A New Jersey Teen Wins a Date With Taylor Swift, inspiring Todd Mauldin to remember is own teenage dream girl.
A high school kid in New Jersey who is battling leukemia got a dream date with Taylor Swift, CNN Reports.
Good for him. Seriously. I hope he has a great time, I’m sure he could use a great time about now.
But hearing the news on Inside Hollywood set me to thinking, back over the decades… who would have been my dream date back when I was a teenager, back in the 80s, back in the midst of the Regan era?
Molly Ringwald.
Fuck off, haters.
Molly Ringwald, man. She was my gal.
I’m talking about “Sixteen Candles” Molly Ringwald. And really, no other version of her from any other movie. Just “Sixteen Candles”. All the others came out after I left the little Nevada mining town I grew up in, and they all came out after I had gotten serious about a girlfriend. “Sixteen Candles” though, well, it came out in 1984, and I was 17 and I had just started dating that girl I ended up getting serious about. I saw it on video cassette. It made a big impression. In the movie, Molly Ringwald gave her underpants to help a geek. I was overwhelmed with pathos.
Now, fantasizing about going on a date with Molly Ringwald was a complicated thing for me, because I lived in that little town of 2000 people, 75 miles from the nearest movie theater. I knew nothing of cities, or Hollywood, or of the girls that lived in places like that. So to dream about a date with Molly Ringwald, the actress who seemed exactly my style of sweet and nice and cute and girl-next-door sexy, required a lot of mental gymnastics to come up with a plausible scenario. I couldn’t dream of, you know, going to *Hollywood* or some shit like that, and going out on a date. I mean, what would I do? Pull up in my green Ford F-100 with the dent in the side and take her to, like, Wendy’s or something? I couldn’t figure a reason she’d come to Battle Mountain either, except maybe if she was making a movie, and who would make a movie in Battle Mountain?
So I settled on this idea of running into her at a National Park.
Here’s my idea of plausible, at the time: I’d meet her, quite by accident, in a National Park, like maybe at Yosemite. That way, we’d sort of be on neutral ground, both out of our elements. She’d be the Hollywood star, trying to escape into nature and get away from all her fancy friends and the pressures of her career and the big city and stuff like that, and I’d be this strikingly handsome, witty and independent high school guy spending a week by himself, exploring Yosemite. She’d see me in the visitor’s center or something, and think I was cute. I’d recognize her but not make a big deal about it, and she’d appreciate that. We’d wander around looking at displays, and then maybe go have a light meal, then maybe start hanging around together, exploring stuff. Then we’d, like, make out in my truck.
It wasn’t a sophisticated fantasy, I’ll grant you that. But it did work out. Remember that girlfriend I mentioned earlier? I’ve been married to her for 23 years. And when she was 16, she was a LOT like Molly Ringwald.
