By Joyce Byrne

If your boss looks a little bleary-eyed this morning, chances are she was up late last night watching clips from John Hughes films, and remembering the 80s.

Before there was Joss Whedon or Judd Apatow, Hughes was serving up highly palatable anti-heroes like the Breakfast Club’s John Bender or Pretty in Pink’s Duckie — or any of Molly Ringwald’s characters (even in Breakfast Club, we found something likeable in the transformation of Claire Standish). If high school in the ’80s actually looked like Freaks and Geeks, we wished it looked more like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. (And likely cut class to make it so.)

If Michael Jackson wrote the soundtrack for many of your lives, John Hughes wrote the screenplay for mine. Before Nick Hornby wrote High Fidelity, Pretty in Pink made “record store clerk” look like the coolest job in the world (it is). He also made it look cool to be smart, marginal, and weirdly dressed.

Thanks Mr. Hughes, especially for this:

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This entry was posted on Friday, August 7th, 2009 at 11:50 am and is filed under First Job, Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.