Thursday, August 06, 2009

Anyone who's ever spent more than five minutes with me is aware of what a giant dork I am. As much as I tried to fight it over the years, I was always conscious of my dorkiness (and have sense grown to embrace it).

As a pre-teen, seeing movies like "Pretty in Pink", "Sixteen Candles", "The Breakfast Club" "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" and "Weird Science", I was convinced that these were accurate depictions of the high school experience and I was convinced that, as a dork, I'd probably see some adversity, but would eventually come out on top with a convertible and the hottest boy in school falling for my quirky dorkitude. I figured I'd have some wild parties, wacky adventures, and a jaunty hat or two.

Guess what?

High school was nothing like that and I was angry at John Hughes (who wrote and directed the above movies - and a bunch of others - like "Vacation" and "Some Kind of Wonderful") for a long time.

Since then, I've gotten over that because those movies were pretty awesome and, let's face it, they still kind of are. And without John Hughes, we wouldn't have had classic movie lines like:

"Blane? His name is Blane? That's not a name, that's a major appliance!"
and
"Oh, he's very popular Ed. The sportos, the motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, waistoids, dweebies, dickheads - they all adore him. They think he's a righteous dude."
and
"By night's end, I predict me and her will interface."
and
"Does Barry Manilow know that you raid his wardrobe? "


John Hughes died today, but his contributions to pop culture will live on.