Goodbye Bodhi, may the waves always be as epic as you

Patrick Swayze died today at the age of 57, and for an hour or so after reading this news online, I continued to work without much change in my overall mood.

Then my phone vibrated with a text from the Sarge, and it was all put in perspective.   “It just hit me now,” he wrote, “Bodhi is gone.”  For the next few minutes, I stared blankly into the wall next to me.  Sure, part of me knew that Bodhi died at the end of Point Break, when Johnny Utah released him to meet his maker at the hands of a superwave.  But everytime I saw Patrick Swayze, he was Bodhi to me.

Sure, millions of grown-up girls are mourning the loss of the star of Dirty Dancing, and plenty of others the loss of Sam Wheat from Ghost. But for guys and girls whose only dream has been to keep it rad and keep it real, today is a day of mourning for the great Bodhi.

Swayze was a dancer, he was a singer, he was an outsider (shout out to S.E Hinton).  He was a Chippendale with a great body, though his dance moves were lacking when compared to the ultimate Chippendale, Chris Farley.

But most of all, he was a surfer.  He was the Bodhisattva, a bank robbing surfer who lived by his own code of ethics, shunning just getting radical and instead embracing the spiritual side of surfing.

"If you want the ultimate, you've got to be willing to pay the ultimate price. It's not tragic to die doing what you love. " - Bodhi

Johnny Utah: 1, Johnny Montana: 0

Saved by the Bell was, and is, awesome.  Granted, it is also awesomely bad.  Never before or since have characters been so typecast, stereotypes so liberally exaggerated, or plots so ludicrous.  With the Tori Paradox fresh on my mind, I couldn’t help but start to think about some of the other absurdities the show presented.  Screech’s talking robot, Kevin, who not only had the ability to speak, but also had human emotions.  The fact that Slater wore a jersey and/or something acid washed 78% of time time.  Zack’s ability to pause time in order to address the camera or, in one case, avoid a punch.  He could also smooth talk his way out of most any situation, and I suppose if he could escape his way out of detention by getting Mr.  Belding to voluntarily eat chocolate covered grasshoppers, he could charm his way into Yale.  But he could not score a 1502 on his SATs.  It’s mathematically impossible.

"Hey hey hey hey WHAT is going on here?" - Mr. Belding

A recent comment by the Los Man piqued my interest about the order of events in the world of Bayside (though I disagree with him that Zack was interested in Tori for sex.  She presented a challenge.  Also, there was no sex in Bayside.  Only kissing, during which an invisible audience would invariably “whooooooooooooooooo!”).  I was floored to see that in 1991, the show aired back to back on Saturdays.  The first episode of the day would be set at Bayside, leading into the second which would center around the gang’s activities at Malibu Sands, the club owned by Mr. Carosi.

Also, by finally looking into the original airdate of the each show, I was able to end, once and for all, the age old “Johnny State Name” debate.  Who came first: Johnny Utah, the ex Ohio State QB turned F-Beee-Eyeee AGENT, played by Keanu Reeves in Point Break?  Or the teen star Johnny Dakota, who burst onto the Bayside scene in order to film an anti-drug commercial, only for Zack and the gang to discover that he puffed the magic dragon himself?

As I always expected, Saved by the Bell appears to have taken a page from the Ohio State Buckeye playbook, as that episode aired on November 30, 1991, some 5 months after July 12 premiere of Point Break. Was Saved by the Bell taped before the movie’s premiere?  We may never know (I can’t find it on the internet), but one thing is for sure: Johnny Utah was one radical son of a gun.  Johnny Montana was not.

They only live life to get radical.