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

