Ferris Bueller's Day Off: Grace (Polo, Giorgio, Poison, Shalimar, Enjoli)

As part of our week long series on John Hughes and eighties perfume, our friend Jack was going to impersonate Duckie, from Pretty in Pink, today. Unfortunately, Jack got busy with school, so I am impersonating Jack, and instead of Duckie I'm portraying him as Grace, from Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

Ferris Bueller is my least favorite John Hughes movie. It has the manic flair of Sixteen Candles, but it misses the anchor of Molly Ringwald. It's the best thing Matthew Broderick's ever done, I think, and in a way I think he does flippant sarcasm better than Molly did in Candles, but he lacks her warmth, and despite a serious thematic thread involving his best friend's relationship with a bullying father, you don't really feel there's anything at stake. It's all lightness, with nothing much to ground you.

It does have its pleasures, and one of the most pleasurable pleasures for me is Edie McClurg. Most of the main Hughes players are hard to imagine wearing perfume, as Elisa Gabbert pointed out in her post yesterday. Ferris Bueller, his girlfriend, and his best buddy are the exceptions. It's easy to imagine them wearing the most popular fragrances of the time. And yet, I can't help it: Grace is the only one for me:

"I'm a happy person--okay? I'm just your average happy-go-lucky lady. I think on the bright side of things. But there are days at school where I think I could lose it--and how--and I might, if it weren't for the blessing of my chipper outlook. I guess you could say I'm pretty gay.

There's not even a window in my office. Can you believe that? That's how these school builders are. No window, and someone got a bright idea to paint the walls grey. A real light bulb went off over somebody's head and he thought, 'You know, it always seemed to me that the best color for a windowless room with a desk and a couple of dying houseplants would be the darkest, drabbest shade of slate, and somebody believed them, and now I'm stuck here all day like I'm pinned under a dark cloud without an umbrella.

I stare at the grey wall ahead of me straight to lunch hour while Principal Jones shouts my name at the top of his lungs. 'Gr-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-ce,' he yells. 'G-r-r-r-r-ace!!' I run into his office as fast as I can and of course all he ever wants is to tell me the latest allegedly larcenous offense Ferris Bueller has committed. I come bursting in and he's sitting there red in the face, with steam shooting out his ears. He wants me to call the police, or Mr. and Mrs. Bueller. He wants me to send for Ferris at once. He wants me to jump up on the desk and scream, like him. I get a real workout running back and forth from his desk to mine.

I don't let it concern me. Okay? I'm going to tell you a little secret. I put ear plugs in. It helps me keep a smile on my face. And I have Jelly Rolls in my right hand drawer, so I keep my energy up.

Along with the Jelly Rolls I have a growing collection of perfume bottles. Confiscated contraband. The perfume problem has reached epidemic proportions here in our class rooms. The girls bring it with them from home. Every day there's a school shooting. Someone gets sprayed. And the amount these girls wear is a real nose sore. Mrs. Cabbits gets her migraines. The math teacher, new this year from Duluth, goes into coughing fits. He coughed so hard one morning he doubled up in seizures. He hit his head on the edge of the chalkboard and woke up in the dumpster. Those kids actually carried his body out like a bag of trash. It's the perfume. It clouds their judgment. It fills them with homicidal impulses. It's hard for a gay person like me to understand perversion like that.

We've asked the girls to stop bringing the perfume to school. We've alerted their parents. The problem is, their parents wear just as much as they do. That's where they pick up the habit. Principal Jones set up a security check at the front entrance. Everyday when they come in, they get patted down. First it was the girls. Now it's the boys. Polo and Giorgio and Drakkar Noir. Sometimes, principal Jones yells my name so loud and so all of the sudden that it startles me, and my leg hits the desk, and all the bottles rattle into each other. Those kids are sneaky. They've smuggled many a bottle past the checkpoint. This is where I come in. I set up a lookout post in the ladies bathroom, third stall down on the right.

I can read your mind, so I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, 'Golly gee, Grace, what do you do with all that perfume?'

Well, let me tell you, I certainly don't wear it.

I'm all for progress. When it looked like pet rocks were going the way of the slinky, I retired Engelbert to the herb garden. No dilly dallying from me. I might be gay but I'm no sap. Except for the occasional girdle, I'm not the slightest bit old fashioned. It's just that these perfumes, this stink they put out now, they're nothing I'd want anything to do with, unless I had a small feral creature to dispatch. Me, I favor the classics. I like something with the heaving bosom of history behind it. That's a fragrance I can get behind. Something generations of women have relied on, and generations of men have lost their heads over. Something classy. Shalimar. Now THAT, my friend, is a fragrance.

And since on a school secretary's income I can't afford Shamilar, I get Enjoli.

Which is just as good, mind you, as your Poison and your Polo and your Eau de Whoop-di-do. Whatever it is these kids are wearing. Some of these headaches act like they walked in off the family estate. Out in the suburbs. I guess they spray that stuff on and they think they're, what, of the manor born? They think they're really something. And they are. They're something else.

You've never smelled Poison? Oh please, there's only so much time in the day. I'll run out of jelly rolls. How does one describe it? How does one describe nerve gas? Tell you what. Why don't you just meet me out behind the cafeteria after lunch. I've got a bottle with your name on it. If you want to spray yourself into a coma, I'm not going to stop you, just don't go around telling people where you got it, and don't do yourself the damage on school property."

The Breakfast Club: Allison Reynolds

The Breakfast Club was so ingrained in my teenage consciousness that I think my generation should be called Generation Hughes instead of Gen X.

I was 14 years old when The Breakfast Club was released. I must have seen the film five times that year; way back in 1985 (2010 is the 25th anniversary, yikes!). The Breakfast Club is essentially about high school stereotypes and teenage angst. I personally didn’t fit into any of the tidy stereotypes John Hughes chose to represent in the film, but I strongly felt little bits of myself in all the characters, every single one. And the most defining feature of The Breakfast Club is that all these kids, from every stereotype, all feel similarly frustrated, trapped, sad, scared and nervous about themselves, who they are and who they will become as they grow up. I like to think John Hughes did my generation a favor by creating films about teenagers; he gave us a voice and he gifted us with entertainment that helped us understand ourselves in a way that had never before been represented on the big screen.

Now, I highly recommend that you get in the mood for my character, Allison Reynolds, and salute 1985 by listening to this:


My name is Allison Reynolds. Yeah, I’m the kook, the social outcast, the freak, the character billed as the basket case. If you don’t think these labels hurt my feelings, well, they do. But you know what? I'm not really any of these things. I'm just different, pure and simple, and if that makes me a basket case, well, that's your stupid problem. If you can't see that a person might not want to be Miss Popular, then you are short sighted, my friend. You asked me here today to talk about how I feel about my life, or lack thereof, since I have no friends and no home life to speak of. And you also asked me here to find out what perfume I wear. Now that’s just crazy. Who the hell cares what perfume I wear, if I wear any at all? I'll tell you the truth, sometimes I spray skunk juice on myself because I love that smell.

Yesterday I went to Saturday detention. I didn’t even do anything to get in trouble. I just wanted out of the house really bad. I thought telling my parents I was in trouble and had Saturday detention might give them something to yell at me about, a reason to pay attention to me, for just a little while. Well, it didn’t. My Dad just mentioned that it might make him late for his flight, but he volunteered to drop me off. My Mom said thank goodness they’re sending me to a shrink, ‘cause I need all the help I can get. Yeah, whatever, Mom.

I packed my own lunch for detention. Always do. Mom would never think of doing that. I usually go to detention once or twice a year, something to do on a Saturday besides stare at the walls of my bedroom and wait for the minutes to string together until I graduate and get the fuck out of this town. I told my shrink and he thinks its fine; detention allows me some ‘social interaction’ like I’m a dog, going to the dog park, to meet other dogs.

This Saturday we had a really mixed up group. All the kids there were total opposites, or so we thought, at the beginning of the day. We had the Princess, the Jock, the Brainy Nerd, the Burn-Out and me, the freak with no friends. Principal Vernon didn’t even realize I wasn’t supposed to be there. He doesn’t even know my name. None of the kids there yesterday knew my name. They just think I’m weird is all.

Turns out that all the other kids think they have problems, too. I couldn’t imagine how the Princess and the Brainy Nerd could have a dark side, but they seem to think they do. Now, John Bender, the Burn-Out troublemaker, I can see how he might be like me. Instead of being quiet, he just acts out all the time, putting a big spotlight on himself; he’s kind of exactly like me but the opposite. The Jock, Andrew, turns out to feel really pressured by his Dad, like the only time he’s worth anything is when he’s good at sports. Brian, the Brainiac, also feels the same way, like his parents only care about straight A’s, and don’t know there’s a person inside him. Claire, the Princess, doesn’t really seem to have any problems to me, but she says she does, she says she feels pressured to be mean and do what all her popular friends think is acceptable. I wouldn’t know what that’s like since I don’t have any friends. I do know that I wouldn't stay friends with people who are fake, and only pretend to like each other to stay popular. That's just so shallow, and I'm more than that. Status quo is not important to me, I'm fine by myself if this is the way it has to be. But I just don’t know. Anything is possible. I’m getting tired of being alone and always looking at the other kids from the outside, from the sidelines, as a nobody, a loser, an invisible girl. So, it’s embarrassing to admit, and I’m using some of the self “introspection tools” that my shrink is teaching me to use, I can see now that I do things to gain attention, I compulsively lie and I steal things and I try to act shocking so others will pay attention to me.

Shoplifting is how I came upon the perfume I’ve been wearing the past few months. I was at the drugstore and they had these gift sets of various types of perfumes with matching body lotion. I picked Jontue by Revlon. I had seen the ads in Seventeen magazine and commercials on TV and I liked the way the ads made me feel like I could get away, on horseback and be free. Free, happy and wonderful, just being me! I could be myself yet somehow sensual and still innocent. So I stuffed that gift set into my back pack and left the drugstore. Sometimes I sneak a little Opium from my Mom’s cabinet or even her Shalimar, but Jontue is my little secret and I’ve already used up the body lotion. I need to go back and steal some more soon.

Here's the commercial for Jontue. I know it's corny but it makes me feel like someday I'll escape my parent's house, I'll escape high school and I'll be someplace far away, free, successful and happy, just being me:Anyway, yesterday in detention was kind of fun. We all sorta bonded. Claire gave me a makeover, and even though I felt so stupid, it made Andrew, the Jock, notice me. He suddenly thought I was pretty and he even kissed me when we were leaving at the end of detention. I thought my heart would explode right out of my chest. I really did. I’m still all tingly and excited. I've never kissed a boy before, even though I sometimes tell people I'm a nymphomaniac. (Oh, and since you're so unusually interested in perfume, I can tell you what Andrew was wearing, it was definitely Polo by Ralph Lauren, all the jocks wear that stuff.) Anyway, back to the nympho stuff, I tell people crazy crap all the time, just made-up shit, to get a rise out of them. People are so stupid, especially in small towns like mine. Everyone is so concerned about being cool, accepted and the same as everyone else. I’m a little nervous that in school on Monday Andrew won’t talk to me, he’ll pretend not to know me. But that doesn't really matter. I'll be fine either way. I’m sure Claire won’t talk to me, pretty positive of that, but only time will tell. It was good to find out that the other kids sorta feel the same as me, ‘cause they all have issues too. I thought I was the only one with problems, well, and John Bender, too, because he’s just a big explosive time bomb of issues. But yesterday I suddenly realized I wasn’t alone, that other kids were just like me on the inside.

People tell me that college is entirely different, that there aren’t the same cliques and the other kids are more accepting and almost everyone finds their own niche. At least this is what my shrink tells me. I want to go to art school. I'm going to be huge, do something really amazing once I blow out of this stupid town. No one knows this yet, because I keep all my work hidden, but I’m a really talented artist. I draw all the time and I’m getting better and better. I also like to write. Writing comes so easy for me, maybe it's because I'm always observing others, from the side lines, I have so many stories to tell. I haven’t told my parents yet, about art school, but they won’t care anyway, they'll just send me wherever I want to go.


...don't you, forget about me...I'll be alone...dancing, you know it baby...

Sixteen Candles: Jake Ryan (Gloria Vanderbilt, Estee Lauder Cinnabar, Aramis JHL)

This week, Abigail and I and a couple of friends are using characters from the films of John Hughes to talk about some of the perfumes we remember from high school and the eighties. First up: Jake Ryan, the guy who made such a lasting impression that still, all these years later, he inspires pangs of dreamy infatuation in women my age all over the country (see above photo of unknown internet user and her, um, date) and plenty of men, too. Trust me.

Jake was like no other guy I'd seen on screen before: sensitive, drop dead good-looking, sleepy-eyed, quiet, relatively smart, and far more interested in the odd girl out than the prom queen. There was something sad about Jake, too; something melancholy. It seemed like he was trapped by circumstances beyond his control, which made his determination to do the unexpected something close to heroic. It was the first time I'd seen the most popular kid at school depicted as such an underdog.

In case you aren't familiar with the character and the film, we're talking about Sixteen Candles here, which came out in 1984. The movie is set in fictional Shermer, Illinois, where another Hughes character, Ferris Bueller, also resides. Molly Ringwald plays Samantha, whose birthday is the sixteenth in question. No one remembers--not mother, father, siblings, paternal grandparents, maternal grandparents--mainly because her older sister is getting married that weekend. Everyone's in town visiting, and in the chaos of preparing for that happy event, Samantha gets pushed to the periphery.

It's nothing she isn't used to. Most of the movie deals with life at high school, where Samantha is equally ignored. She's crushing hard on Jake Ryan, one of the most popular seniors. She worships him for afar. As it turns out, he's not quite as far away as she thinks. Jake is crushing hard on her, too, only it takes a while for her to put this all together. The movie roots for her, and for getting them together. If these two can end up together, high school can't be all that bad. Before that can happen, various mishaps and complications ensue. A geek and a foreign exchange student add to the mixed signals and misunderstandings. Oh--and Jake has a girlfriend, Caroline. There's that to be straightened out first, too.

Michael Schoeffling, the actor who portrayed Jake Ryan, had been a model. He'd done GQ covers, among other things. Many of the people who saw Sixteen Candles at the time of its release were used to admiring him from afar, like Samantha. After acting in a handful of movies he retired with the girl he was dating during the filming of Sixteen Candles. They're still married, and live outside the public eye. It was almost like Schoeffling understood the audience's need to keep him preserved in memory the way he was in Sixteen Candles. In reality, he probably got sick of the bullshit of the business. But that's in keeping with Jake Ryan, too, who seemed equally frustrated by the rules of high school.

The following imagines a parallel universe in which Jake attempts to figure out a.) what perfume Samantha wears, and b.) what it is about said perfume that drives him crazy:

"The skinny geek with the braces swears on his mother's Tupperware collection that the perfume Samantha wears is Cinnabar. According to him, she got it at the mall. He seems to know a lot about her--at least he says he does--but he says she gave him her panties, too, and I highly doubt that.

I wanted to be sure--not about the panties but the Cinnabar--so I sort of grilled him, and he went straight as a rod, then he got all bent out of shape. He was pretty indignant.

'Don't you trust me?' he wanted to know.

Of course, I said. Of course. I just want to be sure. I want to be sure that's the one she wears. You're sure it's called Cinnabar?

'What do you want with her perfume,' he said, a little suspicious. 'Don't you think that's...I don't know...kind of...creepy?'

This from the guy who stole her underwear. Spoken like a true panty fiend, I said.

Later, I went to the mall to smell it, the Cinnabar, and I'm pretty sure he's right. I can't tell you what it does to me. She comes up to me in the hall and I freeze; I go numb. Samantha. It's the most amazing thing ever. It's so serious. It's so heavy. It's some seriously heavy stuff, that Cinnabar. It smells like experience--not, like, slutty experience--I don't mean like that. But maturity. Like she's all grown up. The rest of them are children.

When I asked the lady at the counter to let me smell it, she asked me how long my mother's been wearing the stuff. I told her it isn't my mother, it's my girlfriend, and she got a very confused look on her face.

'How OLD are you?' she said. She had her glasses perched on her head and raised her eyebrows so high she nearly knocked them off.

My girlfriend is a freshman in high school, I said. She's almost sixteen years old.

Her glasses really did fall then, and she said she'd never heard of a girl wearing anything as...sophisticated as Cinnabar. She said sophisticated like somebody'd used her counter for a bathroom.

My girlfriend isn't like any other girl, I said.

Which isn't exactly true, given that my girlfriend is actually Caroline, not Samantha.

Caroline isn't like most girls either. The problem is, she's exactly like all her friends. They dress alike and talk alike and feather their hair all alike, and I think if I heard them coming up from behind I wouldn't be able to tell the difference. Caroline wears that perfume with the swan on it. It's got that weird looking lady in the commercials, the jeans lady. She looks like your mom trying to act like your sister, which totally creeps me out. She's got a smile like the joker from Batman. A white face and a big smile that splits her face in half, and she sells those jeans like if everybody doesn't have at least three pairs in two years she'll jump out the window with a lit piece of dynamite clenched between her teeth.

The stuff smells okay but it's everywhere. Vanderbilt! That's what it's called. It's the perfect name for a rich girl's perfume, the kind of girl whose daddy wears Rockefeller after shave. Caroline's friends spray it in their books, their bags, their hair. She gets in the car when we go on a date and it's unbelievable how much she puts on. If I want to kiss her I feel like I have to break through a wall of stink. Not that I want to kiss her much anymore. She mostly WANTS me to kiss her, and of course she expects me to make the first move. She sits over there in the passenger seat winking at me and I try to figure out if I can drive without passing out at the wheel. Vanderbilt. It smells like flowers in the shape of a big mallet. The big mallet is whacking you over the head.

Samantha isn't like that at all. You have to get right up close to her. You smell the Cinnabar where you'd want to kiss her. It smells of cinnamon--like the name. So soft. It's like a blanket. Spices. Deep and dark and rust colored, just like the cap. Just like her hair. It's weird, because Cinnabar is technically so much stronger than the swan stuff, but she knows just where to put it and just how much to put. It should be a shout, but it's a whisper. It's something whispering in your ear.


I think Caroline knows something. And I feel bad. Maybe she sees me watching Samantha. I try to be careful. I can't help myself. Samantha draws me in.

My dad tells me we're incredibly lucky, for Shermer, for Illinois, for America, for anywhere, we're lucky. I'm lucky to have such a pretty girlfriend. I'm lucky to be popular. I'm lucky I have both of my legs and wasn't born disadvantaged. I feel guilty a lot of the time, because I am thankful, but I'm also miserable. We were riding in the Rolls and we passed somebody in a pinto, and he turns to me, my dad, and he says, "always remember how lucky you are." He says stuff like that like he feels bad for what we have that other people don't have, but if he knew I was watching Samantha all the time he would tell me to remember where I come from and where she comes from and how sometimes people aren't meant to get too close. In other words, I'm lucky, but don't press my luck.

I figure he wouldn't know his head from his ass, so what can he tell me about keeping the proper distance?

I don't like who I am. I don't mean I don't like myself, exactly. I mean that if my life is driving around in my dad's Rolls talking about people from at least several yards away, if that's where I'm going, I'm going to be seriously unhappy. I can feel the weight of that forcing me down. So I'm lucky, but the luck is so heavy it's crushing me. I'm not that person, the guy my dad wants me to become. I'm not sure who I am, yet, but I can tell, looking at Samantha, being with her, that the decision is mine. I can be happy and close or I can keep my distance and be lucky for the rest of my life.

I went over to the cologne section while I was at the mall. I smelled everything they had. I don't know how close I can keep getting to Samantha without people raising their eyebrows so high their glasses fall off their heads, but maybe our smells can reach out to each other. I wanted to pick out something that seemed like the best possible answer to the question Cinnabar is asking. I wanted something Samantha could smell and use to read my mind. Something she could smell and use to see that guy I want to be.

Here's what I picture, with this perfect cologne. I'll spray it where I want to be kissed. I'll stand at my locker, across the hall from Samantha's locker. I'll stand there with the cologne on, waiting. I'll stand there until she smells it. I found the perfect thing. It's called JHL. It smells like we were kissing, me and Cinnabar, and Cinnabar rubbed off on my stubble. JHL is saying something about cinnamon, too. It's saying something like, 'Please get closer.' It's a code. Cinnabar needs JHL and JHL needs Cinnabar; they need each other, to figure the code out. Once they get closer, they'll put it all together.

The geek said I wasted my money. He rolled his eyes and huffed and puffed and postured and clicked his tongue like he was disappointed in me. He said I didn't need to spend half that much. What was I thinking!? I said it was money well spent. I said I would have paid more, much more, if that's what it took. I would have traded in my dad's Rolls, that worthless heap. What else is it good for but keeping a distance? The geek rolled his eyes some more, halfway off his face, and called me a sap. He said I still have a long way to go. Such a long, long way to go. Stick close, he said: look and learn. Lesson number one: he showed me HIS cologne. He got it from his father. Jovan makes the stuff. It's called Sex Appeal for Men and it smells like arm pit.

No wonder he has to lie about girl's panties."

John Hughes Smells the Eighties

Say the name John Hughes to many people of my generation, and you see instantly how deeply the man and his movies permeated our young adult lives. I saw Sixteen Candles my first year of high school, right around the time it hit the mall. I remember thinking, before I went into the theater, that I would hate it, that I would have to. The ads made it sound like a typical teen exploitation flick, a la Porky's. The movie hadn't gotten too much buzz by then and I didn't know a lot about it. I was embarrassed to be seen at it and hoped none of my classmates would be in the audience. I was still busy convincing them I was cool enough to be their friend. In my mind, I was much too grown up for such a film.

Very few movies have affected me the way Sixteen Candles did. There's something so naive in it. There's a real emotional alchemy there, perfectly sent up with humor, some of it slapstick, most of it painfully adroit about the angst involved in being that age. In my now woefully long movie-going experience, only a small handful of films generated this kind of exhilaration in me, that feeling, when you leave the theater, of having seen something truly great, maybe even profoundly good. I wasn't embarrassed to say it after seeing Sixteen Candles because of course the movie, though officially about teens, isn't the slightest bit juvenile. It wasn't just that John Hughes understood what it was like to be in high school. He seemed to understand something essential about being human.

There is a lot more diversity in the Hughes films than people give them credit for, though it's true the films got darker and a little more distilled after Sixteen Candles. Sixteen was full of the sight gags and an irreverent bawdiness typical of National Lampoon Magazine, where Hughes had worked for some time. It still had the residue of the Chevy Chase vehicle, Vacation, one of the first films Hughes had written. Vacation had just come out the year before--and was a huge success. Hughes revisited that particular sensibility, that outright zaniness, in his teen films only once, with Ferris Bueller's Day Off, where Matthew Broderick speaks to the camera and channels in and out of musical interjections with an almost aggressive, jacked up perversity. Otherwise, things got much more serious, like a kid who loses the last of the baby fat and is suddenly, as if overnight, "all grown up".

Breakfast Club recombined and refined the elements of Sixteen Candles, stripping them down to their basic attributes. It locked the quintessential types of the high school experience into a room together, playing them off each other, with less laughs and more tears. Bueller, like Sixteen Candles, was high school as a Marx Brothers film. Breakfast Club was high school as high melodrama. It's the melodramas most of us remember, because in some way they came closest to the tortured core of adolescence. Pretty in Pink and Some Kind of Wonderful, more melodramatic still, were written and produced by Hughes but directed by someone else. Yet all the elements of that imaginative kingdom are there: the popular kid you can't have, the disregarded geek who turns out to be the most interesting person on the planet called High School, the heart to heart talks with dad on the couch, the annoying kid sibling who ultimately becomes the protagonist's fiercest defender, the missing or abandoning parent, the wrong and right sides of the tracks.

Watching these movies today, I cycle through the weirdest feelings and memories. Movies are a lot like perfumes in several ways. They rush things back at you. Certain recollections, mostly ephemeral (the smell of your classmate's hair, the feel of the plastic seat in Algebra), have been inert, you realize while watching these films. The movies reactivate those memories with an almost painful intensity. And on those little details many deeper, forgotten scenes piggy-back, stampeding back into your adult consciousness. I hadn't seen these films for several years. Some I hadn't seen for at least a decade. It isn't just that, watching them, I remember what it was to be young. It's also the fact that I'm remembering from a vantage point I couldn't have imagined back then. Back then, youth felt like a trap. Now I couldn't get back there with all the money in the world. I wanted out like you wouldn't believe. Now I'm out, and for good. Like smelling a perfume my grandmother wore, the Hughes movies transport me back to a time which is totally lost to me, and I go back with the regret and bittersweetness of adult experience, a special kind of understanding I wish I could share with my younger self, and a stodgy stupidity I know my younger self would have laughed out of the room.

Over the course of the week, Abigail and I and several other bloggers will be stepping into the shoes of some of our favorite John Hughes characters, figuring out what they meant to us. Stodgy stupidity be damned. People remember Molly Ringwald, who became the poster child for the era, but there were so many memorable characters, big and small, in the Hughes cosmos: Duckie, Amanda Jones, Jake Ryan, Blane, Iona, Cameron, Jeanie Bueller. The films and their characters are time capsules of the eighties, and we're using them as a kind of time machine. From inside that perspective, we'll look not just at those films and their depiction of the high school experience but our own experiences, too, in all their screwed-up, heightened, angst-saturated detail. Starting tomorrow, we'll be raiding the perfume counters of the period, spraying up the high school hallways and libraries with the memorable, big shouldered scents of that decade. Look for us in the hallways, the library, and the gym, surrounded by the potent, armored mist of tuberose.

While you're at it, check out the fantastic series on eighties fragrances over at One Thousand Scents. I've been enjoying these reminiscences immensely, and I'd be lying if I told you they didn't have something to do with our own. Another inspiration, if you're at all interested, is this book on Hughes and those films I've been reading, which is wonderfully chatty and informative.