Ponyboy...
When I was 11 I had a teacher named Mrs. Jones and she was the third of my favorite teachers, the first being Mrs. Mullins from Sandbox Nursery School and the second being Mrs. Schultz of first grade at Parke Lane Elementary in Grosse Ile, MI. Crazy how the favorites and hated remain in the brain and the ones in the middle fade away.
Looking back on why I loved Mrs. Jones, and 37 years later 3 things came to mind. She was kind. She was no bullshit yet fair, and finally, she read us the Outsiders aloud, chapter by chapter. It was the first time since I was very young that anyone had read aloud to me and it was great.
Of course I fell in love with the book and have read it multiple times since then. A couple years later, the book came to life in movie format. This was in the early ages of HBO, where there weren’t a ton of movies out in the first place and you’d end up seeing some of them so many times you’d know them by heart. The Outsiders was one of them.
Ponyboy has become a moniker that has stood the test of time. A kid of intelligence and empathy, slammed into a world of violence. A kid that is destined to better things. He’s a character of hope.
Like most great stories, there are enough characters in The Outsiders, that each of us could identify with one of them, but didn’t we all think that Ponyboy was us? I mean I did. It’s because that deep down, almost all of us feel like we don’t fit in. We all want to get away from a part of our lives. Ponyboy Curtis was the first of these character realizations I had.
A few years later, it happened again, but in grander fashion, when the Breakfast Club came out. The brilliance of this movie to me, is not just that there are these distinct 80’s archetype characters so perfectly developed. It’s that even while each of them seems separate, they are all one giant character that defined a generation’s life. You may have identified with one more strongly, but you could feel each or their strongest fears and emotions as a part of a greater whole, or at least I could.
I promise that I won’t start writing movie critique or analysis as the above was painful to write. Painful because I can’t encapsulate the emotion that those two films brought out in younger me, but if you are of a certain age, you know exactly what I am talking about.
I’ve read a few articles about Generation X over the last week or so. How we are the heroes of the quarantine because we were a latchkey generation that had to fend for ourselves while our parents worked etc. This is a pretty self serving description. Don’t get me wrong. I believe in Gen X, I just don’t think it’s that simple nor are we heroic for being able to follow instructions.
I will say there was a shimmer to the years 1980-90, one that seemed to rub off in giant swaths over the next decade. I’m not sure if that’s just growing up or reality, but I do believe it. There’s a reason we all have nostalgia for our youth, I think it’s partly because we were learning to be, and that’s sexy, and confusing, and exciting. Big realizations every year. Big changes.
This is also the greatness of the characters I discovered during that period. Ponybboy, Johnny, John Bender, Claire Standish. They were the first ones to articulate the things inside of my brain. They articulated what I felt. Us 80’s kids didn’t talk about all the things we were feeling. We bottled it up appropriately. To see these characters telling us the things we felt was powerful, and made things all right.
Stay gold has become cliche, and that’s okay. It still holds the power of positivity in two words. Really can you simplify it anymore than that?
Stay.. Gold.
#hugsandhi5s
