Oh God, don't get me started on my midterm election anxiety. As much as the media has been hinting around about the "blue wave" that could be coming (hmm, when have we heard that one before?) and the Dems possibly flipping the House and Senate....I'll believe it when I see it. I used to be lowkey optimistic about such things, but--as Madonna once sang--I've learned my lesson well.

Regardless, VOTE in this election, people! VOTE EARLY! Come on, do it! GO NOW!

Well, go in a few minutes. Read this post first, for I come here today not to preach, but to amuse. And this story is definitely amusing. It's also from the right-wing, Murdoch-owned New York Post. However, to avoid giving that rag more clicks, I've copied and pasted all the pertinent details below, including an image of the offending item from the article.

Talk about a buzzkill.

A furious California father said his family vacation to Central Florida theme parks was “ruined” after his 3-year-old daughter found a sex toy in their condo — and he claims the resort barely took the shocking discovery seriously.

Mike Gross and his family had booked a four-day stay at Holiday Inn Club Vacations’ Orange Lake Resort in Kissimmee.

"It looked great, had good reviews — that’s why it was so shocking,” Mike Gross told The Post.

On the second night, Gross said his little girl walked up behind him with a “present” she found in a drawer.

It was a six-inch vibrator.

Okay, stop. First of all, that thing pictured below may technically be a vibrator, in that it vibrates (see the USB cord attached), but it's obviously not your basic straightforward bedroom toy that most people likely envision when they think "vibrator." This particular apparatus definitely seems designed for something more specific, if you catch my drift. Possibly a massager for the prostate or the G-spot. But whatever. Maybe I'm just being pedantic.

Gross said he was horrified by the discovery but calmly scrubbed his daughter’s hands — and then his own.

I'm middle-aged and my vision is going, so I first read that sentence above as "Gross said he was hornified by the discovery."

After he and wife put their daughter and 5-year-old son to bed, they quickly searched the condo for any other adult playthings.

Gross called the front desk and said he was told someone would contact him immediately.

But nobody did.

Stunned, he tried to hook up with management again.

By the next day, he still hadn’t heard a peep from staff — and started to suspect he was getting screwed.

You know, as much as I loathe the New York Post, I do appreciate the writer's snark. "Buzzkill," "tried to hook up," "getting screwed"? Bravo, madam.   

“At first we were laughing about it, trying to have a sense of humor,” Gross said. “What made me so mad was their total lack of concern.”

The next day at Disney World was not the experience Gross had dreamed about.

“I couldn’t enjoy myself,” he said. The hotel was “ignoring a potential biohazard. How can they not care?”

Uh-huh. Let me translate that: "At first we thought it was hilarious when little Maddysyn wandered into the room holding a sex toy, but eventually the hamster wheel in my brain started turning and I said to my wife, 'Hey honey, potential payday!'" 

Later, Gross went to the lobby, slammed the dirty sex toy on the desk and loudly demanded answers.

“By that time I was so mad I was shaking,” he said. “Everyone was staring. You could have heard a pin drop.”

Gross said he saw a manager, but got a decidedly limp response.

Dude didn't appreciate a limp response. He likes his responses rock hard. Also, "slammed the dirty sex toy on the desk and loudly demanded answers"? MARY! What a drama queen! 

Three weeks passed before the resort responded with an offer of $1,300 — on the condition that he not post reviews, speak about the “incident” or contact government agencies.

“No way I was taking that deal,” he said.

So he went screeching to the tabloids and got a better deal! Hey, they don't call it checkbook journalism for nothing. 

Instead, he took his daughter to a doctor for testing.

Oh, for fuck's sake. What exactly were they testing for? Didn't he say he washed the kid's hands immediately? This is such an obvious cash grab. Dad's still got dollar signs in his eyes, and he's laying the groundwork for one of the most bullshit lawsuits ever.  

“Everyone makes mistakes,” Gross said. “But ignore the situation and the potential danger, now you’re gonna have a pissed-off dad. Holiday Inn will never get my business again." 

Right. I'm sure each and every front desk staff member of each and every Holiday Inn around the globe is observing an International Day of Mourning to grieve the loss of your patronage, sir.

Also? A sex toy seems pretty damned pedestrian, as far as things you could potentially find in a Florida hotel room. Seriously. 

Anyway, the whole thing reminds me of that scene in Parenthood where, during a family gathering at Dianne Wiest's house, the power goes out, everyone is fumbling around in the dark, and Steve Martin gets ahold of what he thinks is a flashlight. Then the lights go back on.

"Mommy, what was that?" 

"It was....an electric ear cleaner."

Just an aside: I can't get over how much Mary Steenbergen looks like my mother did at the time! In 1989, Mom had the same hairstyle (perm, color, and length), same petite build, and similar facial features. It's making me all verklempt!

Go hug your moms, everyone. And don't forget to vote.

 THE BOOK 

I was temping in downtown St. Paul around the same time I was dating Jay (see previous post). I remember very little about the job itself--the details of mind-numbing temp gigs tend to blend one into the other over the years--but I do know I was working at The Ramsey County Government Center on Kellogg, next to the Science Museum. I remember having to walk through a metal detector every day, and needing to wear an ID badge to go anywhere in the complex. Our supervisor was a goofy, genial guy who was the spitting image of Dan Fogelberg and frequently quoted old cartoon characters (Mr. Peabody, Underdog, etc).

My old boss, before he got a government job.

I became friendly with another temp, a lady named Reva who was in her mid-40s. Reva was a bookworm like me, and we often traded paperbacks. One day she came in with a novel called Spilling Clarence by Anne Ursu, a book she'd started reading but was "not really feeling it," so I said I'd give it a try. 

Spoiler alert: I never read it. The job assignment ended later that year, I lost touch with Reva (one of the folks lost to the mists of time in the days before social media, back before everyone was trackable) and I never read the damned book.    

Guess what, though? I still have it. 

It's like it was with the mug: I didn't plan to hold onto this book all these years later, I just did. Although, there was some intentionality with this one. See, I have to regularly do sweeps to pare down my collection and get rid of any books I don't plan on reading again, otherwise I wouldn't have room for anything else.* The books I end up keeping are either signed copies, or ones that have sentimental value (if it was a gift from someone dear, I'll usually hold onto it). But all the books in my "slush pile" get dispatched to Half Price Books and various Little Free Libraries around town. 

I've kept Spilling Clarence for over twenty years now. It's been on the chopping block every time I've done a book purge, and every time, it manages to stay. 

Why have I held onto it? The main reason is, well, because I never read it. As a book lover, I cannot---will not---get rid of a book that I haven't read yet. I mean, what if it's amazing? I'll never know if I donate it. 

Also? Spilling Clarence sounds intriguing, if the description on the back cover is anything to go on: 

"What if you could suddenly remember everything that ever happened to you? Would it be a blessing, or a curse? This is the fate of the residents of the town of Clarence, who fall under the spell of a strange and powerful drug that unlocks their memories. The past comes flooding back without the buffer of time, and the townspeople, young and old, find themselves awash in their own reminiscences--of love and death, of war and childhood, of happiness they've experienced and sins they've committed. Beautifully rendered with a light comic touch, Spilling Clarence is a beguiling exploration of our relationship with our histories, the seductive pull of regret, the unreliability of memory, and the bliss of forgetting." 

Hey, look what I found stuck in the pages! 

It's the passport card from my very first passport, which, judging by the date, was issued on July 2, 2006 (ten years before the expiration date listed). Cool!

Without further ado, I am reading it. Yep, today's the day. 

Let's do this, bitches.

* I have to periodically do the same with clothes and shoes, or my closets would overflow. 

THE MUG

There's a scene in the novel Wonder Boys where Grady Tripp, at the end of a chaotic, debauched weekend, looks down at his feet to see that a tuba which showed up early in the story appears to have "followed" him throughout his adventures. 

Does anyone else have something like this? An item that has followed you from place to place over a period of time, even though a.) you never made a conscious decision to keep it, b.) you're somewhat ambivalent about hanging onto it, but c.) still, it's just....there? 

I do.

When I moved to the Twin Cities, I rented a cute little studio apartment in the Cathedral Hill neighborhood of St. Paul. I was living there when I briefly dated a younger guy whom I'll call "Jay." I was 32, he was 23. We used to laugh about the numerological juxtaposition of our ages. 

Going out with a youngster was funny; by our second date Jay was calling me his girlfriend. It wasn't creepy or anything, it seemed kind of natural since we clicked right away and we both dug one another. I didn't mind it. 

Jay had his own apartment in the St. Paul burbs, but--being 23--he was frequently at his mother's house doing laundry and getting free meals. Jay also spent a lot of time at my apartment, and soon he was leaving personal items behind: a hoodie here, a toothbrush there, a towel hanging in my bathroom. Then one day, this mug appeared.  

We were having coffee one morning, and I told Jay how much I loved this literary-themed mug he'd brought over, pointing out Oscar Wilde, Edith Wharton, James Joyce, Nabokov, and some other famous authors I recognized. Jay was like, "Yeah, it belongs to my mom. She works at Barnes and Noble." I told him it didn't seem kosher to swipe his mom's mug and leave it at my place, but he waved away my concerns. "Ah no, it's fine. Believe me, she has a collection of these." 

A few days later, we were drinking wine and laughing at my cats Shelby and Riley. They were crouched on the windowsill, chattering at the squirrels outside. "You know," said Jay, "my mom has this thing for her cat. It's like this carpeted ledge that fits onto the windowsill, so the cat has room to stretch out. I'll bring it over." 

I was like, "Dude, seriously? You can't do that." If Jay nicked the cat's ledge, I would not only be stealing from Jay's mom, I'd also be stealing from Jay's mom's cat. Nope, no way. I couldn't have it on my conscience. 

Jay kept trying to convince me it would be fine, and that his mom could just buy a new window ledge for her cat. I put my foot down. "Fuck no, I'd be pissed as hell if someone did that to me." After going back and forth for a bit, Jay finally relented and agreed that he wouldn't bring the thing over to my apartment.  

We dated for about six weeks. It was hardly an epic romance for the ages, but we had a good time. Jay was funny and quirky, a computer animator who played the theremin and was obsessed with pirates. We went to a lot of movies together; March of the Penguins and Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers are two that I remember, just to place things in a historical context. 

One thing that bugged me? Apart from going to the movies, a lot of our dates consisted of me, Jay, and like thirteen of his buddies hanging out at various hipster bars around St. Paul. While I liked his friends--they were a fun, creative, diverse group of people--I began to balk at the frequency of these types of outings. Jay didn't see why I'd have any issues, since I liked everyone, and they liked me. 

It was becoming an annoyance, though.

The last thing I recall happening in our short-lived relationship was Jay coming over with his DVD player (I didn't have a DVD player; I barely had a working TV at the time) so we could watch Kill Bill, a film he was adamant that I see. I fell dead asleep about 20 minutes in, and Jay was miffed. I often fell asleep when we watched movies at home; I was also temping full-time in downtown St. Paul during the day and posing for drawing classes a few nights a week at the College of Visual Arts. I was exhausted much of the time.    

Still, for him, it was an annoyance.

Not long after, Jay and I made a mutual decision to call it a day, and we parted amicably. He remembered to take the DVD player, the hoodie, and the towel. I tossed out his toothbrush. 

We both moved on. 

A few weeks after Jay and I split, I noticed that I still had his mom's Barnes and Noble mug. By that time, I felt awkward about contacting him to see if he'd pick it up, so I didn't.

More than 20 years later, that mug has traversed the country with John and me, living in the kitchen cupboards of six (Seven? Eight? A dozen ? I've lost count.) different residences. I've kept it all this time, for reasons I don't understand. 

Well, one reason. I mean, it's a cool mug, you know? I still use it when my favorite mug is in the dishwasher. 

Wanna see my favorite mug? Sure ya do!

My stepdaughter and her kids sent me this during the lockdown. 

Of course it's my fave! 

About every five years or so, I remember about the KOOL-TV newsroom hostage drama, and down the rabbit hole I go. Can't help it--my morbid fascination compels me.

NOTE: Every time I watch this, I get PTSD from that horrible beige newsroom. You see kids, some sick fuck in 1972 decided that the color palette for offices, airports, hotels, and schools should be oatmeal, nut-brown, and shit-brown -- no deviations -- a trend that sadly lasted about a decade. It wasn't until 1983 or so that we collectively awoke from our '70s stupor and began to rebel. You might think the '80s went too far with the loud colors and the tackiness, but seriously, when the alternative is taupe and diarrhea? I'll take those eyeball-burning neons every time.

I mean, we just wanted to feel something, you know?

Without further ado, here's the video:

TL;DW -- In May 1982, a paranoid schizophrenic forced his way into a news station in Phoenix, held the whole crew at gunpoint, and got the anchorman to read his cracked-out ramblings live on air. 

Some highlights: 

At the 1:07 mark, we get our first mention of The Ten Prophets: "Johnny Cash, Ronnie Milsap, Eddie Rabbitt, Larry Gatlin, Hank Williams Jr., Rex Allen Jr., Willie Nelson, Conway Twitty, Loretta Lynn, Lacy J. Dalton, Tanya Tucker, and Barbara Mandrell." That's actually twelve prophets, but you know what? I'm gonna guess that Tanya and Barbara were last-minute additions, and Joseph Billie Gwinn just forgot to update the number. It happens. I'm also going to take a stab in the dark and say that Gwinn was a fan of country music, and that these "prophets" were simply artists that he was into at the time. If I were to assemble my own cabal based on my current Spotify playlist, I would select Debbie Harry, Freak Slug, Nation of Language, Bodega, The Bug Club, Suburban Lawns (Su Tissue is an otherworldly being with supernatural powers, and I NEED her in my corner!), Tegan and Sara, MJ Lenderman, Wet Leg, and Wishy. (Hey, this is fun!)

At 3:12 -- Imagine Joe Shmoe of Phoenix AZ innocently sitting down to watch the local news and hearing the anchorman say that cities full of gay men will soon be cropping up around the country. It's like something out of a Dead Milkmen song: "I told you Stuart, it's the queers! They're in it with the aliens! I swear to God, Stuart!"

13:34 -- "Ricky Reagan"? I'm not familiar with him.

At 14:27 We learn that unless the Queen heeds Johnny Cash's warning, Argentina will drop the A-bomb on London. "Oi Maggie! Eat this!" (Shouldn't have invaded the Falklands, I guess.)

22:03 The moment that Bill Close--absolute legend--nonchalantly takes the gun from Gwinn, distracts him with a handshake, then tells the police not to shoot him. The veteran newsman actually seems annoyed more than anything else, and I can see why. Born in 1921, he's from my grandparents' era, the "when men were men" generation. He has no time for your mental illness! "Cut the crap, for God's sake! Get a haircut and get a real job, son, and you won't be worried about Johnny Cash and Barbra Streisand and the Queen of England. Now bring me a whiskey neat!"  

Speaking of legends, the unsung hero of this whole ordeal is production assistant Luis Vila, who saved his female colleague from Gwinn's initial attack. I hope that KOOL-TV gave the guy a year-long, all-expense-paid vacation and a lifetime of free therapy for his trouble.    

And now I'll probably forget about this for another few years, until it's time to discover it again. 

    

  

 MEANWHILE, IN THE NEWSPAPERS.COM ARCHIVE: 
Perverts and Flashers and Drugs, Oh My!

April 15, 1982 was evidently a busy day for sexual deviants in Ferdinand, Indiana. One creeper was seen kissing children at the Ferdinand Elementary playground. A few blocks away, another guy appeared to be stalking a local housewife. And finally, over at the high school, a dude clad only in a jockstrap was exposing his naughty bits to the girls' tennis team.  

I love how colloquially this article is written. "Give the girls a show"? "Bent over for a rear view"? "Playing with himself"? Absolutely no pussyfooting around with vagaries like "committing a lewd act," and such. I applaud that choice. Sometimes, it's good to be blunt. 

I do take umbrage with the author's assertion that "these incidents turned out to be harmless." I mean sure, no one was kidnapped or killed, but I wouldn't call a mental case running around a school playground kissing small children "harmless," or, for that matter, some degenerate incel in a jockstrap flashing his dick and asshole at teenage girls. 

Looking at stuff like this, it's easy to see how my fellow GenXers, free-range kids raised by the "Eh, you'll be fine," school of child-rearing, went on to become hyper-vigilant control freaks once they had children. While I am eternally grateful that I grew up before helicopter parenting was a thing, still, I understand how and why it came about. 

We've seen and heard some shit, y'all.        

Speaking of some shit, this little item is from the July 29, 1982 edition of The Ferdinand News:

Heheheheheheheh, "marijuana trip." I kinda want to read Dr. Curt Scarborough's Basics on Abused Drugs, because anti-drug literature from the 1970s and '80s is a hoot! It's often peppered with phrases like "smoking grass" (I love it when old people call it "grass"!) and "all hopped up on the dope." Totally reminds me of the scene in Better Off Dead where Lane's dad, reading from a book titled Youth and the Drug Explosion, attempts to "rap" with his son.    

Of course, seeing as it was 1982, the warnings in Dr. Scarborough's book would soon be rendered obsolete on the day Nancy Reagan launched her "Just Say No to Drugs" campaign. Sure, people scoffed at the time, but you know what? Her efforts totally paid off. She single-handedly eradicated all drug abuse and addiction in the United States. Everyone immediately quit doing everything all at once. Kids started going to church and doing their homework instead of smoking doobs and hanging at the arcade. Strung-out yuppies flushed all their cocaine down the crapper and drank herbal tea. Famous punk artists quit heroin en masse and joined various religious orders. It's all completely true. 

So hey -- thanks, Nance!

The '80s were a trip, man.

 For S.V.B. 
Rest well, bro.

"All those you thought you lost now circle you

And you are free of pain and heartbreak.

Don't look back, keep going.

We will carry your memory here, until we join you

In just a little while, in one blink of star time."

-- Joy Marjo

VISIT TO MHA 
5/23/2026

John and I took a trip to MHA (my old boarding school) over Memorial Day weekend. We stayed at an adorable bed and breakfast in Jasper, reminding me how much nicer and cleaner B&B's are than mid-range hotels. 

The campus is as beautiful and serene as ever. While the dormitory is now gone--MHA closed in 2000--most everything else there is still the same, aside from the old art department building, which now houses a charming little on-site brewery. 

When we visited last summer, I noticed an abundance of painted rocks placed around the monastery grounds, so I thought I'd bring some of my own.

I painted a giraffe for Angela--she loved giraffes....

....and left it in the grotto...

Church bells signaling Saturday evening mass in downtown Ferdinand
echo throughout the campus. 

Poignant sign among the vigil lights.

I painted a few rocks bearing the old MHA logo....

(NOTE: the school was called Academy Immaculate Conception until the early '70s, 

when they rebranded as Marian Heights Academy.)

Ancient yearbook pic for reference, with the old dorms in the background.

I left my heart in Ferdinand, Indiana....

...along with a few strawberries.

The final resting place for the sisters of the monastery.

We took a stroll over to the colonnades, and I posted up on the wall overlooking the nuns' cemetery and the town of Ferdinand. Not gonna lie, this exact spot where I'm perched right here? Probably one of my top three favorite locations on earth. As a student, it's where I used to steal away for some "me time" when I wanted to journal, think, or just be. Nearly 40 years later, the feels are the same.   

Aerial photo of the campus, taken not by me.

 

 "I am KING SHIT of FUCK MOUNTAIN!"

"WHY would you FUCK with ME?"

God, I love Mr. Show. And yes, I'm still sick. Mask up and pass the Purell, kitties. There's something nasty going around out there. 

Also, "WHAT IS UP SATAN'S ASS?!?"

 

 I am one sick puppy.

Literally! Well, almost literally. I am sick, but I am not a juvenile canine. What I'm saying is that I look and feel like hammered shit, laid up with some kind of horrible sinus-y/upper respiratory/cold thingie with all the usual trimmings: a disgusting phlegm-y cough, achy muscles, and a pounding head. (It's not COVID. I checked.) At the moment I am "bed-rotting" as the kids say, chugging water and OJ and popping Zicam (proven to shorten colds...but we'll see) every two hours. 

At least it's given me a chance to binge all four seasons of Mr. Show--the entire series is now streaming on HBO Max!--because weird comedy is my comfort food. And one of my all-time favorite Mr. Show sketches is the whacked out, spot-on H.R. Pufnstuf parody "The Altered State of Drugachusetts," where instead of Freddy the Flute they got Gurgle the Bong, costumed characters who are either tripping balls or trying to come down from tripping balls, and David Cross sporting a bad pageboy wig and doing a brilliant Jack Wild, complete with those weird, jerky dance kicks he used to bust out during the musical numbers. 

Bonus: a little-known version of the HR Pufnstuf song, recorded by The Murmurs and featured on the 1995 compilation Saturday Morning: Cartoons' Greatest Hits, an album with mid-90s mainstays like Liz Phair, Matthew Sweet, Juliana Hatfield, and Collective Soul covering theme songs from 1970's kids' shows. It's a lot of fun, and probably one of the best things to come out of the nineties' obsession with seventies pop culture.

And with that, I think it's time for me to down some Nyquil and pass out. 

 MORE AI NONSENSE

I'm not as charmed by automatically-generated Spotify word salad as I used to be. The new "Roast My Listening" feature is pretty bad. This is an example of what the app vomited up for me when I gave it a whirl. 

Remember when they tried to convince us that the inevitable robot uprising would be a good thing for everyone? Yeah, I ain't buying it.

 McCARTHY MONDAY 

The standout memory I have of this movie (Class, 1983), involves watching an episode of Siskel & Ebert at my grandmother's house. (Pretty sure my grandmother was the one watching, I was just sitting with her.) The guys were discussing this new teen movie about a boarding school student who has an affair with an older woman who turns out to be his roommate's mother. They showed a scene from the film wherein the main character and Roommate's Mom are about to start going to town on each other in an elevator. My grandmother harumphed at the depravity occurring on the TV screen and promptly ordered me out of the living room. "You don't need to be watching that kind of trash," she said, giving me a look. I reluctantly got up and shuffled out of there, wondering what the big deal was. I watched way worse stuff at home all the time, since my parents and everyone else in the neighborhood had gotten cable a few years prior. Along with getting to see all the sex and violence we could handle on HBO (we were mainly interested in stuff like Friday the 13th and "naughty" teen sex comedies like Fast Times at Ridgemont High), there was a steady supply of porn magazines--some of the more explicit rags, like High Society and Oui--hidden out in the woods that bordered my friend Caroline's house, the same woods that on the other side happened to border the playground behind John Strange Elementary, my school. In hindsight, I really want to believe that the culprit was some horny kid who was forced to stash his stroke books where his parents wouldn't find them, i.e. the wooded lot off of North Ewing Street....because the idea of some pedo-vert strategically placing hardcore porn rags in and around the woods behind an elementary school is too disturbing to contemplate. Also, that probably should've been two paragraphs. My apologies. 

I eventually did see Class a year or two later when it was in heavy rotation on HBO, and it turned out that my grandmother--a very wise woman, by the way--was 100% correct. I didn't need to be watching that kind of trash, but not because of the (lame) sex scenes and the (mostly lame) teenage boy hijinks. It's because Class, well....it kinda sucks.  

The movie takes place at an all-boys boarding school outside Chicago. The bros on the dorm engage in your typical raunchy teen movie antics; pulling endless pranks on one another, smoking copious amounts of weed, and trying to get off with the girls at the neighboring all-female prep school. Sensitive guy Jonathan (Andrew McCarthy), journeys to Chicago on the advice of his roommate Skip (Rob Lowe), hoping to lose his virginity to some worldly big-city gal. Jonathan meets Ellen (Jacqueline Bissett), an older woman who picks him up at a bar. Suddenly the movie shifts gears and morphs into a tender-yet-inappropriate romance that comes to a screeching halt when Ellen discovers that Jonathan is only seventeen (not a grad student as he'd led her to believe) and she wisely "nopes" it out of there. Jonathan is depressed for a while, and then, after the inevitable "Hey I'd love to spend the holidays with your family, Skip. It's a pleasure to meet you, Mrs. HOLYSHITIVEBEENFUCKINGMYROOMMATESMOMALLALONG." If that weren't enough, it soon becomes clear that Ellen is battling a raging alcohol addiction that disgusts her husband, Skip's father (played by Cliff Robertson). And boom! Now we got a tense family drama. 

Jonathan and Ellen rekindle their relationship after the boys return to school following Christmas break. Skip eventually tracks Jonathan to a local motel, finds him in bed with Mom, and goes predictably apeshit. Back at school, Dad arrives to inform Skip that Ellen has voluntarily checked herself into a psych hospital (offscreen)--and, with that--she handily disappears from the movie and is seen nevermore. Tensions between Jonathan and Skip boil over, culminating in a vaguely homoerotic wrestling match in the woods. The boys end up back at the dorm, covered in leaves and mud, all pissed off and exhausted. Skip makes a wisecrack. Jonathan turns to him. They both start laughing, and....freeze frame! The End. I guess the message is, "bros before hos," even when the ho is yo mama.

Well, like I said, Class is a bad movie. And not the fun kind of bad--it's the not-good kind of bad, with all those weird tonal shifts and Rob Lowe trying too hard to be the manic funny guy. The film also lowkey hates women; the female characters are either snotty, shallow bitches (the girls from the neighboring prep school), boozy trainwrecks (Ellen), or pointlessly cruel cunts (the lady who tricks Jonathan into marking up his face with a coin).  

One thing the movie has going for it, at least, is an impressive cast. Besides Lowe and McCarthy, Class is teeming with soon-to-be familiar faces in supporting roles. You got John Cusack, Virginia Madsen, Cameron from Ferris, one of the girlfriends from Weird Science, Lolita Davidovich, and a kid who I vaguely remember from some other Reagan-era flick. There may be more, but you'd have to look closely. 

Upside: Andrew McCarthy is frickin' adorable in this.

Verdict: I give it half a Blane. 

Class can probably be found somewhere on streaming, but seriously, why bother?

 I STEPPED ON ANDREW McCARTHY'S FOOT
AT THE CARMEL CLAY PUBLIC LIBRARY!

He was really nice about it, though.

Andrew is explaining.

Andrew is fixing his hem.

Andrew is listening.

Andrew is amused.

Andrew is pointing.

Andrew is thinking.

Andrew is happy.

I'm reading his new book. It's really good so far, and I highly recommend it.
More importantly -- SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL LIBRARY! The book-banning fascists want to cut library funding. 

Lots of GenX gals go nuts over Blaine from Pretty in Pink, but I prefer Andrew's character in St. Elmo's Fire. I liked his vibe and his cynical attitude, plus he had a much better wardrobe in that one (I love PiP, but I didn't dig Blaine's preppy threads). I know St. Elmo's is generally disparaged nowadays, but fuck it. I love bad movies, and anyway it's pretty to look at and endlessly quotable. (When I met Andrew I should've said, "Quick, what's the meaning of life?" but I didn't. I clammed right up because I was all nervous and excited. Oh well, maybe next time.)

Always loved this scene with him and Emilio: 

I've been toying with the idea of turning this blog into something else. Perhaps an Andrew McCarthy fansite? Maybe I'm kidding, but maybe I'm not.

 J A M  T H E  C O N T R O L S 

 Run + tell all of the angels

Those who could hear the music 

It's a vibe

 Stay Hydrated

 Menopause, amirite?

 Hear them shout across the land

 Pulling threads

Guarding the moon

 

blinked + u were gone 

Jeremy Spoke

 

 Surprise 'em with a victory cry

Watch the shadows

 

 It usually takes a minute....