High School Hero: Overage Actors
In the 1980s, for some reason my sister and I were members of the small, depraved cult devoted to Grease 2. In some ways this made sense, we had the original on video and had seen it about twenty times. My sister, in my absence, watched it about a hundred more. That’s no exaggeration. If you text her any line, no matter how obscure, she will text back the next one. But in other ways it made no sense. The first Grease has good songs and terrific Travolta dancing, which is all you really need. Grease 2 had none of these things. Grease 2 is wildly inferior to the original, preposterous in every way and demonstrably terrible. But it falls in that zone of things that appeal to kids before they know better and by then they can’t get it out of their system, like Reese’s or Apple Jacks. My sister, sadly, knows all these lines too.
Age Appropriate?: Johnny Nogerelli, at left, in Grease 2.
About the only thing it did have is Michelle Pfeiffer chewing gum with more intensity than anybody until Al Pacino in Heat. What’s crazy about Grease 2, in retrospect is that the actors playing high school students are impossibly old. Not slightly but more than a decade too old—they’re grown men and women. They make no effort, absolutely none, to cast people who might be in college, let alone high school. Johnny Nogerelli, good lord these names, rolls in on his motorcycle as a high school senior. He’s a tidy twenty-eight.
School Bus Alternative: James Hurley in Twin Peaks.
So I started thinking about the oldest looking high school students onscreen. Not ones who were old but looked young (wasn’t Ralph Macchio supposed to be ancient during Karate Kid?), but physically improbable men and women. Sean Penn was twenty-two in Fast Times but he doesn’t seem nearly as old as Damone. When I first saw it Damone possessed the most adult knowledge of anyone I’d ever heard. Naturally, I found him terrifying. (I always forget that the speaker salesman Stacy dates is named Rod Johnson and that the face value of Van Halen tickets was $12.50.)
Generations Apart: Damone, at right, in Fast Times at Ridgemont High.
This intimidation factor was also true in The Breakfast Club. Bender seemed like somebody who inhabited an entirely different world, he might as well have been an adult. But Bender and I both learned what sushi was from Molly Ringwald, which is an unexpected way to discover a world cuisine. Everybody in Twin Peaks seemed very old, including James Hurley driving his motorcycle. Who drives to high school on his motorcycle? Oh right, the T-Birds in Grease. James seemed old enough to own a bar, much less drink at one. I vaguely remember that the girl in glasses in Beverly Hills 90210 was supposedly very old (I can’t be bothered to look up her name, I want to say it’s Andrea). I’m sure there are numerous examples since then (leave the most notable in the Comments).
“This is U.S. History. I see the globe right there.” Jeff Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High.
It seems that we don’t have a clear sense of age when we’re young other than that somebody is older. So if Johnny in Grease 2 is on the far side of teendom and we are on the near side, then it doesn’t register that he’s twenty-eight. To a kid adults are just adults, there’s no distinction between thirty or forty. And yet of course a twelve year old is very aware of the difference between being eleven or thirteen. At that age we know our own world but not what we’ve yet to experience. It’s the opposite of the rear-view mirror: Ages in the distance are greater than they appear.
“What’s Sushi?”: John Bender in The Breakfast Club.