Kellerman's Resort, 1963

Bergstein probably based Kellerman's on Grossinger's, the now extinct Catskills resort where she spent summers with her family in the 1950s and '60s. (Although handful of resorts have claimed the honor of being the inspiration for Kellerman's.) Kellerman's is the quintessential Catskills Resort, and it defines a very particular culture, place, and time.

The Catskill Mountains in upstate New York were dotted with a thousand resorts in the '50s and '60s, from luxury hotels to boardinghouses and no-frills bungalows, that catered mostly to Jewish families escaping the hot New York city summers. Moms and kids might go for a few weeks, with dads showing up on weekends. In the first part of the 20th century, lots of hotels refused to rent to Jews, so they created their own communities. The area became known as the "Borscht Belt" because of its Jewish cultural connections, although anyone was welcome to stay there.

Working class families went to the bungalows and cooked their own meals or ate cheap camp food. Middle class families went to the more upscale resorts known for their ridiculous amounts of food, entertainment, and goofy activities. (It occurs to us that cruise ships are the new Catskills.) Some of the fancier places recruited famous musicians and comedians; Jerry Seinfeld and Woody Allen had gigs there early in their careers.

In a different movie, Kellerman's would be the stuff of nightmares, more like the Overlook Hotel from The Shining than a fun family retreat. It has all the makings of being the worst family vacation ever for a 17-year-old: being stuck with your parents and doing a lot of lame activities with people who have more wrinkles than a pug's face.

But from the beginning, we can tell that Baby, who is narrating the opening from some point in the future, looks at this time nostalgically.

BABY: That was before President Kennedy was shot, before the Beatles came, when I couldn't wait to join the Peace Corps, and I thought I'd never find a guy as great as my dad.

Her narration sets us up to see Kellerman's as a place of fun, once we look past the lameness on the surface. And it is. Baby finds magic with Johnny, and, as the final song says, she has the time of her life.

But nostalgia always has a twinge of bittersweet. We see this at the end, in a speech we call Kellerman's lament. Realizing the days of this type of resort are nearing its end, the owner looks back on everything the resort has seen, a short history lesson about the Catskills.

KELLERMAN: Bubba and Zeyda serving the first pasteurized milk to the boarders, through the war years when we didn't have any meat, through the Depression when we didn't have anything. […] It's not the changes so much this time, Tito. It's that it all seems to be ending. You think kids want to come with their parents and take foxtrot lessons? Trips to Europe, that's what the kids want. Twenty-two countries in three days. It feels like it's all slipping away. 

Btw, Bubba and Zeyda are Yiddish terms for Grandma and Grandpa. Max was right; the Catskills resorts are almost gone now. This speech shows us that although Baby can visit Kellerman's in her memory any time she wants, or by popping in the Blu-ray, she can never go back there physically. The resort was of a time, too.

And its time is up.

All Dried Up

Ironically, the location used to film Dirty Dancing has all but faded from memory, proving that time always marches on when we're not looking.

Although Kellerman's is in the Catskills, the movie was filmed at Mountain Lake Lodge in Pembroke, VA. They should rename it Mountain Lodge because the iconic lake—made of Jerry Orbach's dad tears—is drying up. It was almost entirely depleted of water in 2008 (source).

The Lodge still stands, though, and welcomes Dirty Dancing tourists to have their own real-life Kellerman's adventure, lake not included.

Just like with nostalgic memories, we can still visit the lake in our minds… and whenever Netflix recommends we watch the movie again.

The '60s

Baby remembers her summer at Kellerman's as the summer before JFK was assassinated and the Beatles arrived on American shores. She was about to head off to college, where no doubt she'd be protesting the Vietnam War by senior year. It was a time of personal changes for our girl, but a huge era of transition for the country as well. Screenwriter Bergstein, a Jewish woman from a liberal family herself, wanted to capture that era in her movie.

I'm always very anxious to be in those moments just before transition. I was enormously interested in bringing back that time, both politically and socially in America, when everybody really believed that the world had been made safe by World War II, and the only thing left to do was to make it safe for everybody, so the large Jewish community gave lots and lots of money to SNCC and CORE and supported the Freedom Riders, and Martin Luther King made his speech that summer in 1963. Just when the Housemans are at Kellerman's is the "I Have A Dream" speech in Washington. (Source)

Bergstein said she thought that after the early '60s, the kind of "upstairs-downstairs" social dynamic she created in the film didn't exist in the same way, especially for young people. More people got radicalized, or at least liberalized; traditional values were going out the window, to the dismay of parents and grandparents everywhere. The counterculture hoped to blur the boundaries between rich and poor, working class and middle class, black and white. Socialism briefly came back in style.

That's a gross oversimplification for sure, but the sixties saw a cultural and sexual revolution of epic proportions. That summer of '63 was the calm before the storm, and Baby and Johnny had their own little revolution to get things going.