John Hughes Understood Dorks

When I was in high school, I spent many a weekend night holed up in my bedroom, listening to cassettes and brooding over all that I was missing out on by not being invited to the “good” lunch table.

This of course was where the popular crowd sat ― the ones that got elected to student government and homecoming court and traveled in packs at the mall and had parties to go to every Saturday ― parties that I was sure were wildly exciting events taking place at impressively furnished houses, with people crowding the kitchen, spilling out onto patios and jumping into swimming pools in their underwear.

The reality was more like a keg and an oil drumfire in the woods, but what did I know? I watched a lot of movies.

More at home in English class than I was at a football game, I ate lunch at a sparsely populated table near the tray return with my friend Angie, and hid out in the art room painting during free periods. I wish I could say now that I didn’t give a rat’s ass about hanging with the in crowd, but the truth is that I longed to fit in.

Mollie Ringwald felt my pain. Like Sam in Sixteen Candles, I hugged the bleachers at lame school dances, couldn’t get a coherent sentence out if a cute guy even looked in my direction, and generally felt like a complete dork most of the time. What a strange coincidence, then, to hear the news of John Hughes’ death just a few weeks after receiving the invite to my 20-year class reunion. The genius of his movies was that they had fun with, yet completely respected, teenage angst.

So, thank you, John Hughes, for creating a heroine I could relate to. One who was awkward, inexperienced and fairly uncool, but who still managed to captivate the attention of Jake Ryan (That Porsche! Those penny loafers!), just in time for her sixteenth birthday. She made all us dorky girls feel at least a little bit more comfortable in our own skin.