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Hong Kong constitutes my earliest memory. When I was one, my father’s career with the Bank of America took him from Manila to the former British colony, where we lived in a building perched on a mountain that overlooked the ocean. Repulse Bay Beach was our playground. I can still see the tide rushing towards me, the crest carved in the form of foaming clouds fallen to the earth. I am lying stomach down on the shore, and a feeling I have not known before that is part excitement, part fear overwhelms me. Nothing can harm me, I think, because Daddy and Mommy are near. Yet the wall of water surging forth compounds my smallness in relation to nature.

Water was ever present in the formation of my mind. Over 40 years later, it floods me with memories that place and time rather than sequence link. I now sit on a bench onboard a yacht, my feet barely touching the floor, as my family joins the Normans in prayer for a storm that has stranded us out at sea to subside. Now my father, with a tone of factuality to his voice as if he were teaching me to count, points to cars in the basement garage that a hurricane turned over the night before. A tidal wave on TV mounts to the syncopated trumpets of “Hawaii Five-O.” My mother yanks me by the arm from a toilet. She laughs, not at my slipping into a commode, but at the two of us drenched in rain as we run downhill to a noodle stand.

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Since memory starts at three, these remembrances encompass only one year. The memories that I have amassed ever since have added to the mélange to create me into the person I am today. Months intertwine – years, events, and people, too. They are the solar plexus of my consciousness. It would be impossible to subsist on a single memory, blithe as it is, yet that is the challenge “After Life” (1998) presents.

Director Hirokazu Kore-eda has a peculiar vision of what awaits us when we die. He doesn’t believe in hell, only in heaven. To get there, we must pass through purgatory – a snow laden landscape where stands a sole edifice that houses the departed. Gray and block-like, it has the stodginess of a bureaucratic office. No harps and angel choirs here. Counselors conduct the business of assisting its residents journey forward to eternity with one happy memory. One. The episodes of an individual’s life are stored on reels of film for him or her to view, and within a week the person must decide. An aged woman (Hisako Hara) chooses a plane ride with an infinite view of cherry blossoms. The gaiety of Disneyland’s Matterhorn obsesses a 12-year-old girl (Sayaka Yoshino). And for one man (Kotaro Shiga), happiness never existed. The counselors are faced with the task of inspiring all to search deep in their hearts for a memory redolent with a bliss deeper than the superficiality of one gained in an amusement park as well as to understand that life, no matter how deprived, possesses spurts of richness.

For all their expertise, the counselors are themselves the dead who cannot decide on their own singular memory. Takashi (Arata Iura) is a man in his twenties. Shiori (Erica Oda) is an 18-year-old girl. Like those to whom they offer guidance, Takashi and Shiori remain the ages that they were when they died. A new arrival is of special interest to Takashi. She is an elderly woman by the name of Kyoko (Kyoko Kagawa), who chooses as her cherished moment a farewell to her fiancé before he goes off to fight in the Pacific War. She is young and she smiles with hope beside him on a park bench. The sky is clear. Trees are alive with the singing of birds.

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With every decision comes a sacrifice. Somebody is bound to get hurt. In this case, it’s Shiori. We know by the way she looks at Takashi that her feelings for him are more than platonic. Hers is a look not merely of wistfulness, but of anguish for the knowledge that, once Takashi singles out his memory so that he could enter the portal in the sky, it will be for him as though she had never been born.

It seems that oblivion is the fate of myriad splendors that enrich each passing day from birth to death. Certainly, we have memories we would like to expurgate because the events that produced them were unpleasant. “After Life” provides us with this possibility. Then again, we need to wonder if this is a wise move. We might as well will to change our history. I could wish that I had been looking where I was running that day in the school playground when I slammed into another boy and had my front teeth knocked out or that my brother hadn’t bullied me or that, to avoid what could have been a ship wreck, my family had not moved to Hong Kong. Grant me this wish, then I would never have experienced the gentleness with which a dentist held my hand or the sincerity of my brother’s apology (http://www.rafsy.com/films-1960s-1990s/love-story-love-means/), and I would not have the image I will hold dear to the end of my mother, in Capri pants and slippers, running in the rain with the joy of the provincial girl she once was.

How to select one memory to live forever? Takashi’s advice to Shiori is that in our search for happiness, we forget that knowing we were a part of somebody else’s happiness is also a blessing. That doesn’t make it any easier. What a tragedy it would be that in heaven I would not recognize many of my loved ones because I had chosen not to remember them.

Death is complicated. I’d rather choose life.

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Faster than a speeding bullet. More powerful than a locomotive. Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s… Doc Brown’s time traveling, flux capacitor-powered DeLorean!

30 years later, that genius of a car still stupefies me. It’s the most awesome invention that ever was. Or should I proclaim instead that never was? Hard to say. The thing is a movie invention, and we all realize how significantly more ingenious imaginary machines are than anything real that comes out of a Chrysler assembly line. Now I am not an auto junkie, never have been. I am especially not prone to hyperboles, that “awe…” word in particular. In this case, however, the object of reference deserves the praise of awesome. I would not be exaggerating. Einstein would agree. (No exaggeration here either.)

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When “Back to the Future” (1985) unveiled Doc’s brainchild, it sped off the screen and into pop culture Neverland. The poster image of Michael J. Fox in character as Marty McFly raring for the adventure of his life, car track marks on fire as he counts, panic-stricken, his watch tick away the seconds, is synonymous with the 1980s. Every generation can claim a decade. For me and my peers, the decade of padded shoulders and Pac Man fever is the one and only. I was 18 in 1985, the age of Fox’s character and of his parents when he travels through time to meet their adolescent incarnations. The Thompson Twins topped my list of pop groups. I deified Kelly Lebrock. Benetton populated my closet. I also sang in the privacy of my room to Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, swooned over Audrey Hepburn, and bathed my head in hair products to achieve (unsuccessfully) James Dean’s pompadour. In this, I thought I was an anomaly, until Doc’s car materialized in a void and landed on the streets of 1950s suburbia.

Of all the periods in the history of the world, we wonder why Doc (Christopher Lloyd) would program his invention to journey to a monotonous place in a sedate time. The 1940s had the adventure of war. The 1960s was a string of social upheavals. Go further back to previous centuries, and the selection is immense. Sure, the ten years sandwiched between the introduction of the Volkswagen Beetle and the presidential inauguration of John F. Kennedy boasted glorious movie stars – Grace Kelly, Marlon Brando, Elizabeth Taylor – if that’s what you’re into. Otherwise, it suffered from a surplus of Tupperware. And yet, a moment in America when families were migrating away from urban centers makes sense. Like the pioneers of the west, they were etching on new territory a golden future. Not everybody had it good, though, and two of the unlucky ones are Lorraine Baines (Lea Thompson) and George McFly (Crispin Glover), Marty’s mom and dad.

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Our introduction to Lorraine and George is an ugly picture; they’re losers. Lorraine provides no incentive to start a day. Her face Elizabeth Taylor jowly during the actress’s John Warner phase, she’s a drunk who greets her family with a grimace at the breakfast table. George is the quintessential nerd. His despondent eyes through aviator glasses light up only when he guffaws, and he walks with a slouch as if in apology for treading the earth. Marty also has a mama’s boy of a brother, David (Marc McClure), and a sister, Linda (Mary Jo Sperber), who offers no relief. Picture Miss Piggy, but with glasses and a whininess in place of the glam wardrobe and the attitude. You wonder how a dude like Marty could have been born into this family. So does he.

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Doc Brown is the one person in his life whom Marty is proud of. White hair in disarray lends Doc the appearance of a walking streak of lightning. He regurgitates ideas with the rapidity of a machine gun so that we can’t help falling mute the way a child does with a fairy tale. Everything about this scientist is unreal to Marty, but then not quite. As outlandish as his visions are, Doc aspires to fulfill them. From dawn to dusk, he is confronted with a black board of hieroglyphic computations until… lo and behold… he surpasses the imaginings of H.G. Wells. This time machine is real and it works.

Though the journey Marty embarks on isn’t one he would have chosen, it turns out to be an enlightenment. He witnesses for himself where it all began for his parents and why it went wrong. Lorraine in her youth is beautiful. George is talented. Marty never regarded his parents this way, and seldom ever do we with our own parents. It’s an exhilarating discovery for him that his father should possess the gift of creative writing. The guy pens tales of aliens visiting our planet. Marty asks to read them. George is embarrassed. “Oh, no, no, no,” he says. “I never… uh… never let anybody read my stories.” Marty asks why not. “Well, what if they didn’t like them? What if they told me I was no good? I guess that would be pretty hard for somebody to understand.” Here lies the crux of the problem: dad is insecure.

Like arson in liquid, George’s insecurity so contaminates his blood that the local bully, Biff Tannen (Thomas F. Wilson), remains his nemesis into the future. As high school kids, Biff torments George into doing the former’s homework. As married men with kids, Biff torments George into paying for car damages Biff incurs. George acquiesces with a snort and a goofy smile. It is Marty’s mission to change his father into a strong man. More than having a parent to be proud of is at stake. This is a matter of life and death. You see, Marty’s appearance in the past thwarts the event of his parents’ meeting. Instead of George whom Lorraine nurses to health after her father drives into him on the street, it is Marty. No meeting between Lorraine and George equals no marriage. No marriage equals no birth of the McFly progenies.

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Of course, Marty is too lovable of a character to be eliminated, and “Back to the Future” is too fun of a movie not to have a sequel (or two). We are also rooting for George. He speaks for all of us. We want him to have the break that he deserves as much as we want one for ourselves whenever life deals us a bad blow. No better moment for this fighter in embryo to shine… with Marty’s encouragement… than at the prom, the singular event that caps every teen’s existence. In the school parking lot, he catches Biff forcing himself on Lorraine. One punch on that asshole’s nose, and Lorraine sees in George a winner.

Back in the future, George is a best-selling sci-fi author; Lorraine is sober; David and Linda have their rest and recreation at a country club instead of at Burger King; and Biff kowtows to George. This is too drastic of a turn around, we might say. So what? At this point, the film is no longer about parents, but about us… about you.

Every decision you make today will have a repercussion on tomorrow. You can either be George McFly, the winner or George McFly, the loser. Certain decisions will be more difficult to make than others. Don’t fret. You’ll always have somebody to help you. The unlikely ally can even be your own son. And under any circumstance, never forget the life lessons of “Back to the Future”:

1. Punch the forces of oppression that prevent you from pursuing your potential.
2. Fight for love.
3. Trust in the supremacy of your talent.
4. Forgive your parents. They’re human like the rest of us.

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Everybody knows the tale of “Romeo and Juliet” (1968). Even if you have never read a word of William Shakespeare, and even if you have but find his prose too archaic to comprehend (that would be most of us), you know it. The shared grief of a boy and a girl, who sacrifice their lives on the altar of love, set the standard for every romantic tragedy to follow. What is curious about the movie adaptation of literature created four centuries earlier is that it would be made and be a box office success in the decade of the 20^th century that experienced the apex of rebellion against the past. History attests that no ten years revolutionized our advancement as citizens of the world more than those of 1960-1969. A minister’s dream of human equality upended a long-standing tradition of racial segregation. Women were no longer divided between the titles of Miss and Mrs., but united as Ms. Gays and lesbians broke through closet doors and into the light of freedom. Indeed, times were a changin’ with such velocity that men grew their hair, joined hands with those they once held subordinate, and sang in harmony against the destruction in Vietnam. Make love, not war was the motto of this era. Every man was a Romeo. Every woman was a Juliet.

“Romeo and Juliet” is loyal to cinema’s mission in that it is a mirror of the cultural and social milieu in which it was made. As unforgettable as the ultimate pact of union is that forever links Romeo (Leonard Whiting) to Juliet (Olivia Hussey), life more than death suffuses the movie. It’s gorgeous to watch. Costumes the colors of Jupiter against a Renaissance backdrop evoke the murals of Michelangelo. Juliet and her Romeo are as dewy as the moon under which they seal their devotion. Energy thrives in every scene. Dueling swords aside, we can’t believe these young Capulet and Montague rogues truly want to off each other. Both sides are at it more like rugby players fighting over a foul than like warriors. And the balcony courtship – all sighs and kisses and hugs – burns with the fire of two people hungry to be one.

But the most mesmerizing moment is the dance where Romeo and Juliet first lock eyes. This isn’t a meeting. This is a collision. We could almost visualize two chariots racing towards one another, the horses maneuvering them at full throttle. Destiny has no brakes. Neither does disaster. Who cares? It feels good to be flying against the wind, unstoppable and free.

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In this scene, Romeo sneaks into a Capulet gala. He masks his face to conceal his identity, though he fails to conceal his handsomeness. His figure is lithe. His eyes are visible. They gleam with such admiration that Juliet is beguiled. For the pair, the world stops. The only person in motion is the other. They circle the room in a merry-go-round of seduction, catching glances over people’s shoulders, through the space in a crowd. She is coy and courageous. He is determined and daring. When at last Romeo, from behind a post, grabs Juliet’s hand, we know that in this single touch, they have discovered the purpose of their existence. Time melts into Juliet. She can only stand frozen, throw her head back, and shut her eyes in awe as the past and the future converge in this one sensation. Romeo reveals his face, smiling and smitten. She studies his beauty as though she had just unearthed a holy relic.

Director Franco Zeffirelli hit the jackpot with Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey. Whiting is just 17 in the film. Hussey is 16. They speak Shakespeare with the fluidity that we text messages. Perhaps this kind of language is inherent in the Brits. Regardless of how old the tale of “Romeo and Juliet,” Whiting and Hussey bring it to life with a youthful freshness.

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We are inclined, as a result, to believe that “Romeo and Juliet” is about the young and for the young. Not so. Let me tell you the true story of a Kentucky boy on the dawning of the Depression who dreamed of movies and movie stars. In 1928, Hal Riddle was 11 years old when he fell in love for the first time. The object of his emotional awakening was the lead actress in a film called “Adoration” (1928) – Billie Dove, a diamond-studded Howard Hughes paramour on whom, during the peak of her fame, the public stormed with 50,000 fan letters a week. The boy’s mother was not pleased as he announced his love for Dove when he came home that day. This meant he had played hokey again. He wrote Dove a fan letter, and in return, received an autographed photo. It would have ended right there, but Riddle himself wanted to be a movie star, so when he grew into a young man, he went to Hollywood. “Cinema Paradiso” (1988) could have been based on Hal Riddle. (http://www.rafsy.com/films-1960s-1990s/cinema-paradiso-the-sacrifice-behind-a-dream/)

You might recognize Riddle in the Michael Keaton film “Johnny Dangerously” (1984). He plays a prison warden. He had been working as a character actor for 40 years, but had never achieved the stardom he had yearned for back in Kentucky. “Johnny Dangerously” was his last shot. Alas, it was not meant to be. Calling it quits, Riddle later took up residence at the Motion Picture & Television Fund’s Wasserman Campus in Woodland Hills, a retirement home for the elderly who play a role in Hollywood’s history, whether big or small. He must have expected the rest of his life to consist of nothing more than bridge, golf, and swapping with fellow residents anecdotes about dreams that were never fulfilled. But that would not entirely be the case because it so turned out that Billie Dove was in a facility a mere five-minute walk away from his cottage.

Although Riddle might not have become a star, one dream did come true. The famous actress for whom he held a torch for nearly all his life would love him back. It didn’t matter that Dove was frail and wheelchair bound. As he confided to Entertainment Weekly: “… when I looked at her, I still saw the actress in the photo she’d sent me when I was a kid. I just saw Billie Dove. And I could see the essence of her beauty still.” And radiant she had been: black hair against white skin, curled lashes, and lips the red and succulence of a heart.

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Through age, ailment, and dashed ambition, the Romeo in Riddle had not dwindled. A bystander at the community movie theater who had overheard Riddle gush to a friend about his boyhood crush brought him and Dove together. He was 79. She was 93. He told her everything of his life, including her autographed photo that hung on his wall in every place he called home up to that moment and to the end. When Dove died on New Year’s Eve 1997, a year after she and Riddle had met, Riddle delivered her eulogy. He lived on for several years more, fueled by a passion to tell the world about his two greatest loves: movies and Billie Dove.

This is why we need stories. Stories are our history. We remember Romeo and Juliet not because of their death, but because Shakespeare immortalized them with words and Zeffirelli with images. Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey are thus frozen in adolescence, in the bodies of our most famous couple – both permanent reminders of what is possible in us, whether young or old. We can say the same for Hal Riddle and Billie Dove. That the two were not teens nor are familiar to all is irrelevant. Riddle’s public appearances in the wake of Dove’s passing paid off.

Their love is everlasting on the internet.

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Hollywood has a penchant for envisioning the future as a wasteland of destruction. When the atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima, little did we know that a black cloud would loom over the imagination of every man and woman born thereafter. Fact might not be far from fiction. The Rodney King riot that erupted in Los Angeles in 1992 resulted in cobwebs of smashed glass on building fronts, flames in the night, and fallen supermarket merchandise from toilet paper to ketchup turning aisle floors into a rocky terrain. Soldiers in black helmets patrolled the streets, their batons raised in attack formation. Citizens of every ethnicity tore at each other like beasts in the wilderness. For a week, Los Angeles spun off its axis. “Blade Runner” (1982) predicts this bedlam, only the Los Angeles of “Blade Runner” is set in 2019. The city’s demise started 27 years too soon. With nuclear arms on the rise in regions across the globe from North Korea to Israel, and with terrorists annihilating civilizations, the rest of the world in the second millennium is just as doomed.

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If Armageddon is the only factor that unites humanity, we wonder why the laws that protect us from theft, murder, and civil violations of all sorts that rob us of our right to be. No sense in waiting for a bomb to do to us what we’re able to do to each other. It’s with this cynicism that Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) wears a frown. He’s a Blade Runner, a government assassin whose target is Replicants, the term for androids in this dystopian microcosm. Humans created Replicants. The master engineer is a scientist named Dr. Tyrell (Joe Turkel). Their purpose is to work as slave labor in the construction of colonies on other planets, where our species is to flourish onward once the world ends. Molded after our image, Replicants deviate from us in two respects – the capacity for emotion and longevity. Their life span is four years.

As is the case with the oppressed, the Replicants have mutinied, marking them as criminals to be terminated. Four of them have managed to return to earth to seek more life from their maker. Although not as lethal as the A-bomb, they are lethal even so. In their desire for a prolonged existence, they kill in a process that involves the crushing of the skull and the gauging of the eyes. This because Replicants resent us humans for possessing a brain layered with memories that trigger emotions expressed through the one part of our body that speaks when words fail us.

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Deckard himself is a man of few words, a futuristic version of the frontiersman of yore in the vein of John Wayne and Gary Cooper. Like all silent types on a mission for justice, he faces his greatest challenge in an affair that involves the heart – a Replicant named Rachael (Sean Young). While Deckard has no qualms about killing the others, Rachael is different. She is not part of the band of renegades. She is an experiment implanted with memories and who goes AWOL from Dr. Tyrell. Rachael also happens to be statuesque with lips as red and lush as cherry, luminous skin, and hair the black of black onyx styled in retro-1940s bouffant – a cross between Betty Grable and Wonder Woman. Aside from being drop dead gorgeous, the tricky thing about Rachael is that she doesn’t know she is a Replicant.

“I dreamed music,” Deckard tells Rachael in one pivotal scene. She says, “I didn’t know if I could play. I remember lessons. I don’t know if it’s me or Tyrell’s niece.” Rachael’s doubt notwithstanding, Deckard only sees her. “You play beautifully,” he says. They are sitting at a piano in his place. A moment earlier, she saved him from death by shooting a Replicant who was about to empty his skull sockets. She knows now that she is not human, that her memories could be those of another; Deckard told her the truth of herself. Thus, she is on the lam, has nobody to turn to except Deckard. She asks him if he would hunt her down if she were to disappear north, wherever north may be. He tells her no. He tells her he owes her. As he lies in repose exhausted from a day that could have been his last, he falls asleep then awakes to the gentle tap of the piano keyboard. Here they are, man and woman, side by side, two loners connected in chaos. Deckard brings his face close to hers. She runs, but opens the front door only partially when Deckard slams it shut, pushes her back into the living room, where he demands one thing of her unique among living creatures as proof of the possession of a soul: “Say kiss me.”

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That Rachael falls under Deckard’s spell is no shock. The shock is in Roy (Rutger Hauer), the leader of the Replicant deserters. He is Deckard’s last target. In a fight to the finish, they smash walls, break fingers, and leap building tops. Roy is the victor. As Deckard shrivels against a post in surrender of his fate, the world is drab and wet from a cloudburst. But rather than meeting his own maker – whether his maker be God or science or some omnipotent force that orchestrates the law of evolution – Deckard confronts a distraught foe. Roy sits before Deckard like a sage opening the gate to knowledge, his eyes not murderous but sad, and with Dr. Tyrell having denied him more years, he recites his own obituary: “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the darkness at Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time like tears in rain. Time to die.”

Why, Deckard wonders, why is this most deadly of Replicants allowing him the blessing of what he so direly wants for himself? Perhaps Roy isn’t a monster after all, for although memories may not have been implanted in Roy, the memories he did acquire from the day of his inception were rich enough to stir in him the very human feelings of loss and mourning.

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And so Roy dies, Deckard lives, and Rachael runs north. Our hero stays loyal to his oath. He doesn’t follow Rachael. He goes with her. In this most dichotomous of pairings, we understand as “Blade Runner” comes to an end that Armageddon is not what unites humanity. It is the fight for survival. For all our technological advancements and quest for immortality, the warmth of another’s touch is what sustains us, and the sensation of completeness upon witnessing a light enliven a heart as the person whose eyes we are looking into sees us in return as dear and indispensable.

Love has the power to build pyramids, palaces, and civilizations. Love can compel a king to relinquish the throne and drive a queen to end her heartache with a serpent’s venom. Love is the thread that joins every era through the infinite course of history, from the biblical past to the space age present and beyond into the apocalyptic future.

Love is the miracle that turns an android into a human being.

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“Grease” (1978), the movie, will live forever. It’s been nearly 40 years since it premiered, and “Grease” sing-a-longs across America are as much of an event as Halloween, complete with character look-alike contests and a bag of accoutrements to be brandished at certain scenes. Light wands sway in the dark like candle flames in lament of Danny (John Travolta), stranded at the drive-in, as he bears his heartbreak in song over Sandy (Olivia Newton-John). Blow bubbles are for Frenchy (Didi Conn), bubbly beauty school drop-out that she is, during her visitation from Teen Angel (Frankie Avalon). You’ve got a pair of sunglasses, as well, because “Grease” is a sunny frolic of friendship and love with never a raindrop in the horizon. I’ve experienced the fun at the Castro Theater, the perfect venue given its history. Constructed in 1922, the San Francisco theater has a viewing room that boasts murals of Greek colonnades and a chandelier molded after a colossal lotus. Although “Grease” may not be as old as the Castro Theater, the movie shares its status as a historical landmark.

The magic of “Grease” is that it is not a deep film. Music erupts at the moment an inkling of seriousness threatens the lightness. When a group of girls scorn Rizzo (Stockard Channing) for getting knocked up, she doesn’t cry but sings instead that nobody shall ever witness any tears, and Sandy, in her pureness and innocence, can only express the pain of yearning in melody. In happy moments, of which exists a plethora, a song isn’t enough. These teens need to break out in a dance of high jumps and twirling limbs in the gymnasium, on the football bleachers, atop a car painted with lightning bolts, everywhere, anywhere. Both the cast and the crew must really have been immersed in merriment for the camera to have transmitted all that joy with such palpability. They so acutely capture the frivolity of adolescence that you can overlook the discrepancy in age between the actors and actual high schoolers. More importantly, they did something that spoke to the subconscious of viewers back then and that would continue to do so to that of generations after; they made every single character in “Grease” cool, from nerdy Eugene (Eddie Deezen) to stuffy Principal McGee (Eve Arden).

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Indeed, coolness is the magic ingredient to the film’s immortality. Every teenager deserves the right to be cool, to be included in some group or other. The friends made in high school form the first tribe outside of family. You share the same taste in music, clothes, and books. You talk about sex and disclose your crushes. You approve of each other in a way your parents don’t. Time and maturity will generate a rift, but the bond will never quite be broken because the seed of acceptance planted back then has instilled a sureness of self that will flourish with age. You’re a comic geek, not a jock or a brain or a beauty queen, and that’s okay. You’ll never be alone. The world is full of comic geeks, so much so that a Comic-Con convention is held annually in San Diego. Besides, cliques are as transient as the latest hair trend, and the bravado with which the ordained gods and goddesses of high school strut the corridors is as slippery as grease. Danny can’t shoot a ball into a hoop. Sandy’s all-American boy toy (Lorenzo Lamas) can’t carry a conversation. Rizzo disparages herself when it comes to love. Everybody has got an issue.

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As a result, high school becomes a battle field on which you bear arms against your insecurities, the most prevalent among your peers being body issues that a number of conditions ranging from premature balding to fatness propel. (Mine was acne and a lack in height.) You’re called names. Your locker is vandalized. Nevertheless, you survive, as you should. In retrospect, you realize that puberty was a necessary rite of passage, one that actually had moments of laughter and belonging, and you find that you have emerged a stronger person on account of it. Look at how happy the graduating class of “Grease” ends up. Rizzo’s pregnancy scare is just that – a scare. Kenickie (Jeff Conway) gets to keep his girl without the burden of fatherhood. Sandy blossoms into a fox. Danny takes Sandy for a ride on his fancy set of wheels to the sky. Who knows what our hero and heroine are going to do up there? Probably lose their virginity in a union of heavenly bliss.

Heed to the message of “Grease.” Forget the isolation, fights with your parents, and bullying. Remember instead the mischievous pranks, the bitter sweetness of first love, and friendship. Especially the friendship. The mystery of adolescence happens only once, in all its ecstasy and damnation, which is why “Grease 2” (1982) was a flop.

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