Car Talk

On our way to work this a.m., my husband and I had a very strange conversation, prompted by a song we heard on the radio. I am not sure what station we'd turned to, although I'm pretty sure we had switched from the NPR station a while back to avoid the fund drive and never bothered to switch back. Anyway, it was like a blast from the past. "St. Elmo's Fire" by John Parr. The fact that I know the singer's name and all the words to the song is frightening enough, but when we started talking about the movie, it got way weirder. I started spouting some of my favorite lines. And I kept saying, "It's such a great movie." He said, "I've seen the movie. It was good. I just don't know the entire script by heart."

And that's when it really hit me. That movie is 20 years old. Made in 1985. The film that prompted the world to refer to a group of young, hot actors as "The Brat Pack." I find it very frightening that two whole decades after watching a fairly mediocre movie, I can recite whole scenes of dialogue. Like valuable brain space is being taken up with this information. Could I tell you what a quadratic equation is? Could I recite the Declaration of Independence? Could I name all the former presidents in order? Of course not. Why remember that stuff when you could remember this:

Alec: You're being arrested for drunk driving.
Billy: Drunk definitely, I don't know if you could call it driving.
***
Jules: Don't you enjoy anything anymore... like girls?
Kevin: I enjoy being afraid of Russia. It's a harmless fear, but it makes America feel better, Russia gets an inflated sense of national worth from our paranoia. How's that?
Jules: I thought you were taking steps to phase out everything that wasn't working in your life.
Wendy: That doesn't leave much.
***
Kevin: You know Jules, there is the brink of insanity and then there is the abyss, which obviously you have fallen into!
***
Kirbo: It's true love, my friend.
Kevin: Love, love, you know what love is? Love is an illusion created by lawyer types like yourself to perpetuate another illusion called marriage to create the reality of divorce and then the illusionary need for divorce lawyers.
***
Kevin: Marriage is a concept invented by people who were lucky to make it to 20 without being eaten by dinosaurs. Marriage is extinct.
Alec: Dinosaurs are extinct. Marriage is still around.
***
Kirby: There are several quintessential moments in a man's life: losing his virginity, getting married, becoming a father, and having the right girl smile at you.
***
Kirby: Fluff and fold, buddy. When I make it really big, I'm going fluff and fold...
Kirby: I understand the fold, but what's the fluff?
Kevin: Fluff's what I write for the paper.
***
Wendy: No diet works. The only way to lose weight in the thighs is amputation.
***
And to answer your question, T...there was no such person as Saint Elmo. But someday, when that muppet passes on...

Billy: Jules, y'know, honey... this isn't real. You know what it is? It's St. Elmo's Fire. Electric flashes of light that appear in dark skies out of nowhere. Sailors would guide entire journeys by it, but the joke was on them... there was no fire. There wasn't even a St. Elmo. They made it up. They made it up because they thought they needed it to keep them going when times got tough, just like you're making up all of this. We're all going through this. It's our time at the edge.