I never paid that much attention to John Hughes.<\/p>\n
Don’t get me wrong.\u00a0 I saw most of his movies.\u00a0 I loved most of them; Breakfast Club, Pretty In Pink, Sixteen Candles, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Planes Trains and Automobiles, <\/em>even Home Alone<\/em>\u00a0– all of them were fun, clever, well-written…<\/p>\n …but not, in my case, because they captured what teenage life was really really like<\/em>, as MPR’s film critic noted yesterday in reporting on Hughes’ passing from a heart attack yesterday.\u00a0 It struck me as being a great look at what teenage life was really really like <\/em>in Evanston Illinois.\u00a0 Not where I came from, I grumbled.\u00a0 And I was in my twenties by this point, and kinda past the whole “teenage” thing (He did <\/em>contribute what I’d call one of my life’s mottos; “You can never go too far”).\u00a0<\/p>\n And still I loved the movies; Breakfast Club <\/em>was wonderful; Pretty In Pink<\/em> rocked my world;<\/em> I don’t laugh any less at Ferris Bueller <\/em>now than I did 20 years ago;<\/em> Planes Trains and Automobiles <\/em>was not only hilarious but poignant.<\/p>\n But while I knew and loved the movies, I didn’t know so much about Hughes himself.\u00a0 Hughes was almost a brand in his own right, like “Kleenex”; say “John Hughes Movie”, and everyone knew the basic formula right off the bat.<\/p>\n Allison Byrne Fields has the best piece I’ve seen yet, ever, on Hughes the person<\/a>, told from the perspective of a teenage penpal of Hughes’:<\/p>\n “I’d be honored to be your pen pal. You must understand at times I won’t be able to get back to you as quickly as I might want to. If you’ll agree to be patient, I’ll be your pen pal.” Read the whole, wonderful, poignant thing.\u00a0<\/p>\n You can never go too far.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I never paid that much attention to John Hughes. Don’t get me wrong.\u00a0 I saw most of his movies.\u00a0 I loved most of them; Breakfast Club, Pretty In Pink, Sixteen Candles, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Planes Trains and Automobiles, even Home Alone\u00a0– all of them were fun, clever, well-written… …but not, in my case, because […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5215","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-a-n-e"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5215","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5215"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5215\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5215"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5215"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nFor two years (1985-1987), John Hughes and I wrote letters back and forth. He told me – in long hand black felt tip pen on yellow legal paper – about life on a film set and about his family. I told him about boys, my relationship with my parents and things that happened to me in school. He laughed at my teenage slang and shared the 129 question Breakfast Club<\/span> trivia test I wrote (with the help of my sister) with the cast, Ned Tanen<\/font><\/a> (the film’s producer) and <\/font>DeDe Allen<\/font><\/a> (the editor). He cheered me on when I found a way around the school administration’s refusal to publish a “controversial” article I wrote for the school paper. And he consoled me when I complained that Mrs. Garstka didn’t appreciate my writing.<\/font><\/p><\/blockquote>\n