“I hope there’s no video.” Mom sighs, unconvinced. “I hope there was nothing to record.”
Dad raises his eyebrows at me as I put the lid on the hummus and the carrots back into the crisper. “Pretty fancy outfit for mowing the yard,” he says.
“Oh, Carl,” Mom says, smiling. “She has a date.”
“Besides,” I say, “mowing the grass is Will’s job.”
“How about I go on a date, and you mow the grass?” Will asks.
“For that to happen, someone would have to want to go on a date with you,” I say with a smile.
Mom and Dad laugh. Will tries to hit me with a throw pillow as I dart upstairs to the bathroom.
Wyatt Jennings is a knockout.
By the end of “Summer Lovin’” he and Shauna Waring have us all on our feet screaming like sixth-graders at a boy band concert. Even Ben is cheering. Cheering. Fist pumping, yelling, whooping.
Offstage, Wyatt’s just this tall, skinny kid. Handsome enough. Sort of a big forehead and a horsey jaw. He seemed so scared of LeRon and Kyle on Tuesday when they pinned him against the lockers. He could barely look Ben in the eye.
But onstage?
He’s a star.
His hair is sprayed up in a perfect pompadour. His black leather jacket clings to his broad shoulders like he was born wearing it. When he sings, he struts. He owns the stage like Dooney owns center court. But unlike Dooney, Wyatt wants you to join him, not worship him. His presence invites you in, instead of keeping you out. When he swivels his hips and hits those high notes, he’s not showing you he’s better than you. Wyatt is doing it for you. He lets you know that there’s room for you here, too, his voice soaring above Sandy’s in a gorgeous falsetto that makes you smile and clap in the middle of a song. You know you’ll have this tune stuck in your head for the next month.
And that’s the problem with Grease!
The music is so catchy.
When the lights went down tonight, I was amazed at how many of the songs I still knew by heart. I haven’t watched the movie for a long time. It used to be on cable a lot when I was little, and I remember Mom sitting down with Will and me one night to watch it.
This was my favorite when I was your age.
Back then, I understood why right away. I felt so special that my mom was sharing this with me. I’d never seen a musical movie that wasn’t animated—one where it was actual people singing, not cartoon characters. For a couple years after that, every time Will and I saw Grease! on TV, we’d dance around the living room for hours afterward singing “You’re the One that I Want” and “We Go Together.”
The stage version is a little different from the movie. For starters, Sandy’s not from Australia, and she doesn’t sing “Hopelessly Devoted.” They took out all the cigarette smoking and curse words for our high school production, but most everything else is the same—especially the way this music still excites me. It makes me want to get up and dance with my arms in the air.
Which is why I say the music is a problem:
It’s so good that you forget the plot.
You forget that “Summer Lovin’” is the story of how hot and heavy Sandy and Danny got before school started. You forget that after exaggerating to the T-Birds how far they went “under the dock,” Danny basically blows Sandy off. You forget that later, he tries to get her to have sex in his car when she doesn’t want to.
You forget that at the end of the show, Sandy gives in.
Sure, Danny makes that half-assed attempt to join the track team, but you can tell he doesn’t really mean it. Nobody at Rydell High expects him to change. For that matter, no one in the audience expects him to either. It’s a funny part that we all laugh at. How ridiculous! Boys don’t change for girls.
We all expect Sandy to do the changing.
And after she flees the drive-in movie when Danny pressures her to go farther than she wants to? Twenty minutes later, she shows up at the Burger Palace in skintight pants and a low-cut shirt. Her hair is huge, and she’s wearing tons of makeup. She becomes exactly the person Danny Zuko wants her to be. She makes herself into the version of the girls that he’s decided are attractive.
She doesn’t ask him why he has the power to decide what she should look like. She doesn’t say, “Okay. Yes, I’ll go have sex with you now.” She doesn’t have to.
A lot of this musical went way over my head when I was a kid.
But then? Just as you’re about to feel annoyed about it, the music kicks in.
It’s this big feel-good number. Now that Sandy has completely changed, Danny sings to her: You’re the one that I want. Then everybody else joins them onstage and sings “We Go Together.”
By the end of that number, we’re all on our feet, clapping and stomping and singing along with this rambunctious, infectious, life-affirming music. And it’s so bright and so shiny and so happy and so perfect that by the time Wyatt takes his final bow?