Wednesday, September 13, 2017 // The Statement
7B

The Picture Stays in the Kid: Days Off

T

he last time someone asked me
where I was from, the response
itself was long enough to be
nominated for a writing award (it

certainly wouldn’t win, if anything for lack of
lucidity).

“I’m from the North Shore suburbs of Chi-

cago, about 30 minutes on the 94, sort of near
Northwestern University in Evanston, in John
Hughes territory: You know, like “The Break-
fast Club” and ‘Ferris Bueller.’”

In fact, I’ll continue, if I haven’t lost the cap-

tive attention of my audience, “Ferris Buel-
ler’s Day Off” and “The Breakfast Club” were
filmed at my high school in Northbrook, Ill.,
and were based on them. It’s a fun little fact that
sometimes surprises and leads to an additional
inquiry or two on the subject, but never lingers
beyond ephemeral interest.

It was the same for me for the longest time,

until it wasn’t. I threw out the fact as a matter of
location-sleuthing convenience, and occasion-
ally as an icebreaker, but, as most would think
with a fun fact, my high school’s cinematic
legacy wasn’t much of my identity — despite the
seemingly unending obsession with it that sur-
rounded me growing up.

It changed once my passion for film bloomed.

I wanted to see myself — the halls I walked, the
classes I took — on screen. And “Ferris Bueller”
was it.

Film-going audiences have watched North

Shore Chicago life unfold on screen for years.

1980’s “Ordinary People” traced the lives of a
grieving family in Lake Forest. “Mean Girls”
ostensibly was set at Evanston Township High
School, but any North Shore resident will tell
you with a wink and perhaps a hushed voice
that it’s actually about New Trier Township,
Evanston’s wealthier neighbors to the north
and the cluster of towns to the east of North-
brook.

And all John Hughes’s films — “The Break-

fast Club,” “Sixteen Candles,” “Home Alone,”

and, of course, “Ferris Bueller” — were set in
the North Shore, and some specifically in the
fictional (but not entirely) town of Shermer
(Northbrook was called “Shermerville” before
anti-German sentiment in World War I led the
town to name itself after the branch of the Chi-
cago River that runs through the town).

But there’s something about “Ferris Bueller”

specifically that so perfectly captures a sub-
urban Chicago malaise and boredom, and the
yearning to escape it.

My family drove down to Chicago nearly

every week when I grew up, almost always to
visit my grandmother who lived at the corner
of Michigan and Chicago avenues. It was prime
real estate — the famous water tower that sur-
vived that 1871 Chicago Fire sat across the
street. Her window faced the towering John
Hancock Center and a sliver of the Oak Street
Beach peeked through the buildings clawing
into the sky, north on the Magnificent Mile. I
could spend hours staring at that view.

Every week, as I sat in Sunday school classes

at synagogue, I couldn’t wait to climb into the
car, stop at home briefly to grab some waters
and a sweatshirt (“It’s colder by the lake,” my
mom reminded us), and head down on I-94.
The suburban tree-and-house-scapes that
lined the highway would soon give way to the
more crowded buildings lining busy streets. We
would pass an old church whose ornate exterior
came just short of the highway. We would pass
a building side with an impressive and ever-

changing wall mural. We would pass the Mor-
ton Salt rooftop, which featured its logo — the
umbrella girl — with the saying, “When it rains
it pours.”

The same could be said for the city itself. In

Chicago, even on the touristy and relatively
staid Michigan Avenue, life was lived. Even
more so in the peripheral neighborhoods where
I began spending more time in recent years:
Lincoln Park and Lakeview, the West Loop,
Hyde Park. “Ferris Bueller,” I knew, was full of
delirious exhilaration, but it was a metaphor for
a state of being — of simply being in the city.

Ferris dances around to The Beatles’s “Twist

and Shout” in a German pride parade. Every
moment in the city seems like a celebration,
every street corner a meticulously planned
work of art. He steals the identity of the fiction-
al Abe Froman, the supposed “sausage king”
of the city. Chicago, literally “the second city,”
with a massive chip on its shoulder, is I believe

the nation’s best-kept secret, even if 8 million or
so people live in its environs and millions more
tourists flood the city every year.

When my parents moved to Chicago from

Washington, D.C., they settled in the city
proper, moving around from neighborhood to
neighborhood until deciding to move into the
suburbs after deciding against a house in Chi-
cago’s Wicker Park, then on the cusp of a rapid
bout of gentrification.

I understand their decision — and I value liv-

ing in a quiet village on the edge of Cook Coun-
ty — yet I can’t help but mourn the exuberant
urban life I could have had. As if my birth itself
were a scar in replace of an alternate life, I was
born in Evanston while both my brothers and
my father were all born in the same hospital in
downtown Chicago.

I suppose I’m not alone, not even in my

immediate family. My dad’s ancestors lived on
the southside of Chicago since the 1870s, and
his mother moved the family to Glencoe, Ill.,
only one town east of where I grew up. He, too,
traveled to the city frequently to see his grand-
parents and the extended family in Hyde Park.
And yet, at the end of the day, he lived in subur-
bia, close in proximity, but much farther in cul-
ture, from the city a half an hour to the south.

When I first watched “Ferris Bueller’s Day

Off,” I was with my dad, who smiled and said,
“This is a perfect movie.”

I think he knew it too.

by Daniel Hensel, Daily Film Editor

ILLUSTRATION BY EMILY HARDIE