What About Prom Blane?

As I was watching The Breakfast Club, I remembered that I have been meaning to write an entry about John Hughes for quite awhile and as I was laying down to go to sleep the entry wrote itself in my head.
When John Hughes died in August, I know I felt like I had lost one of the few filmmakers who understood how I felt as a teenager and even now as a twenty-something.
I remember the first time I saw The Breakfast Club--I was a freshman in high school and I just felt (as all teenagers do) that no one understood how I felt and that no one else felt as much like a misfit as I did. And then this movie came along, and so did characters I could relate to--John Bender? Totally my other half in terms of sarcastic comebacks. I loved the oddity of Allison and how multidimensional she was--at least until the end when they take her personality from her just so she can go out with Andrew. My point is that this was the first time I had seen depictions of actual teenagers put up on the screen.
After this I rediscovered Sixteen Candles, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, discovered Pretty in Pink (and just recently) Some Kind of Wonderful (which I know is Pretty in Pink in reverse) but it's still pretty awesome and having recently watched all of these films I realize what a treasure teenagedom has lost. John Hughes understood that we had voices; I think David Bowie said it best "And these children that you spit on as they try to change their worlds are immune to your consultation they're quite aware of what they're going through." Now I don't know, but I think every teenager at some point or another just wants their parents to shut up and let them figure life out for themselves--in this instance I think Keith in Some Kind of Wonderful really took the words out of my mouth when he said to his father, "when does my life belong to me?" See no other filmmaker was giving us lines like these--and really they weren't lines, they were our honest to God thoughts and someone thought to put them out there so that we could say "finally someone understands what it's like to be me."
I feel like that was a really rambling entry, but I think it rambled because I felt I had so much to say and it was really hard to write; I guess I felt like I lost a friend and that's never an easy thing to write about.
So thank you John Hughes for speaking to the misfit in all of us and for understanding us.