Out of nowhere yesterday came a memory that made me smile.
My pal Marla is the source of many fun memories for me, even though our period of regular hanging out didn't last all that long. Our friendship, admittedly, began in a strange way. To tell the whole story, I'd need a map, a calendar and more time than the whole story is worth, but suffice it to say that our exes are cousins, and once they were both exes, our friendship was firmly cemented.
Most of my fun memories of her feature shopping trips to Target and/or Ikea and a good many of them feature some sort of international cuisine. This one features both.
One evening last summer, Marla and I visited the Ikea store in Schaumburg, Ill., and then set out to find "the really good Indian buffet" where she'd eaten once before.
I find that Marla seems to rank her restaurants not with stars or points but with "goods" and "really goods." It's a fine system; I suggest the Zagat folks adopt it.
Neither of us were that familiar with the Schaumburg area; we were relying on a map and an address to find the restaurant. And we weren't doing too well. We went way down Schaumburg Road and couldn't find it, then ended up in the middle of nowhere, turned around and came back and couldn't find it....
It was starting to seem like we were in the middle of an 80s teen movie, getting lost on the way to a forbidden hot spot while borrowing the car without permission, getting a flat tire and waking up in a car with a big chunk of your hair in your hand and Anthony Michael Hall staring at you.
Well, maybe not that last part.
It was starting to get very dark, and very late, and we weren't even sure if the place would be open when we got there, but on we went down Schaumburg Road, past Schaumburg High School. Driving by, we both commented that it looked an awful lot like the school in "Ferris Bueller's Day Off." The movie takes place in Chicago and its suburbs, so it made sense that that might have been the school used in filming. When we drove by a second time, we were sure.
Suddenly, the "wrong way" seemed not so wrong after all. Sure, we'd wasted some time and gas, but we'd found the Ferris Bueller high school!
We made it to the restaurant (which ended up being "decent" but not necessarily the "really good" we were expecting) and drove home without incident, still brimming with excitement over our find.
Everyone who grew up in the 80s knows Ferris Bueller and remembers the scene on the steps of the school, where Ed Rooney consoles Sloane Peterson on the death of her grandmother. And we had seen those steps, a symbol of Americana!
I suddenly understood how old-time immigrants must have felt seeing the Statue of Liberty for the first time.
But my excitement didn't last long. When I got home, I went online to look up the filming locations for the movie and was shocked with what I found out. Ferris Bueller didn't go to Schaumburg High School at all. He (and, apparently, director John Hughes) went to Glenbrook North High School on Shermer Road in Northbrook.
Then I understood how Jay and Silent Bob must have felt in "Dogma" when they realized there was no town called Shermer, Illinois.
A week or so after this adventure, Marla decided to move back to her home state of Michigan. She is happy there, and I am happy for her, although I miss her terribly.
But I'm happy for memories like this one. I had a lot of fun that night, and it doesn't matter that we were wrong about the school.
I'll still always remember it as the night we saw Ferris Bueller's high school.
1 comment:
too bad ed rooney wasn't there to yell at us. that was a fine night. and, even if that indian food sucked, and they didn't like filling my water glass- it was a fine night of moving furniture around at ikea to create my perfect living room, screaming like tiny school girls at the ferris bueller high school and laughing. alot.
and, by the way, we are much more exciting than our ex's. we didnt need family bonds to keep us together.
Post a Comment