with Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta, featuring prominately Didi Conn and Stockard Channing.  First off:  this is a story about a bunch of wild kids during their senior year in high school.  Travolta was the youngest actor in the bunch at 23, Didi Conn was 26,  Olivia Newton-John was 29 and Stockard Channing 33. Nobody was ever going to buy them as high school students.  Apparently this "too old" complaint was a big deal in 1978 when the film was released, and eventually the director had to comment.  His explanation was that this was a deliberate choice.  "It's not a documentary," he is said to have said, "It's a fantasy. It wasn't important that they look like they were in high school; it mattered that they all looked about the same age."  O----kay.  What kind of fantasy and whose?  Are we supposed to see ourselves in this casting of too-old-to-be-in-high-school bunch? Let me just say that no one in his or her 30s has a fantasy of reliving high school.  (Or if they do, if these are folks for whom the best days of their lives were those spent in high school, then all I can say is I feel very sorry for them!)  High school, as near as I can tell, and I taught in them for more than 30 years, is, has always been, and always will be a wretched hive of scum and villainy.  

My take:  these actors were all too old (youngest actor in the film actually was 20), and I am sure the choice was deliberate:  because they couldn't find a pack of 17 and 18-year-olds who could sing and dance and be the box office pull that Travolta, Newton-John, and Channing were.

Secondly:  some of these songs are just really weird.  Take "Grease is the Word" for example:

Grease is the word, is the word that you heard
It's got a groove, it's got a meaning
Grease is the time, is the place, is the motion
Grease is the way we are feeling

What does that even mean?  "Grease is the way we are feeling. "  We're feeling greasy?  Should we take a shower?

Thirdly: Mr. Director obviously wasn't kidding about the "fantasy" bit.  To start with, the entire plot hangs on a completely ridiculous coincidence.  Sandra Dee and Danny Zuko meet somewhere in the world at some unspecified beach resort and have a summer romance far from anyone they know.  At the end of summer, Sandra has to return to Australia (don't know if that bit was in the original musical or whether they added it to account for Olivia Newton-John's accent), and Danny Z goes on back to high school.  Then, miraculously, Sandra Dee doesn't go back to Australia; she goes, instead, to Rydell High, the very high school which Danny attends!  Of all the high schools in all the towns in all the world, Sandra ends up at Rydell AND she doesn't know that that is Danny's school! What are the odds?  Astronomical.

The next fantastical element is that Sandra Dee, the clean-cut All-American cheerleading good girl, upon arriving at Rydell, is immediately taken under the wing of the "bad girls" who do all the things that no good girl is ever supposed to do--drinking, smoking, teasing their hair, dressing in tight black skirts, and (it is presumed) having sex with various "bad" boys.  This would never happen.  A clique in a high school is a clique with like gravitating toward like, and people just do not cross boundries.  

And then there's the bit about the flying car at the end--a sort of evil Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang which first tried to slice up the car Danny was driving in the drag race (tearing up the body work but somehow missing all the tires), and which, having been won by Danny in said race, then flies away with Danny and Sandra at the end.  (Oh--did I mention:  spoilers included here.  Sorry if you have never seen Grease and were dying to watch it for yourself.)

Finally, Rydell High being Danny Zuko's school brings us to the biggest problem with this film which is that it portrays an absolutely appalling view of what women ought to be and how they ought to behave.  The problem stems from the fact that out of range of his school friends, Danny can be a nice guy.  Once back in their realm, however, he has a reputation to uphold (he says so himself), and that is WAY more important than treating Sandy well. So the upshot is that in order to keep the guy, the girl has to change her entire personality to be what will help him prop up his ego and create the "right" impression on his friends. Give me a break.  That would have been bad in the 50s, but by the time this film was made in the late 70s, it was unconscionable, and nowadays it's just grotesque.

The attitude toward extra-marital and teenage sex in this film is pretty ambiguous.  The "bad" girls are portrayed as making themselves sexually available, while there is an entire song mocking Sandra Dee for abstaining from sex until she is married.  Then when the word gets out that Stockard Channing's character thinks she is pregnant, the whole school ostracizes her. (See "wretched hive of scum and villany".) She lies to the man who is apparently the father and tells him he is not (why???).   Meanwhile, Channing has the only song in the show with any real depth in it when she sings about how there are worse things she could do than getting pregnant, such as leading boys on as a tease and then refusing to follow through with the implied promise. And then when it turns out she is not pregnant, everything is sunny again. At that point, just after graduation, the man offers to "make an honest woman" out of her.Seems reasonable to me. I really don't know what we are meant to make of all this.  I will say, however, that the sexual messaging, whatever it is, falls a lot flatter when the folk engaging in extra-marital sex are in their 30s rather than their teens.

A final note:  Olivia Newton-John, even at 29 years old, must have been the skinniest woman in Hollywood--approximately two sizes below 0.  When they put her in that cat suit at the end, she all but disappears.  Amazing.

At any rate:  that's all for the Arizona-New Mexico trip. 

By the numbers:

I'll be making a flying trip to Texas in a week or so to visit my sister for a couple of days, but probably will not blog that.  The next trip planned is to the men's Canadian curling championship in Kelowna, B.C., Canada.  That's in early March. If anything comes up before then, I'll be back here!