There was a time when explaining the Catskills to someone who’d never visited was simple. 

“You know Dirty Dancing?” you’d ask.

Eyes lighting up, they’d likely shout “Nobody puts Baby in a corner!” Or perhaps you’d get a deeper cut like “I carried a watermelon” or “You’re wild!” “This is my dance space. This is your dance space,” you’d answer back before explaining the story’s set right in your backyard. 

When it hit theaters in 1987, Dirty Dancing was, by all accounts, a smash hit here in the US and performed even better abroad. Meanwhile, its soundtrack was topping the Billboard charts. For a season, the world was focused on summer in the Catskills, and they were having “the time of their lives.”

Then came the Oscar Award for best song, the TV series spinoff, the (absolutely terrible) prequel, the concert tour, and the tens of thousands of t-shirts and tchotchkes available for sale on Etsy. On the off chance someone had managed to escape the past few decades without having sat down to watch the film in its entirety, there was still a general idea that some girl came of age in a hotel in upstate New York while Patrick Swayze danced. 

Those days, I’m sad to report, are over. 

For people of a certain age, Dirty Dancing is and will always be iconic. 

There will always be those of us who know that the proper way to call your lover boy is to say, “Come here, lover boy,” and if he doesn’t answer to call out “Oh, lover boy.” And if he still doesn’t answer, we know that we should simply say “baby, oh baby, my sweet baby… you’re the one.”

We will always know that, in the summer of 1963, before President Kennedy was shot, before the Beatles came to America, the Catskills were a place where family fun met class divides and the counterculture, a place teeming with life. 

We are now, however, forced to reckon with a generation of people born in the past two and a half decades. 

One day, you will find yourself talking to the 24-year-old who just got hired at work. They’ll ask where you’re from, and you’ll say, “The Catskills,” and they’ll ask where that is. You’ll say, “you know Dirty Dancing?” and they’ll answer, “Oh, yeah. That’s my mom’s favorite movie.”

You’ll realize Baby would now be their grandmother’s age.

And suddenly you’ll feel like Max Kellerman and mutter sadly to yourself, “It’s not the changes so much this time. It’s that it all seems to be ending.”