As I was getting ready to get my computer set up after a trip, I find out that John Hughes died. If I’d been on Twitter all day, I would have known before 7:00pm. I know this is a television site, but every John Hughes movie I ever saw I saw on TBS.

John Hughes died on Thursday, August 6, 2009 of a heart attack. This is the first entertainment death that was not of a comedian that affected me.

How can you be a 30-something and not be affected. The Breakfast Club, Weird Science, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, National Lampoon’s Vacation, hell, even Home Alone for you late 20-somethings. More than directing these movies, he wrote countless others that are cult classics to us – Uncle Buck, Dutch, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation – so many films.

John Hughes wrote teen flicks before it was popular, touching those of us who were teens. Little known secret – I was 13 years old the first time I regularly watched television. After AMC (when they were American Movie Classics), my most watched television station was TBS and that was the first time I came in contact with The Breakfast Club. I laughed and cried in the watching of that movie. I thought about things like fair and unfair, love and hate, shame and abuse and somehow had fun doing so.

I’m not sure if it’s about whether or not he was a good director that makes him stand out to me. Maybe it is about being a girl similar to how he wrote Molly Ringwald. The shit always happened to me. Nobody every remembers my birthday either. Everything took precedent over my wants and wishes and if someone did like me, they were the big, fat nerd at a time when I just wanted to fit in. I had that strange family and those strange friends and that crush on the popular guy who would never know who I was. And when Hughes got to the end, when Molly ended up with who she wanted, it was satisfying, something that “could” happen, especially if I were Molly Ringwald.

My favourite National Lampoons are Vacation and Christmas Vacation, both written by John Hughes. I am a fan of the writer and know just how important the writer can be, although I do understand the role of all the other parts making up the whole. It’s so easy to look at that era and think the Brat Pack. For me, as a person, as a movie/television watcher and as a writer, that time will always be the John Hughes era. No, his movies might not make it into the Director’s Hall of Fame – some people don’t like that scattered, frantic feeling that those earlier movies had. But for me, I got it. It was in my stream of consciousness language where things didn’t always make sense to others, even as it made sense to me. I got it John Hughes, for what it’s worth. I have always had a theory that anyone who watched those movies when they were older than 16 or who didn’t have a sense of the romantic would not like the Pretty in Pink, Ferris Bueller era. Almost everyone I know who didn’t like the movies were older when they saw them. But if you were that right age, if you were like Molly Ringwald or Anthony Michael Hall, you gravitated to Hughes and he spoke to you through them.

As we get older, we are getting closer and closer to that threshold where we lose our idols. Gregory Peck, Don Knotts, Harvey Korman, Farrah Fawcett, even Michael Jackson, all nostalgic or regrettable losses. I will cry little baby tears when Carol Burnett or Andy Griffith dies. Maybe I don’t have tears for you, John Hughes, but I do have a sadness for the work you’ve done and that sense of nostalgia for my childhood because of your work. It helped me put my young, fucked up life into perspective and for that, I will always be grateful.

P.S. Though I always wanted to be Molly Ringwald, I know I was Ally Sheedy and you made me feel that was alright. Yes, John Hughes, I appreciate you more than you will ever know.