Winamp Wednesday: Now That You're Older
SAVE FERRIS
Winamp Wednesday is our continuing feature spotlighting all the MP3s I downloaded in the wild-west days of the early internet. B-Sides, live shows, off-air recordings, classics, and today's track...
The Dream Academy, “The Edge of Forever”
I didn’t know what I was doing when I woke up that day.
Legend has it that Ferris Bueller took his day off on June 5th, which honestly feels a little bit late to me. The kid who’s trying to get out of summer school makes sense, and the fact that Ferris is buddy-buddy with even the Freshmen, and definitely the weather as it’s announced on WLS at the top of the movie. But the tone of the school day itself feels too formal. By this point in the year my teachers had fully given up trying to teach anything to the seniors. This was about where my AP Calculus class had descended into just watching Stand and Deliver for the “educational” “value” of it all.
It doesn’t matter, really. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is a fantasia about the feelings we felt as teenagers and the aspirations we had as we got older and just became the bigger kids. In that way it is the perfect film for a thirteen-year-old to call their favorite. You’re gonna grow up to fight through Cameron’s problems and be as cool as Ferris and stay that way forever. I probably haven’t watched this movie in full since college and I could still recite the whole thing down to the Paramount comedies on VHS promo. I’ve never seen Foul Play but I sure do know that shot of the phone booth getting obliterated.
Did you know there’s no soundtrack album to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off? That’s something I wish I knew scouring record shops in 1997. I finally found the answer on the nascent internet, and I found it as quick as I could on Netscape because we were paying by the hour. Turns out that John Hughes thought that the songs together wouldn’t make a coherent album. What, and Weird Science did? Honestly we were never really buying soundtrack albums for the coherency, even if Grosse Pointe Blank did end up becoming one of my favorite end-to-end listens of middle school. We were buying Back to the Future so we could listen to “Time Bomb Town” over and over again, or at least I was. So to find out that only John Hughes Fan Club members had gotten any semblance of that music sent to them in 1986, and then only a vinyl copy of “Beat City” by Flowerpot Men, was a huge blow to my obsessive teenage discography.
Leave it to Napster to immediately hook me up with the obscure and long-out-of-print pieces of Ferris’ rampage across Chicago. I saw myself as a hopeless romantic from jump street and now at fifteen-nearly-sixteen I was going to see how that played out in practice. “The Edge of Forever” plays under my favorite moment of the movie, of two so-cool teenagers finally showing how in love they are and how awkward they’re capable of being. It’s a moment of pure vulnerability, another brick in that Hughesian wall of teen moments nobody else could bring perfectly to life. He was a writer with a direct line to the terrible glorious horribleness of being young. That’s why I loved scenes like this one. My friends were too busy tying themselves in knots creating a perfect outward persona. The other teens on TV were self-consciously witty and cut out the bits that made one want to crawl inside themselves and die. (Buffy, I love you, but you were aspirational rather than presentational.)
“The Edge of Forever”, divorced from the film, brought something to mind that was beyond any of that. It starts by asking easy questions: were you in love when you were young? I was young and in love, that was simple. It was pretty great. Everyone should try it. “But now that you’re older—” I guess I was. Imagine counting down the days to being sixteen years old and thinking you’re older than anything. You’ve passed the training course, kid. Now the real stuff starts. But as a high-school sophomore this is all about love and the people who make your heart beat super quickly. It’s about Sloane and Ferris and how you thought you were gonna have something like that and now you do. It’s about two hearts beating as one and how nothing can ever rip that away from you.
I’m sitting here just after the thirty-eighth anniversary of Ferris Day, and I wonder where everyone from Dean Rooney to Simone Adamle ended up. I know that Ferris and Sloane aren’t together, because with the incredible powers of hindsight and being an adult we can see that Ferris sucks. I wonder if he still speaks to Cameron. There’s a line from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off that’s seared into my brain, once as a worst-case scenario and now as an inevitability, as Ferris talks directly to us about his friendship with Cameron: “We’ll have the summer. He’ll work and I’ll work. Then he’ll go to one school and I’ll go to another. Basically that will be it.” That used to terrify me as a kid. Friendships are the most important thing! How could he just toss them aside like that?
Now that I’m older I see that it’s basically impossible to keep up high school friendships like they were outside of the pressure-cooker of everyday schooling. I try to keep up with my old friends but so much gets in the way. And looking down the lyric sheet of this number I see it all laid out. The love we take for granted that’s impossible to find in later years. The doubts that rattle in our heads when we’re alone. The inability to reconnect because of what-if and that mountain of terror we’ve built up within ourselves. The introspection that makes us crumble.
That’s the Cameron within us. There’s no easy Ferrari to kick out the side of the garage. How do we overcome that? What gives us the courage to say hello again? There’s a line in the screenplay to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off that was cut before filming where Ferris discusses nostalgia: “When my mom listens to the White Album now, she doesn’t hear music, she hears memories. Nostalgia is her favorite drug. It’ll probably be mine too. I hope not.” We’re a thousand words in on nostalgia as a favorite drug. I can try to turn a critical eye to this song but it’s still Mia Sara and Matthew Broderick showing how I could grow up to be a cool teenager. How do we reclaim that as adults? I don’t know. Ferris only showed me how to race your folks home when you’ve been out all day.
I’m writing this on June 5th for publication on June 7th. I’ll start writing when Cameron is still in bed and I’ll publish it when Dean Rooney is licking his wounds. During the process Paramount announced that Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is finally coming to 4K disc. I can’t wait to revisit it for the first time in twenty years. I hope it gives me the inspiration that led to obsession of my early-teen years. If not, I hope I get a hit off of Mrs. Bueller’s favorite drug. Maybe I’ll get past that. Maybe I’ll be brave enough to talk to Cameron again.
There’s at least one nice thing about being older. If I was still a teenager right now I’d be in gym.