Remember the movie The Flamingo Kid? Matt Dillon plays a working class cabana boy at the fictional upscale family resort, the Flamingo Club, in this 1984 dramedy set in the early 1960s? Man, I loved that movie.
This week, I got to relive some of my junior high movie nostalgia when Vivi, Jack and I got invited by some friends to a private beach club in Atlantic Beach, the 10-mile strip of sand about 22 miles from Manhattan which served as inspiration for The Flamingo Kid.
I hummed “(Love is Like a) Heatwave” (did I mention how much I loved the movie soundtrack, too?) as I wheeled the stroller past blue and white wooden cabanas and smiling cabana boys in all-white togs setting up lounge chairs. I navigated past a table of leathery matrons girdled in industrial-strength bathing suits gossiping and playing cards and let Vivi and Jack loose in the giant sandbox to slide into bright blue plastic kiddie pools and eat sand and spray each other with water guns.
It was a respite from the cloying heat of the city, a day of sandy hot dogs and pruney fingers and sunburnt shoulders and lime Popsicles and spent children falling fast asleep in the car on the way home.
Love it. Now I have to see that movie again.
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