So the other night I watched Grease with a Grease virgin. And wow that term is bad. But anyway, yeah, he likes musicals, but hadn’t, somehow, seen Grease. It happens. When it does happen I can often be found swooping down with a dvd and fixing the problem.

Now, see, I love Grease. It is a fantastic show. No, I take that back. It is magical. Not in the Xanadu sense, either. It’s just so … very, you know? And when I think of Grease I think of Danny Zuko and the sports montage. I think of Sandy and her robotically impossible cheeks of doom (dear lord if those things were any redder and more perfectly round it … no they could not be). I think of things like that. The fun moments. The entire staging of You’re the One That I Want before it devolves into We go together. You know, when Olivia Newton-John is wearing the tightest pants known to man and filling them out as God intended? And Travolta isn’t touched by the strangeness of Scientology yet, he’s just a pisan who can dance the fuck out of things. It’s made of pure musical goofy win.

And then I watch it with someone who hasn’t seen it and I am forced to remember the rest of it. The surreal nature of the beast. Look, most musicals are surreal. By nature they have to be. People break into song at random and no one notices (and before a bunch of you comment or ask or email yes I’ve seen Enchanted) and people can all dance and … sure, sure.

But Grease. Well. It’s something more. During Greased Lightning it’s not enough to go into a fantasy world where the car is this awesome ultra-car (wait, really, because that car isn’t as cool as the real Greased Lightening ends up and that always bothers me) but that the garage they work in turns into this ultra modern white spotless space. An untouched, spotless white operating theatre. To work on a car in. I just … sure.

And it keeps going. It doesn’t back down. At no point does Grease decide it needs to back up and make sense. Never! It’s a simple story of:

Boy meets girl, girls transfers to boys school, boy and girl both circle each other and try to change to be what the other one wants, boy drives in drag race, girl does nothing, boy builds a flying car, girl skips some, boy dances, girl runs off crying, boy and girl end up together because girl becomes who the boy wants.

Simple! Easy! Insane!

I love it so much it hurts.

But man is it fucking insane.