The nerd pack

In ninth grade, faced with what was, in my 14-year-old mind, the worst case of strep throat (like, ever), I spent an entire week watching “The Breakfast Club” again and again.

I stationed myself on the couch with a cup of ice chips and focused intently on the movie, agonizing over why these walking, talking stereotypes couldn’t understand each other.

So after learning that John Hughes, who brought us the Emilio Estevez, Anthony Michael Hall, Judd Nelson, Molly Ringwald and Ally Sheedy perfection that was “The Breakfast Club,” died Thursday at the age of 59, my inner 14-year-old self sighed.

Not long after my first strep-induced John Hughes experience, I set into the classic “Brat Pack” trifecta, with back-to-back viewings of “Sixteen Candles” and “Pretty in Pink.” And, of course, next came “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.”

As the quintessential high school nerdy type (playing in marching band and captaining the quiz bowl team tend to pigeonhole a girl) I always found solace in the awkward, gangly characters in his movies – the hyperanxious Cameron Frye from “Ferris Bueller” and the I-got-a-fake-ID-so-I-could-vote Brian Johnson from “The Breakfast Club.”

Despite their sagging social skills and awkward demeanors, despite the fact that they never got the girl (or any girl, for that matter), Hughes’ nerds gave me hope.

While they failed miserably in sweeping the ladies off their feet, the nerds kept everyone together and kept Molly Ringwald’s prissy characters from becoming too much to handle.

More so than any other characters in Hughes’ movies, the nerds never stop being themselves.

They are unabashedly, unstoppably nerdy – passionate, dedicated and completely oblivious to how the popular kids act.

Seeing characters like this do well made me feel like it was OK to be proud of my nerdiness because it was what made me whom I was – and still am.

Because, really, if it weren’t for Anthony Michael Hall’s character in “The Breakfast Club,” who would have summed up so eloquently the point of movies like this: that beyond “princess” or “rebel” status, we’re all scared kids trying to navigate a confusing, hormonal world?

High school never worked out quite as neatly as “The Breakfast Club,” where the line between jock and nerd could be sorted out over a weed-laced detention session in the library.

And 16th birthdays were never perfectly capped off with a tabletop cake from the Jake Ryans of the world.

But movies like “Sixteen Candles” and “The Breakfast Club” made and continue to make us believe that somehow that cruel, weird world of teenagerdom will work out.
Even if you’re a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess or a criminal.