Last month me and wifey decided to visit Summer Film Festival at Bryant Park to experience an open air movie. We had been thinking to see a movie at Bryant Park for a long time and finally ended up going to watch the last movie of the festival – Dirty Dancing. I do not think we could have chosen a better movie to go to. We reached around 7pm at the Park and it was full of people. Most of them were sitting with their blankets spread out and had got their picnic baskets with food and drinks. We were finally able to find some space where we could lay our blanket and sit and eagerly wait for the movie to start.

The movie experience is just like what you experience in a movie theater – with trailers being played before the star of the movie. Just before the start of the movie, a lot of folks got up and started to perform a routine – like some kind of tradition before the beginning of the movie. I had never been to an outdoor theater before and was expecting to not hear any dialogues due to crowd noise. However, to my surprise the sound system was excellent and loud and I was able to hear everything clearly. Since this a cult movie, a lot of folks had already seen this movie (many times, I believe), knew what was coming next and were hooting, whistling and shouting at many scenes. We had not seen this movie before and this is what made our experience even more enjoyable. The best part of the evening was during the end of the movie when the song “I had the time of my life” comes on and everyone started shouting. Some people got up and started dancing on the song, what followed was just magical. Pretty much everyone in front of us, behind us started to get up and started dancing to the song. This was like an unplanned flashmob and the most spontaneous bunch of people (more than 1000) dancing at the same time. Not to be left behind, we also started dancing along with them and enjoyed the evening. A couple of folks also told me that they had been coming to the Summer Film Festival for over 10 years and they hadn’t seen anything like this before and they don’t expect to see anything like this again. I am not sure if I would have experienced something like this in another city. This experience is going to stay with me for a very long time.