Matching up with this post of Sephy’s. ;)
When I was growing up, I watched a LOT of movies. My parents had one of the first video machines on the block. We were one of the first people to sign up at “Focus Video” i think it was called, and we usually between the four of us rented anywhere between 2-10 movies a week. So a lot of movies have influenced me over time. Every time I mention a movie to my good friend Sephiroth, most of the time he has never seen it. This is partly because he is a lot younger than me. Many of the movies I really loved were from the 80’s.
A fair while ago we decided the easiest thing to do was for him to just make a list of movies I thought he should at some point in his life see. I suggested he get Ferris Bueller’s Day Off a while back and when he said to me yesterday that he had it, I decided I would like to re-watch it myself. Of course I already had it here in my enormous DVD collection ;) hehe I must take pics and post them for you some time. But I watched it with the Director’s Commentary. John Hughes reminds me a lot of a guy we both know from baiting, Bandit. The way he talks is quite similar.
One of the lesser known facts about this movie was that Ferris was actually the first teenager chosen to go on the space shuttle. Just before before this film was released, the Challenger accident happened. So the film was edited to remove that bit of the storyline.
John Hughes talked quite a bit about the Institute of Art, and one thing he said was that he used to go there a lot when he was taking a day off from school. Long before I heard him say this, this movie inspired me and probably a whole generation of kids to do the same thing. My number one destination was always the Museum {the egypt room, does this come as a surprise to anyone? ;) but I also loved the rocks}, followed by the Art Gallery. There’s something about those places that make you forget all your troubles and just *be*. I would usually go to the art gallery once a week minimum.
I didn’t go to school for almost all of year 11 at school – the deputy principal died while scuba diving (an aneurysm – is that how you spell that?) about two months into the school year and I did not enjoy the way the other kids revelled in it. He was a good guy and we interacted a lot with each other the previous year because I got kicked out of art class – I can’t draw and I hated it and the Art Teacher was a nasty cow who liked to point out I couldn’t draw – and he was the teacher who ran the detention I got sent to instead of going to art class. I explained to him why I hated art class and he admitted to me that he never could draw either but he loved to take coloured pencils and just make little colored squares with them. I had a huge pencil case full of great pencils and the two of us often spent an hour sharing a desk and pencils, just coloring in squares and enjoying the colors and talking about all kinds of stuff.
He inspired me to take a few different classes the next year when I didn’t have to take art, one of them being Latin with a really good teacher friend of his (and the dead poets society had something to do with that too, seen that one Sephy?) but the other kids thought it was great that he died because he was the real disciplinarian. So there I was, probably one of the only people in the school who was upset about this and I really missed him – typing about it opens up a big hole I had forgotten about, too. A couple of days after it happened some kids got real rowdy laughing and joking about it and I took one look and thought, it’s going to be like this for the rest of the year. I don’t need this. These people suck, bigtime. So each day my Mum would drop me off at school, I would go and sign in at home room, then I would walk down to the train station and catch a train into the city. I’d go wherever I felt like going. If I had enough money I might go to the movies but usually I had to look for stuff that was free and save any money I had for buying lunch.
The other thing I really loved about this movie was the idea of life moving pretty fast so you have to stop to take a look around once in a while. I firmly believe in that to this day. You have to have me time, every now and then. I had a lot of me time when I was in year 11 and this was one of the things that taught me to really love my own company. I couldn’t often talk anyone into taking even one day off school with me. They were all worried about getting caught.
The irony of this is, I never did get caught. I actually passed all my classes. I even passed exams I did not show up for. There were almost 500 kids in my year level of school, 5 year levels in total and most of them had over 500 too. My maths class had 60 kids in it. So one kid was not missed. Nobody ever said anything to me about it. At the end of the school year I was dreading getting my school report but when I did get it and I found I had mostly got b’s, I suggested to my Mum that it might be time to look at changing schools.
Wow, that blog kinda went off track a little there. ;) Sorry about that.. ;)
Well, to answer your question, I haven’t seen the Dead Poets’ Society; shocking, I know.
I have a lot of pictures from the Art Institute, from when I went there about 6-1/2 years ago, along with some photos from the observation deck of the Sears Tower from my trip there about 7 years ago.
Actually, I did take days off from school, but since I live in the middle of nowhere, there wasn’t ever anything but sitting at home. One time I did this that I do remember, my brother was around (it was I think his Christmas break at uni or something) and I was literally sneaking around the house hoping to not get caught by him, actually I think it was in May because the tv auction was on, but I digress; I remember sneaking around just not to get caught.
Ironically, when I was a Junior in High school (which is the same as year 11, or as we’d call it 11th grade), the teacher who was a mentor to me died after his final bout with cancer (he had actually had a couple successful fights before), however there wasn’t the celebration that you describe – he was a fairly popular teacher, I think because he had a bunch of slides from his trips to Europe and Russia.
Lastly, 500 kids in your year? Wow. My graduating class had right at 184 or so students; another small town/big smoke difference I’d guess ;)