More on Mark’s unhappy note.

One of the well-hidden rewards of being a father of teenage girls is the way they give a seal of approval to the stuff you thought was good and funny by rediscovering it and presenting it to you as something brand new that everybody should know about. Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink, and the Bueller kid have thus all just piled back into my life, just as John Hughes is stepping out of it.

During the last few years, it’s been terrific getting to know those films again and see how accurately they still mirror the life of adolescents on Earth. Only Hughes could cajole a teen girl to step outside her angst and into Molly Ringwald’s, where it is so very much more attractive. The daughter-panel here can perform almost all of Uncle Buck by heart and agree that Breakfast Club is a thing manufactured of pure, fresh truth.

They filed into the office a couple of hours ago, told me they had some bad news, then let me have it.

When just saying you once knew somebody is enough to raise you up in the eyes of young women, your sense of gratitude is pretty palpable. One of my Hughes-worshipping daughters is 15; it’s been twice that many years since I last saw the guy. During his Lampoon period, which is when I met him, Hughes was P. J. O’Rourke’s perfect bookend: They were two extremely smart Midwestern guys who would show up dutifully every morning in an office on Madison Avenue, roll up their sleeves, and write seriously funny stuff all day long — unlike me, a depressed charity hire, who sometimes didn’t show up at all, busy, as I was, you know, reading French poems.

I don’t know what his politics were yesterday, but he once flew a GOP banner, which looked very much like his trousers. Every now and then, he and O’Rourke would find some battle worth choreographing and drag passers-by into the melee, which is how I came to be a Pants-Down Republican — truthfully, the only kind of Republican I have ever been in my entire none-of-the-above life.

Memory eternal — which is a safe bet in his case.