"Let's Plow..."

I don't think I'd given John Hughes a whole lot of thought any time recently. I mean, sure, I still stop flipping if I come across any of his mid-80's masterpieces on cable on a Saturday, and sure I still quote him on a somewhat regular basis. But I hadn't really taken any time to consider what his work meant to me. That is, until I got the email from my best friend yesterday afternoon that he'd passed away.

Even though he'd left Hollywood years ago and hadn't released anything new in many years, it still genuinely saddened me to hear of his passing. What he contributed to the lives of teenagers, mainly teenagers of my generation, but I firmly believe teenagers to come as well, cannot really be measured. He made us feel understood. He created characters we could relate to and characters we could fantasize about.

It's hard to describe the experience of being a 12 or 13 year old girl and wathing Pretty in Pink, Sixteen Candles or Some Kind of Wonderful. It's hard to describe the feeling of hope that would overcome me in the moments of those movies when the dreamy boy finally realizes he loves the girl. When I was a freshman in high school with an impossible crush on a wholly unattainable senior, I had the solace of Jake Ryan to get me through. See? It COULD happen. He COULD love me. You never know.

Beyond that, movies like The Breakfast Club highlighted the inanity of high school cliques and their inherently shallow nature. As someone who was always acutely aware of this, that made me feel like, "Someone GETS it!"

Countless happy nights from my youth had John Hughes movies at their centers. The night my sister put the Andee/Blaine kiss in the headlights of the BMW on slo-mo and said, "That. Is how you kiss. Memorize it." And I did. The countless nights my best friend and I would watch her worn out copy of Breakfast Club and argue over whether or not John Bender was attractive (she thought yes, I wasn't convinced).

This is really just the tip of the iceberg. I could go on all day. I could list hundreds of quotes. Suffice to say, there are so many of us whose lives were made more enjoyable by this man's work, and we'll miss him, and continue to treasure what he gave us.