Lloyd Dobler goes to Washington (D.C.)

wherein I discuss John Cusack's tweets.

I've made no secret in this blog of the fact that I am a John Cusack fan. I think most women my age (not yet 40) have at one time or another had a thing for Lloyd Dobler. Sweet, slightly awkward at moments, just wanting to spend time with the woman he loves, always going to be there when so much else is going wrong in your life, kickboxing, yummy Lloyd Dobler.  I remember seeing some article recently where John Cusack stated he was trying to move away from those early roles, maybe even regretted them (not sure if I’m remembering the thing correctly or not). No, please, say anything but that!

Several years ago I was in Chicago for a week of training seminars. Fun stuff, really. Each day after the “lecture” a group of us would head off down Michigan Ave. One of the women was even more of a John Cusack fan than I was at the time. She would literally walk up to cars (the traffic was usually barely moving) and look in the windows to see if he was in the car. I promise I wasn’t doing it also. The two guys who were usually with us were completely embarrassed, and even I was trying to get her to stop. I’ve since wondered what I would actually have done if the slightly-crazier-than-me lady had discovered John Cusack in a car.

Most likely it would have went something like this:

“Um, uh, oh, I swear I tried to stop her. But since you’re here, it’s nice to meet you?”

I’ve walked up to the actor who played Q in L.A. to ask for an autograph for a star struck friend, and I have no problem getting guys’ numbers in bars for friends, but for myself? No way.

Anyway, as a fan of John Cusack, I of course followed him on the new household Twitter account. Turns out he’s incredibly political, if his tweets are anything to go by, overwhelmingly so at times.  My feed became full of political messages and arguments with others (though I finally decided to look at some of their pages and they weren’t people I’d want to spend much time with) about politics. Some messages I couldn’t even understand. Granted, I set up the twitter account right around election time. I figured that once the election had passed other topics would start showing up in my feed. One finally did, and it was about:

sports.

The thing is that our politics basically agree. I just tend to like humor in my politics. I wanted to see some evidence of a personality. This is the actor who did movies as disparate as Say Anything, High Fidelity, Max, Raven, Grosse Pointe Blank, and Better off Dead. Maybe the problem is that I wanted to see a certain personality. Maybe I’m expecting too much from 140 characters.

What does it really mean to be a fan? We create blogs based on their work (me). We tweet Taylor Swift song quotes (not me). Once we pay attention to the director credits we realize that the Criminal Minds episodes directed by Matthew Gray Gubler are the episodes which blow our minds (me). We ask them to marry us over twitter (so NOT me, though I retweeted it cuz I thought it was funny). We make sure to watch Castle (me). We hang out at the hotel they're staying at (not me). We end up watching E! News after Chelsea Lately, getting dragged into the story of RPatt and KStew's relationship (me, and I've never even seen a Twilight film). We start to feel as if we are involved in their lives. But the characters they play are ephemeral. They're a mirage. They live only on the screen, both small and large. The actor who played Q notwithstanding, and no matter how many car windows we look into on trips to Chicago, the odds are that we will never meet them.

Lloyd Dobler doesn't actually exist.

(Evidently neither does the line in the Martian Child where Mr. Cusack tells the girl not to take away his Social Security benefits when she becomes president. I swear that line was there in the theater but now isn't on my DVD version. It was my favorite line too).

Mr. Cusack is right. It is his twitter feed, to do with as he wishes, though he worded it differently.  And change never came about through people who wouldn’t listen because they wanted more humor or personality. If Martin Luther King, Jr. and feminists had been quiet some of us wouldn’t have had the right to vote when we did. I’ve driven the voting rights march route between Selma and Montgomery, and that was no walk in the park. Change needs politically loud and passionate people.

So I had pretty much resigned myself to getting political commentary from Mr. Cusack, among others, and my humor from the comedians I follow. Then Thanksgiving weekend arrived, and there was a funny quote from his sister Joan, and some music clips (though I think he may have meant he digs the band, not did them). I admit that I gave a little sigh of relief.

Then yesterday, while I was trying to work out what I wanted to say in this post, Mr. Cusack tweeted another political tweet. And then he quoted Shakespeare.

Cool.

(Disclaimers: all tweets in this post are the intellectual property of John Cusack. Check out the Jane Automatically post to see why John Cusack has something to do with Jane Austen. And to Jennifer Crusie, who included a scene in Bet Me in which the women describe a test to see if a man should be dated twice based on his reaction to Lloyd Dobler steering Diane around the broken glass and one of the male characters in the book get extra points because he notices that she's wearing open toed shoes: she's not wearing open toed shoes in that scene. I watched the movie a couple more times just to make sure.)