Grease

Lu's Guilty Pleasure's confession got me thinking about Grease.

Okay, nowadays it is hard to buy John Travolta, Olivia Newton John and Stockard Channing (like most of the cast in their twenties/thirties) as gauche teenagers still at high school, but as musicals go, it rocks.

Best bits - Rizzo's torch song, There Are Worse Things I Could Do, which slams the sexual double standard. And the prom dance scene, which is some amazing cinematography, even now. And Sandy's transformation from girly girl to leather- clad total slapper. And John Travolta, very cute in those days.* Plus Thunder Road! I always wanted to be Cha Cha, starting the race off.

*Controversial I know, but controversy holds no fear for Slaminsky.

When you are seven years old, it makes a major impression, so much so that when I was at Lovebox in Victoria Park, the giddy funfair atmosphere brought back the last scene powerfully. I wondered why everyone wasn't bursting into a synchronised dance routine along the lines of We go together

But most of all when you are seven, a lot of it sails straight over your head. Like Kenicki's solitary condom breaking ("I bought it in seventh grade"). I had no idea what was going on in that scene, and only years later got the quite sweet implication that he was a virgin, despite all the laddishness.

Or Rizzo's pregnancy scare ("I feel like a defective typewriter - I skipped a period"). Some of the song lyrics were a tad risque too, I gave my poor dad a shock when innocently inquiring about a word I'd heard in Beauty School Dropout. "Dad, what's a hooker?" I think he muttered something like "It's a naughty lady".