Staffer Wishes High School Was More Like ‘The Breakfast Club’

I guess I could be considered a nostalgic for a variety of reasons. I still have a Winnie the Pooh piggy bank sitting on my tan dresser in the corner of my room. My collection of rocks from when I was a kid can also be found somewhere buried in one of those drawers inside a little bedazzled box.

In the top drawer of that dresser, though, my most prized nostalgic possession hides itself from the rest of the world. I’ve shielded it away from most who know me, besides a few closest friends, but I feel I’m ready to reveal my dorkiest fervor. Here it goes: I am a closet ‘80s fanatic, and that embarrassing possession in my top dresser drawer is a stack of CD’s I have accumulated over the years from my Mom and Dad’s old CD collection. The Cure, Tears for Fears, Psychedelic Furs and a copy of “The Breakfast Club” soundtrack. Any ‘80s new wave song, you name it, I probably know most of the words to it; I’m a sucker for synth.

I don’t think of the ‘80s in neon colors and shoulder pads, or even permed hair and fingerless gloves. My infatuation with the ‘80s is heavily influenced by one man – John Hughes. “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”, “Pretty in Pink”, “Sixteen Candles”: Hughes is the fuel behind these angst-filled flicks. And then there’s “The Breakfast Club,” the movie that fills me with nostalgia for a decade I was never even alive for.

“The Breakfast Club,” released in 1985, is one of the greatest cult classics of all time. It’s timeless, emotionally forceful drama, that’s ironically comical at times, is compelling to teenagers to this day. The movie follows five unknowing high schoolers who spend one Saturday morning together in detention with their cynical principal. It is a movie about nothing and everything.

I cannot describe how many times I have geeked out listening to “Fire in the Twilight” by Wang Chung, picturing the memorable scene in Breakfast Club when the Brat Pack is running through the linoleum floored halls of their suburban, Chicago based high school. I should be more embarrassed about confessing to this, but my next confession is fundamentally more embarrassing.

I always pictured high school, or at least my high school experience, playing out to be like a quintessential John Hughes movie. My Breakfast Club dream dates back to sixth grade, when I was first exposed to the Brat Pack in all their glory. No other movie I had seen before “Breakfast Club” had made high school seem like a life-changing experience, much less fabricate the idea that detention could result in an impromptu dance montage.

To my younger self, this type of high-school-based movie was refreshing after “High School Musical” mania spread like wildfire through the pre-teen hearts of my school. John Hughes understood me and every other teen that was filled with a mixture of anxiety for the inevitable future and the ever-looming doom of puberty that would ensue in the next two years.

Hughes’ characters weren’t just “the princess” or “the jock” or “the recluse.” There was Claire Standish, played by Hughes’ muse, Molly Ringwald — the spoiled popular girl, but also a girl caught in the middle of her parents’ crumbling marriage. John Bender (Judd Nelson) is the rebellious smart-ass who has to live with the scars from the abuse of his father at home. Brian Johnson (Anthony Michael Hall), the stereotypical brain dealing with the constant fear of failure. Allison Reynolds (Ally Sheedy), the reclusive basket case who hides behind her strange exterior due to her lack of friends. And Andrew Clark (Emilio Estevez), the popular wrestler who constantly fights the guilt he feels for bullying other kids.

I wanted to be Claire, Bender, Allison, Andrew and Brian all at once. And if I couldn’t be a culmination of the five main characters, I was at least determined to find them in the halls of Shawnee Mission Wonderful at some point during my four year stint in high school.

By the end of the movie, these characters strip each others’ perceptions of each other, revealing something to the viewer that makes them believe it’s the youth versus the future and the 9-to-5 jobs that we will perhaps all face at some point in our lives. If anything, it revealed the fact that being stranded here on this island called high school together should bring us closer.

So here I am, senior year, a little less than three months left in this institution and I still haven’t found my “Brian” or my “Claire.” I still have yet to have that “Breakfast Club Moment” — the moment of unexpected spontaneity between an unlikely group of people.

The problem just might be, that as real as Hughes’ cult classic seemed every time I watched it, it wasn’t real at all; it was only a movie. For one, no one is just a nerd, or a jock or a rebel. The jock is also the nerd, the rebel is also the jock and a lot of times the princess is also the basket case and the rebel and the nerd. There’s also no such thing as Saturday morning detention, so the idea of the “Breakfast Club” is completely irrelevant to Friday Schools and consequently would have to be referred to as “After School Snack Club”, which sadly isn’t as catchy.

I realized one defining thing about my Hughes inspired search. No, I haven’t sat in detention with four seemingly polar opposite strangers, (the only detention I have been handed was for texting my mother in my freshman English class. It seemed like a bigger deal at the time). No, I haven’t run through the white-walled halls of East like the Brat Pack did. And no, I haven’t danced on top of bookshelves in the empty library when the administration wasn’t looking.

But I have danced across the streets of Portland at night with fellow Journalism students, half running and skipping past flickering streetlights — a bunch of journalism nerds. I have sprinted into the freezing waters of Lake Michigan after running a 5k Cross Country meet in Chicago with 20 other seniors — a bunch of cross country jocks. I have also driven to the middle of nowhere Olathe and back with three of my elementary school friends in the seats in front and beside me, belting our favorite tunes and counting the number of houses that we passed. I sound like a “neo–maxo zoom dweebie,” but even though my high school experience hasn’t mirrored that of a John Hughes flick, I guess all of those moments were still miniature “Breakfast Club” moments.

I still haven’t given up hope on my big “Breakfast Dream,” though. I have a little less than three months left, and I now accept the fact that my “Breakfast Club Moment” will occur when I least expect it, with people I least expect to have it with. Call me crazy for writing this column, but you see it as you want to see it — in the simplest terms or most convenient definitions. So, whether you’re a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess or a criminal, I’ll see you in detention.