Blogging with Esther

Over the past few months, pop culturistas like me lost pieces of our cultural childhoods one at a time, each one adding to the devastation: no sooner were we moving past Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson, that we lost writer/director John Hughes and dancer/actor/not putting Baby in a cornerer Patrick Swayze. Hughes and Swayze, were two linchpins of my cultural adolescence, sculpting the landscape of expectation for me and countless others in my generation, as we moved forward into an uncertain future.

John Hughes went first, in August, and I thought in movie quotes for days. “Demented and sad, but social.” “Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?” And of course, every single line from my beloved mantra of a movie, “Sixteen Candles.” (“Jake Ryan? But he’s a senior, and he’s taken…I mean, REALLY taken.”) But I felt I had to write about him: this post at Beliefnet’s Idol Chatter is the result.

Then we lost Swayze, and I didn’t have the energy to plumb my own depths for reactions: instead, I went to social media, relying on Facebook status updates and Twitter messages to express the collective sense of mourning.

These pieces were sad to write, but as a writer, I appreciate the opportunity to mourn with thousands of others, virtually, through words, over the internet, because together, we are a community of the affected – in our union over a career’s end, we celebrate the work of the artists and their undeniable impact.