Friday, August 7, 2009, 12:26 am
Rooney will forever eat it
In high school, before MySpace took its place, LiveJournal was the shit, and my LJ handle was rooney_eats_it. People would occasionally ask, Is that referring to Jason Schwartzman’s brother’s shitty band? And I’d emphatically reply, No, retard! Edward R. Rooney!
Ed Rooney, of course, was the dean of students at Ferris Bueller’s high school. Most people evidently fail to notice the graffiti on the school bus toward the end of the movie that reads, “Rooney eats it!!” “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” ranked near the top of my list for a long time, before I developed a more sophisticated taste. But, as I tweeted earlier, I still laugh whenever someone says the words “nine times.”
So I was reflective tonight when I read that John Hughes died at 59. Hughes wrote and directed “Ferris” along with a slew of other quintessential teen angst movies of the late ’80s and early ’90s. Not only did I grow up watching his films, thus a natural connection to them, but they captured the insanity that was and is being a teenager in America, whether in 1986, when I was born and when “Ferris” was released, or in 2004, when I graduated from high school, or now.
Not to mention that he taught us “each one us is a brain and an athlete and a basket case and a princess and a criminal.”
