Teen angst
I started two other blogs this week. One about how clean my cabinets will be now that I've spent a couple of weeks at my in-laws perfect homes. I didn't finish the blog, so you can imagine the state of the cabinets...
The other is about our dog who cut himself playing yesterday and that the estimate for stitches was $800 so we opted to let him heal on his own. In the marital battles of wills, that one ended Wife-0, Husband-1.
But now I just read that someone I really hadn't heard of but who was a very influential figure in my life, John Hughes, has died. So I'll blog about him instead.
I was lucky. I was a teenager during the time when he started making classic movies about teenage angst. In fact I just referred to one last month. In the drama revolving about my sister's life my father forgot my birthday! If Sixteen Candles is a reflection on my life, I didn't get the hot babe with the cool sports car making me a luscious chocolate cake, but I did marry Anthony Michael Hall who can fix an iPhone when I shatter it's glass screen. So it's still a happy ending.
I can almost cite the entire script of The Breakfast Club verbatim. I was never sure who I was supposed to be. I wasn't quite weird enough for Ally Sheedy's character, and clearly I wasn't the Princess, maybe I was the geek?! The whole point of the movie was that we aren't cookie-cutter stereotypes. We are all composites. I always felt I needed a little more Molly Ringwald in me.
In my current life as a suburban Mom, wife, unemployed writer, etc. I have to remind myself that people see me as they want to see me, in the simplest terms and most convenient definitions. But that I don't have to see myself that way!
Anyway, I wish there were someone out there writing movies that spoke to me about who I am now. The Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles, Ferris Bueller's Day Off (didn't I just elude to that in a recent blog too???), Footloose, even St. Elmo's Fire (I was in High School when that movie came out, so new college graduates seemed so old - ha!) were movies that I looked to for reflection on my experience in the mid-late 1980s America.
I'll ALWAYS love these movies. Where are the movies about the Mom who is too lazy to clean the fish from the frying pan after tonight's meal?
Or the Mom who can't lose weight even though she is cutting back on cake and exercises four times a week, because she still drinks wine?
Or the stay-at-home Mom who feels she should be living in a parallel universe where she is taking the career world by storm.
Where are those movies?
There's one less in-touch writer/director on the earth to create them. RIP, John. You'll be missed by some, but your movies have touched countless others.
The other is about our dog who cut himself playing yesterday and that the estimate for stitches was $800 so we opted to let him heal on his own. In the marital battles of wills, that one ended Wife-0, Husband-1.
But now I just read that someone I really hadn't heard of but who was a very influential figure in my life, John Hughes, has died. So I'll blog about him instead.
I was lucky. I was a teenager during the time when he started making classic movies about teenage angst. In fact I just referred to one last month. In the drama revolving about my sister's life my father forgot my birthday! If Sixteen Candles is a reflection on my life, I didn't get the hot babe with the cool sports car making me a luscious chocolate cake, but I did marry Anthony Michael Hall who can fix an iPhone when I shatter it's glass screen. So it's still a happy ending.
I can almost cite the entire script of The Breakfast Club verbatim. I was never sure who I was supposed to be. I wasn't quite weird enough for Ally Sheedy's character, and clearly I wasn't the Princess, maybe I was the geek?! The whole point of the movie was that we aren't cookie-cutter stereotypes. We are all composites. I always felt I needed a little more Molly Ringwald in me.
In my current life as a suburban Mom, wife, unemployed writer, etc. I have to remind myself that people see me as they want to see me, in the simplest terms and most convenient definitions. But that I don't have to see myself that way!
Anyway, I wish there were someone out there writing movies that spoke to me about who I am now. The Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles, Ferris Bueller's Day Off (didn't I just elude to that in a recent blog too???), Footloose, even St. Elmo's Fire (I was in High School when that movie came out, so new college graduates seemed so old - ha!) were movies that I looked to for reflection on my experience in the mid-late 1980s America.
I'll ALWAYS love these movies. Where are the movies about the Mom who is too lazy to clean the fish from the frying pan after tonight's meal?
Or the Mom who can't lose weight even though she is cutting back on cake and exercises four times a week, because she still drinks wine?
Or the stay-at-home Mom who feels she should be living in a parallel universe where she is taking the career world by storm.
Where are those movies?
There's one less in-touch writer/director on the earth to create them. RIP, John. You'll be missed by some, but your movies have touched countless others.
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