"Do you want to feel a clean, close shave?"

Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson are certainly icons for certain segments of American pop culture. I remember that famous poster and Charlie’s Angels, Thriller and moonwalking…but I was either too old, too young or too whatever at the climax of their fame for any of the nostalgia to really grab me when they died.

Granted, both of these celebrities passed away during the same week that my mother did, so her loss certainly blunted the impact that anything else could have had on me at the time.

But today I learned that John Hughes died. Now, that name echoes all kinds of nostalgic images for me.

His movies were like the soundtrack playing in the background of my adolescence. I don’t know what the actual timeline is, but it seems like he released a new movie during each of my torturous years that teenagers require in order to make that awkward leap between frustrated youth and the real world.

Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Pretty In Pink, Some Kind of Wonderful, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Sure, these movies dealt with the typical teen-angst stuff…first kisses, virginity, rejection, geeks, jocks, etc. But they were also extremely relevant to the excessive materialism of the 80’s.

John Hughes’ films almost always exposed, parodied, romanticized and/or critiqued the dog-eat-dog world of high-school class wars in a way that was palatable to us all, whether you were a “geek, sporto, motorhead, dweeb, dork, slut, or butthead”.

But I think that the reason why these movies seemed to leave such an impact, at least on me, was because they were so in-the-moment. While we are all laughing about the over-the-top parody of the “jock/princess/criminal/basketcase/brain” syndromes in the Breakfast Club, or the struggles of Farmer Ted and Jake Ryan over their feelings for Samantha in Sixteen Candles, those of us in high school at that time knew how all of these characters really coexisted in the contemporary American high school that John Hughes had merely recreated for the screen. We were those characters...or at least wanted to be (in the case of Jake and his red Porsche 944).

Of course, if you were from a different generation, none of these characters would seem unfamiliar as they have existed since whenever high school was invented. But the characters in Hughes’ movies wore the clothes that we did, the haircuts that we had, drove the same cars, used the same slang and listened to the same music. They belonged to a uniquely 80’s cultural aesthetic that I knew and lived every day. "Geek, can I be honest with you....?"