She’s the nicest John Hughes villain you’d ever meet.

The last time we got together, as she stood to hug me, she left her iPhone on the table. I looked down at it. I wasn’t snooping. I just didn’t know that Lily Pulitzer made iPhone cases. And then, as I stared at the little pink shoes on a lime green background, I noticed something out of character.

“Bebe,” I asked her, “why are you searching ‘threesome’ in the App Store?” Though perhaps the better question would have been why the term results in a tool to help your golf game.

“Have you ever had one?” she whispered. “You know, a ...”—and here she held up three fingers and mouthed the offending final syllable. It took me a minute to put this rebus together. Apparently it was too shocking to say, though not to do.

“Well, you know,” I replied, “the opportunity has never really presented itself!”

“Would you want to?”

Oh, God. The opportunity was presenting itself.

I’d be terrible at a threesome. I wouldn’t even know how to cuddle afterward. Would there even be cuddling afterward? Would there be breakfast?

“I … no. I don’t think so, but thanks! That’s really flattering.”

“No!” Bebe exclaimed, “no, no! I didn’t mean you!”

That was a relief. But why not me? I would have made pancakes in the morning.

“It’s just,” Bebe explained, “I promised John we could have one for his birthday. But I have no idea how you make one happen. Do you? Know how to?”

When was it exactly that women stopped giving men books and bow ties for their birthdays and started giving them breast implants and swinging sex? Probably sometime around 1963. And it had all led up to this—confused WASPy girls with pink-and-green phones desperately typing in various risque acts. Philip Larkin must be turning over in his grave.

“I thought there might be an app for it,” Bebe explained. “There’s that one for gay men. Where they can find each other. I thought there would be one like that.”

“You thought you’d find a bunch of bisexual girls at Bryant Park Grill?” I scanned the room full of rather bored, beautifully dressed women eating identical cobb salads. If the threesome-seeking app existed, Bryant Park Grill would be a really good spot to fire it up.

“I’m sure there’s a website that’s perfect for that,” I noted. “What about Craigslist? I think this is why Craigslist exists.”

Bebe began pecking away at her phone.

“Oh, it’s just furniture,” she said. She looked pleased to have found such a wholesome place, filled with vintage armoires. I grabbed the phone and began drilling down, feeling worldly.

“Tuesday Night Is Suckfest For Hung Trannies,” I read, as Bebe’s eyes widened in horror.

I no longer felt worldly.

“I am not a hung tranny,” she said.

A second later I found a pregnant woman who wanted to meet a couple who would drink her milk. Bebe lifted her perfectly manicured hand to her mouth and kept it there for a very long time.

“It’s just. I was hoping it would be someone who seemed nice. I want it to be with someone I’d like doing it with. Someone like Chloe Sevigny’s character in The Last Days of Disco, you know? That would be a good person to have a threesome with.”

“Do you think picking the most virtuous and virginal character in film might be a difficult starting point?” I asked (though I admired her for aiming high). “What if you went for someone like…” I paused to assess our mutual friends. “Becky!”

Becky spends a fair amount of time smoking peyote and having spiritual experiences. She seemed like someone who would know how take the reins on a threesome. She also has a tattoo that reads “I [heart] Sex” which seems like a good sign.

“Are you insane?” replied Bebe. “She’s terrifying. She tried to eat a live snake.”

“It wasn’t poisonous. It was more of a kissing thing. She tried to make out with a live snake, and that shows she’s up for new experiences! And she has a Chloe Sevigny–type physique.”

“She’s on drugs.”

“Sexy drugs.”

“No,” she said firmly.

“You could…” and now I found myself whispering, “call an escort agency. They’d send someone, and she’d be very nice.” I knew this because I have seen The Girlfriend Experience as well as Pretty Woman.

Bebe adjusted her headband primly. I assumed she had a moral objection. “I don’t think so,” she said. “I just don’t feel like I should have to pay for it. Besides…” she hesitated, “Julia Roberts is really adorable.”

“That’s ideal then, right?”

“No,” Bebe replies, “because then John could fall in love with her and take her to an opera. Thank God John doesn’t like the opera.”

Bebe called me a few weeks later. It seems John had been having second thoughts and decided that what he’d really like for his birthday would be a new nine iron. Bebe seemed somewhat disappointed, but she had just the app to go with it.

editorial@observer.com

TMZ: John Hughes Dies — Appropriate comment from NRay7882: "RIP, and here's to never remaking The Breakfast Club or Ferris Bueller's Day Off."

Advertisers dumping Glenn Beck — MediaMatters.org quoted a ColorForChange press release announcing that three companies who run ads during Mr. Beck's Fox show—NexisLexis-owned Lawyers.com, Proctor & Gamble and Progressive Insurance—today "distanced themselves" after "over 45,000 ColorOfChange.org members called on advertisers to pull their ads from Glenn Beck after the controversial news host called President Obama a 'racist' who 'has a deep-seated hatred for white people' on 'Fox & Friends' last week."

Marijuana is Safer: So Why Are We Driving People to Drink? — On Alternet.org, an excerpt of the book Marijuana is Safer: So Why Are We Driving People to Drink? by Steve Fox, Paul Armentano and Mason Tvert (published by Chelsea Green), which examines how Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps could get away with acting like "a drunken ass," but when he inhales a bit of pot, "he is run through the social, corporate, and legal wringer—but only for his suspected pot use. ... Next time he goes out in public, he should just stick to being drunk and obnoxious." Frankyfran3 says: "This comparison is all the more serious because of his previous conviction of driving under the influence of alcohol, which could have potentially maimed/killed himself or others."

Rejected By Apple, iPhone Developers are Going Underground — Wired reports: "Some developers aren’t taking the rejection lying down: They’re turning instead to an unauthorized app store called Cydia, where forbidden wares continue to exist — and even earn developers some money." Viva la anti-Apple revolution!

How Did Hackers Cripple Twitter? — Time magazine investigates. Comment from skyfyre: "They did the world a favor."

Spotify Is the Best Desktop Music Player We've Ever Used — Lifehacker reviews this music app getting lots of attention across the Web recently, including from New York's Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures and his son, Josh Wilson, who were quoted in Brad Stone's recent New York Times story. This is from Lifehacker: "Imagine a music app with instant access to any song you wanted to hear. Imagine creating a playlist from those songs and quickly, easily sharing it with friends. Such an app does exist, it's called Spotify, and could just change music forever."

CNN Rips Into Fraudulent Health Care CEO Anti-Reformer — Talking Points Memo points out the rift between CNN anchor Rick Sanchez, who took down Rick Scott: "Rick Scott, the founder of an organization that's been funding anti-health care reform protests and the former CEO of a hospital company that, as Sanchez pointed out, paid $1.7 billion to settle charges of overcharging Medicare and Medicaid." Latenight13 says: "Finally CNN finds a backbone."

10 mysteries of human behaviour that science can't explain — The U.K. Telegraph writes up the New Scientist magazine editorial about our pecularities, like why we have body hair and get blushy cheeks or pick our noses and do silly things like make art. Comment from Rockout: "#11 Women."

Digg Ads beta rolling out this week — Wow, now Diggers can help influence what kinds of ads they see as they browse around the site. What if you could down Digg those Palm 3 ads into oblivion? Bliss! An explanation from Digg's official blog: "your Diggs, buries and clicks influence a quality score that determines how often the ad gets displayed, and ultimately how much the advertiser pays per click. The more you Digg an ad, the less the advertiser will have to pay; the more an ad is buried, the more the advertiser is charged, eventually pricing it out of the system. ... Our goal with Digg Ads is to encourage advertisers to create content as compelling as organic Digg stories, and to give you more control over which ads you see on Digg."

Twitter, Facebook attack targeted one user — CNet reports: "A Georgian blogger with accounts on Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal, and Google's Blogger and YouTube was targeted in a denial-of-service attack that led to the sitewide outage at Twitter and problems at the other sites on Thursday, according to a Facebook executive." Just one guy, people! Comment from ipt2g: "I'm so mad at the hacker. I really wanted to see what my friends ate for lunch today, and when they flushed their toilets, or when they farted. I missed out on a lot today, all thanks to this Russian Hacker! :("

In Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club, Hughes essentially introduced the modern teenage hero: wise beyond one’s years, artistically inclined, hyper-articulate, romantic and hopelessly misunderstood. These characters weren’t so much role models—they were far too flawed—as they were imaginary friends for the audience, who empathized with every pang of adolescent longing. Within a couple of years, it seemed, every teen-movie protagonist had an Elvis Costello poster on his wall, and every real-life teen had a crush on Molly Ringwald.

And then, after launching the careers of a half-dozen young actors (and a half-dozen New Romantic bands), after introducing “neo-maxi-zoom-dweebie” and “poozer” and “eat my shorts” into the lexicon, John Hughes decided to leave the kids behind. While he prepared to direct Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (Matthew Broderick’s nearly superhuman Ferris a fitting culmination of the steadily increasing confidence held by Mr. Hughes’ characters), he hammered out the script for Pretty in Pink and turned it over to rookie director Howard Deutch. Judging by Mr. Deutch’s commentary on Paramount’s new DVD edition, he was simply Mr. Hughes’ proxy and conceded in nearly every disagreement.

The result was the first in what would be a series of films written and produced, but not directed, by Mr. Hughes and superficially bearing his marks. But despite the familiar sans serif titles and NME-approved soundtracks, these films lacked his sharp visual sense and, most tragically, a handle on the rhythms of his dialogue.

Pretty in Pink is a hodgepodge of teen-romance archetypes. Working-class Andie (Molly Ringwald) falls for rich kid Blane (Andrew McCarthy). Super-rich slimeball Steff (James Spader), having been rejected by Andie, tries to convince Blane that she’s “trash.” Meanwhile, Andie’s best friend Duckie (Jon Cryer) pines for her, but she has no romantic feelings for him. Gee, maybe it’s the logorrhea? Or the mirrored round sunglasses? Or the way he practically stalks her?

If it’s hard to imagine dating Duckie, it’s even harder to swoon for the craven Blane, who reneges on taking Andie to the prom, then unconvincingly drops the L-bomb. The script originally called for Andie to wind up with Duckie, but test audiences balked and Mr. Deutch, to Mr. Hughes’ chagrin, reshot the ending. (The footage of the original ending promised on the DVD packaging is nowhere to be found.)

Everything that doesn’t hinge on the main plot works. Mr. Spader, with his Mitchum-heavy lids and dangling cigarettes, is the most magnetic—and, in fact, it’s the characters on the margins who are most interesting. Harry Dean Stanton lends weight to the role of Andie’s layabout single dad, while Annie Potts as Iona, the manager of the record store that Andie works at, fits the moody music she plays. And despite Duckie’s insufferability, Mr. Cryer gives a wonderful, brave performance, especially in his hold-nothing-back lip-synching of Otis Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness.”

A year after Pretty in Pink, Mr. Hughes got the ending he wanted with Some Kind of Wonderful. Enter gender reversal: Eric Stoltz played the lower-class Keith (once again, the opening sequences reveal the poor kid to literally live on the other side of the tracks), with Mary Stuart Masterson as Watts, the best friend who’s in love with him, and Lea Thompson as Amanda, the girl for whom he pines. But Hardy (Craig Sheffer), Amanda’s rich ex-boyfriend, wants to quash it.

Mr. Hughes and Mr. Deutch wisely lay the groundwork of a first kiss between Keith and Watts, and their outcast friendship is less one-sided than that of Andie and Duckie, all of which points to an ending that improves on Pretty in Pink’s. But a bizarre third act has Keith unloading his college fund on a mega-date with Amanda, which includes squandering his savings on a pair of diamond earrings, a move that’s supposed to symbolize—well, it’s not really clear. And so John Ashton, as Keith’s apoplectic father, is the sole voice of reason in the final 20 minutes (presumably not the intent of the maniacally antiauthoritarian Mr. Hughes, who in interviews has scoffed about a college education); then the credits roll, and the Hughes teen oeuvre comes to an unsatisfying close. (The defeated filmmakers would soon collaborate on The Great Outdoors.)

And yet even these second-tier films, treating adolescence with gravity and sensitivity, mesmerized a nation of kids. The emotional moments in teenage life in which the heart races fastest—a first kiss, the seconds before a confession, the nausea of jealousy—should seem overblown to an adult viewer, but the films’ openheartedness is powerful enough to recall painful buried memories.

Ironically, it might be teens today who would scoff at such fumbling intensity. Fifteen minutes into Pretty in Pink, Blane predicts the future of teenage social life. From across the high-school library, he hijacks Andie’s computer screen with a simple message: “Do you want to talk?” Decades later, millions would follow in his footsteps with MySpace and instant-messaging, and a generation would know diaries as something to be shared.

What Pretty in Pink doesn’t predict so well is the future of the teen film. Though Mr. Hughes’ influence is apparent in commercial failures like My So-Called Life and Freaks and Geeks, the lure of today’s dramas has quickly moved from identification toward purely aspiration. The O.C. (tag line: “It’s nothing like where you live. And nothing like you imagine”) abandoned class issues early on in favor of debating the niceties of Chrismukkah; then Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County dispensed with authority figures altogether; while the Duff sisters play the Hilton sisters in Material Girls.

How can anyone possibly see his or her own life reflected in this? It’s only natural that we’d be flummoxed. The Pretty in Pink fans of 1986 are long past the teenage experience, decades older but not yet raising teenagers of their own. Better to just let it go. As Andie warns the 32-year-old Iona in Pretty in Pink, “You’re gonna OD on nostalgia.”

In Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club, Hughes essentially introduced the modern teenage hero: wise beyond one’s years, artistically inclined, hyper-articulate, romantic and hopelessly misunderstood. These characters weren’t so much role models—they were far too flawed—as they were imaginary friends for the audience, who empathized with every pang of adolescent longing. Within a couple of years, it seemed, every teen-movie protagonist had an Elvis Costello poster on his wall, and every real-life teen had a crush on Molly Ringwald.

And then, after launching the careers of a half-dozen young actors (and a half-dozen New Romantic bands), after introducing “neo-maxi-zoom-dweebie” and “poozer” and “eat my shorts” into the lexicon, John Hughes decided to leave the kids behind. While he prepared to direct Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (Matthew Broderick’s nearly superhuman Ferris a fitting culmination of the steadily increasing confidence held by Mr. Hughes’ characters), he hammered out the script for Pretty in Pink and turned it over to rookie director Howard Deutch. Judging by Mr. Deutch’s commentary on Paramount’s new DVD edition, he was simply Mr. Hughes’ proxy and conceded in nearly every disagreement.

The result was the first in what would be a series of films written and produced, but not directed, by Mr. Hughes and superficially bearing his marks. But despite the familiar sans serif titles and NME-approved soundtracks, these films lacked his sharp visual sense and, most tragically, a handle on the rhythms of his dialogue.

Pretty in Pink is a hodgepodge of teen-romance archetypes. Working-class Andie (Molly Ringwald) falls for rich kid Blane (Andrew McCarthy). Super-rich slimeball Steff (James Spader), having been rejected by Andie, tries to convince Blane that she’s “trash.” Meanwhile, Andie’s best friend Duckie (Jon Cryer) pines for her, but she has no romantic feelings for him. Gee, maybe it’s the logorrhea? Or the mirrored round sunglasses? Or the way he practically stalks her?

If it’s hard to imagine dating Duckie, it’s even harder to swoon for the craven Blane, who reneges on taking Andie to the prom, then unconvincingly drops the L-bomb. The script originally called for Andie to wind up with Duckie, but test audiences balked and Mr. Deutch, to Mr. Hughes’ chagrin, reshot the ending. (The footage of the original ending promised on the DVD packaging is nowhere to be found.)

Everything that doesn’t hinge on the main plot works. Mr. Spader, with his Mitchum-heavy lids and dangling cigarettes, is the most magnetic—and, in fact, it’s the characters on the margins who are most interesting. Harry Dean Stanton lends weight to the role of Andie’s layabout single dad, while Annie Potts as Iona, the manager of the record store that Andie works at, fits the moody music she plays. And despite Duckie’s insufferability, Mr. Cryer gives a wonderful, brave performance, especially in his hold-nothing-back lip-synching of Otis Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness.”

A year after Pretty in Pink, Mr. Hughes got the ending he wanted with Some Kind of Wonderful. Enter gender reversal: Eric Stoltz played the lower-class Keith (once again, the opening sequences reveal the poor kid to literally live on the other side of the tracks), with Mary Stuart Masterson as Watts, the best friend who’s in love with him, and Lea Thompson as Amanda, the girl for whom he pines. But Hardy (Craig Sheffer), Amanda’s rich ex-boyfriend, wants to quash it.

Mr. Hughes and Mr. Deutch wisely lay the groundwork of a first kiss between Keith and Watts, and their outcast friendship is less one-sided than that of Andie and Duckie, all of which points to an ending that improves on Pretty in Pink’s. But a bizarre third act has Keith unloading his college fund on a mega-date with Amanda, which includes squandering his savings on a pair of diamond earrings, a move that’s supposed to symbolize—well, it’s not really clear. And so John Ashton, as Keith’s apoplectic father, is the sole voice of reason in the final 20 minutes (presumably not the intent of the maniacally antiauthoritarian Mr. Hughes, who in interviews has scoffed about a college education); then the credits roll, and the Hughes teen oeuvre comes to an unsatisfying close. (The defeated filmmakers would soon collaborate on The Great Outdoors.)

And yet even these second-tier films, treating adolescence with gravity and sensitivity, mesmerized a nation of kids. The emotional moments in teenage life in which the heart races fastest—a first kiss, the seconds before a confession, the nausea of jealousy—should seem overblown to an adult viewer, but the films’ openheartedness is powerful enough to recall painful buried memories.

Ironically, it might be teens today who would scoff at such fumbling intensity. Fifteen minutes into Pretty in Pink, Blane predicts the future of teenage social life. From across the high-school library, he hijacks Andie’s computer screen with a simple message: “Do you want to talk?” Decades later, millions would follow in his footsteps with MySpace and instant-messaging, and a generation would know diaries as something to be shared.

What Pretty in Pink doesn’t predict so well is the future of the teen film. Though Mr. Hughes’ influence is apparent in commercial failures like My So-Called Life and Freaks and Geeks, the lure of today’s dramas has quickly moved from identification toward purely aspiration. The O.C. (tag line: “It’s nothing like where you live. And nothing like you imagine”) abandoned class issues early on in favor of debating the niceties of Chrismukkah; then Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County dispensed with authority figures altogether; while the Duff sisters play the Hilton sisters in Material Girls.

How can anyone possibly see his or her own life reflected in this? It’s only natural that we’d be flummoxed. The Pretty in Pink fans of 1986 are long past the teenage experience, decades older but not yet raising teenagers of their own. Better to just let it go. As Andie warns the 32-year-old Iona in Pretty in Pink, “You’re gonna OD on nostalgia.”

But our favorite comparison comes from a friend who described the race as a latter-day version of The Breakfast Club. You know, the John Hughes flick about the five high school kids who get stuck in detention together one Saturday morning and spend the day torturing each other (until, of course, they discover that they all really have a lot in common).

Here is the cast for the re-make:

Howard Dean - Judd Nelson (The Rebel)
Donnie Fowler Jr. - Emilio Estevez (The Jock)
Simon Rosenberg - Anthony Michael Hall (The Brain)
Tim Roemer - Molly Ringwald (The Prom Queen)
David Leland - Ally Sheedy (The Basket Case, who showed up for detention because she didn't have anything better to do...)
Martin Frost --The Principal (Our friend actually neglected to assign Mr. Frost, who just dropped out of the race, a role in the film, so we took the liberty of doing it ourselves. But we think it works pretty well and can almost hear Mr. Frost telling Mr. Dean, "Don't mess with the bull, young man. You'll get the horns.")

Having spent the last few days shadowing these guys at the Roosevelt Hotel, we think that this scenario makes good and solid sense. But we just have one question for our friend: Does this mean that Tim Roemer will give Howard Dean his earring? We're on the edge of our seats.