I somehow missed the news about Patrick Swayze's death in the paper and on TV, all of yesterday. It was only while surfing late last night that I caught it on a website. I didn't know what to think. Sure, I had been reading about his battle with cancer over the last year or so. The news still caught me off guard, and my mind instantly rewound back to the first time I laid eyes on him.

It was the summer of '88 and I was a restless teenager, home on a break from boarding school, whiling away the hours on endless telephone calls, non-stop page turning and the "occasional" 2-3 movies every day. In between all this, I slept.

One day, I got my hands on a scratchy VHS tape and the oily-haired guy at the video lending library (who never missed an "opportunity" to "accidentally" brush up against me) said, "Baby, yeh latesht Englees pikchar hai. Bahut accha hai. Ekdum Hindi pickchar style mein hai. Naach gaana, love ishtory aur thoda dishum dishum bhi hai." (Baby (!) this is the latest English movie. It's really good. Just like a Hindi flick. There's song and dance, a love story and even some fighting!)

Never mind that the movie had been released the previous year (ah! those simpler times) he told me it was the "latesht" and I just had to see it. I looked at the cover and instantly thought, my dad is never going to let me watch it with a title like that - Dirty Dancing. Besides, I didn't know who the hell those two were - Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze? I was all set to borrow Raiders of the Lost Ark instead, for the umpteenth time. But my oily-haired Romeo looked like he was about to accidentally brush up against me again while looking for the Indiana Jones' flick, so I just grabbed the Dirty Dancing tape and ran out of there.

The next day, I waited for my Dad to leave for work, my grandmother to leave for her daily dose of gossip at the neighbours and, my brother... I think I just let him continue sleeping! I stuck the tape into the faithful old VCR and started watching. It was quite a bad print and it was barely audible. But I had nothing else to do so I watched.

Young girl goes on vacation with her folks blah blah blah... Wait, why is she dressed that way? And her sister's hair? Oh! Ok, It's the 60's... Seems pretty okay so far. So I keep watching until... I see this funny looking guy on screen. Funny because he isn't conventionally good looking (you have to understand, we were brought up on a steady diet of Tom Cruise and Michael J Fox back then), and he walks a bit funny too and I can't understand a word of what he's saying. But there's something about his eyes. Never mind... keep watching.

Baby this and Baby that, this Jennifer Grey has some honker for a nose and she isn't so pretty. How could she be the lead? I'm starting to get bored. Until Baby sneaks out of her posh room at the resort and helps someone carry a watermelon to the servant's quarters. Wow! They have servant's quarters in the US? They have servants in the US?

Wait... what's this? It's a whole other world and that music, and boy, this sure is dirty dancing. So, that's what this is about? Then Baby looks at funny looking Johnny boy, and suddenly he's not so funny anymore! He's not even a boy anymore. He is....what the hell... I still have no words to describe what I felt when I saw Patrick Swayze dancing for the first time. And just like Baby in the movie, I was hooked!

It's over 20 years and I can't count the number of times I've watched that movie. For the first time in my life, I realised that those men up there, on the silver screen, could do more than just make you laugh and cry and think. I finally understood what adults meant when they talked about raging teenage hormones and boy, was that some discovery!

I felt like Dirty Dancing was like my own private romance (as did millions of young girls around the world). I wanted a Johnny Castle of my own! How could I not identify with Baby, this shy, plain looking girl who is suddenly noticed by this hunk with rippling muscles. And he teaches her how to dance and looks at her with those Hungry Eyes and holds her melting body in his strong arms and makes love to her. The countless number of times I rewound that lovemaking-in-the-cabin bit and watched it with one eye on the door. Mr. Oily Hair must have wondered how the tape got scratched so much!

Back at school, the movie was ALL my friends and I would talk about. "Don't you know, he's the same guy from the TV serial North & South," said my best friend, "I always loved him." We listened to the songs all the time and we danced to them every Friday night during "Recreation" time. We kept singing out loud to She's Like the Wind and saying what a voice, what a voice... I still cry towards the end of the movie, when Johnny gets fired and leaves in his big black Chevy, and that song is playing in the background.

Once we even conned the nuns into playing the movie for the entire school one Sunday evening. Needless to add, we were grounded the rest of the year. But I don't recall any of the nuns ever stopping it! They just sat and squirmed in their seats and then lectured us for our "immoral and godless" choices for the next couple of days, but they made sure they damn well watched it till the end... Ahem!

When I got out of school a couple of years later, the movie came to the big screen in India (yes, remember those good old days when we had to wait years for a release?) and I was dying to watch it. I called up all my friends and begged them to go but for some reason or the other no one was free. I said to hell with everyone, and went by myself. I was 16, and had never been to a movie hall by myself. But I did it just to see Johnny Castle dance and make love, on the big screen!

I mooned over Swayze a few years later in Ghost but somehow now, I only remember Demi Moore's beauty and Whoopi Goldberg's humour from the movie. Patrick, really seems like a "ghost" that I forgot was even there. I don't think I ever watched him in anything else after that. But I've watched Dirty Dancing at least 3-4 times a year since I first saw it. And that's how he will forever remain in my memory - sexy Johnny Castle with those twinkling small eyes and awesome moves. Sigh!