As magnicifent an experience as having a child is, the whole process really makes you appreciate your downtime. The couple hours between Ava’s bed time and our bed time are really exquisite little pieces of the day when Leah and I most often plop down in front of the tube to indulge in some trashy programming on MTV or VH1 or Fox.
This past Saturday night we hit a new low. SNL was a rerun (natch), so we were flipping through the
channels, hoping something would catch our eye. What caught our eye, unfortunately, was John Travolta strutting around a soundstage in a ripped tank top and spandex tights with a Kennebeck spud stuffed down the front.
Needless to say, Leah and I were transfixed. The movie we’d come upon was, of course, 1983’s Staying Alive. To quote IMDB, “It’s five years later and Tony Manero’s Saturday Night Fever is still burning. Now he’s strutting toward his biggest challenger yet – making it as a dancer on the Broadway stage.”
There’s also a sweet love story in all this. Tony is a serial philanderer, which is really hard on his sweet-like-honey dancer girlfriend (she has a heart of gold, don’t you know). When Tony sees the hot female lead of the show he’s auditioning for, his libido strains at the fabric of his crudely-fashioned codpiece, and he begins his quest to make her his own. After lots of dancing and sweating and fighting and kissing and a couple musical numbers by Frank Stallone (brother of the director), Tony gets the male lead in the show, reconciles with his original lady love, and goes on to live happily ever after (at least for a couple years).
Telling someone you watched a movie like this is akin to showing off the scar from a bullet wound.