"JAKE RYAN? BUT HE'S A SENIOR, AND HE'S TAKEN, I MEAN, REALLY TAKEN..."

If you are anything like me, there was a point in your high school life when you totally lived for Sixteen Candles. Well (prepare to feel old instantly), Sixteen Candles (see this excellent NY Times article) is 20 years old.

You remember how it was back then.
* You'd look longingly at "that guy," whoever he was, and hoped that he'd catch you staring, leave his perfect girlfriend and see the someone special your parents were always telling you that you were.
* You went to dances hoping for miracles. (Or, if you were in yeshiva, like I was, you hoped the miracle would be that there'd be a dance to begin with.)
* Sweet sixteen parties functioned as additional school dances, with classroom cliques perfectly preserved in their transition to dance floor; there was no redemption in boogieville for the losers among us--even if we believed we were good dancers, we'd be shunned by the regular group of shunners.
* You passed notes in class, hoping your declaration of love would be intercepted even as you feared that your declaration of love would be intercepted.

Back in the pre-Britney age, we all wanted to be Molly. We wished we were redheads. (After we saw The Breakfast Club, we even danced like her.) We named our crushes "Jake Ryan." We incorporated phrases like "life is not whatnot, and it's none of your business" into regular discourse. We puzzled over the centrality of a young John Cusack to the pack of nerds, which he was so clearly not destined to be a long-term part of. We identified with the headgear-clad Joan Cusack as she attemped to drink from a water fountain. We wondered what the Donger was saying as he lay, writhing intoxicatedly, on the front lawn of Samantha Baker's house.

And now, twenty years later, we remember our hero worship, our identification with the losers of cinema, and realize that most of them were never really losers to begin with. (OK, maybe Anthony Michael Hall was.) And we know from our own personal experience and shattered high school expectations that most of us will never get our crushes to fall in love with us because they catch us staring at them. If your crush intercepts a love-declaring note, he's seldom intrigued. (Trust me on this one.)

But we manage to survive without the boy, because it turns out that our parents were right about us, even if we didn't believe them.

Sixteen Candles has always been about the themes that obsess us constantly: the torture of geek populations; the primacy of superficial beauty; and the potential for transformation. Universal and timeless themes...just look at reality television.

There's a term paper in here somewhere. It's almost worth going back to school. Almost.

"JAKE RYAN? BUT HE'S A SENIOR, AND HE'S TAKEN, I MEAN, REALLY TAKEN..."

If you are anything like me, there was a point in your high school life when you totally lived for Sixteen Candles. Well (prepare to feel old instantly), Sixteen Candles (see this excellent NY Times article) is 20 years old.

You remember how it was back then.
* You'd look longingly at "that guy," whoever he was, and hoped that he'd catch you staring, leave his perfect girlfriend and see the someone special your parents were always telling you that you were.
* You went to dances hoping for miracles. (Or, if you were in yeshiva, like I was, you hoped the miracle would be that there'd be a dance to begin with.)
* Sweet sixteen parties functioned as additional school dances, with classroom cliques perfectly preserved in their transition to dance floor; there was no redemption in boogieville for the losers among us--even if we believed we were good dancers, we'd be shunned by the regular group of shunners.
* You passed notes in class, hoping your declaration of love would be intercepted even as you feared that your declaration of love would be intercepted.

Back in the pre-Britney age, we all wanted to be Molly. We wished we were redheads. (After we saw The Breakfast Club, we even danced like her.) We named our crushes "Jake Ryan." We incorporated phrases like "life is not whatnot, and it's none of your business" into regular discourse. We puzzled over the centrality of a young John Cusack to the pack of nerds, which he was so clearly not destined to be a long-term part of. We identified with the headgear-clad Joan Cusack as she attemped to drink from a water fountain. We wondered what the Donger was saying as he lay, writhing intoxicatedly, on the front lawn of Samantha Baker's house.

And now, twenty years later, we remember our hero worship, our identification with the losers of cinema, and realize that most of them were never really losers to begin with. (OK, maybe Anthony Michael Hall was.) And we know from our own personal experience and shattered high school expectations that most of us will never get our crushes to fall in love with us because they catch us staring at them. If your crush intercepts a love-declaring note, he's seldom intrigued. (Trust me on this one.)

But we manage to survive without the boy, because it turns out that our parents were right about us, even if we didn't believe them.

Sixteen Candles has always been about the themes that obsess us constantly: the torture of geek populations; the primacy of superficial beauty; and the potential for transformation. Universal and timeless themes...just look at reality television.

There's a term paper in here somewhere. It's almost worth going back to school. Almost.