First off, thanks to all the readers who entered PRIME’s contest for tickets to see Molly Ringwald host a special 30th anniversary screening of “The Breakfast Club” at Symphony Hall on Oct. 18.
I loved all the feedback on what stories you like and where you find your copy of PRIME. I especially appreciated the notes some of you enclosed with your contest entries, and the “I’d love to win tickets!” written on several forms.
Keep the feedback coming … and if you’ve got an idea for a story or a person to profile, call, email or send me a note!
Speaking of “The Breakfast Club,” it had been some time since I’d seen the 1980s coming of age teen flick, so I got a copy and viewed it again before contacting Molly for this month’s feature story.
I was surprised just how much the five characters stuck in that day-long Saturday detention – the Princess, the Athlete, the Brain, the Criminal and the Basket Case – still hit home with me more than 30 years after high school graduation.
I didn’t need my yearbook to remember the faces of the kids in my class who epitomized each of those characters.
The movie also took me back to my own “Breakfast Club” type moment from my high-school days.
Back then I played in a garage band – jazz-type – and we used to perform at school talent shows and arts festivals. One Saturday, I was sitting on my guitar case on the sidewalk outside school waiting to be picked up after a show when one of the cool guys – you know the type – came over and started talking to me. As we chatted, it slowly dawned on me that he didn’t know who I was.
You see, in high school I was one of the smart, good kids – quiet, neat, plain, ignored. In school, he would have never looked twice at me.
In that parking lot, without the “label,” we were just two teens talking about what we liked at the art festival, and what we were going to do for the rest of the weekend.
Suddenly, I realized the two of us really weren’t all that different.
I never talked to him again, but that few minutes stuck with me. From that afternoon on, I looked at all my classmates differently. And I felt less like an outsider.
Behind the labels, we really were more alike than we knew.
Thanks for reading,
