I Love My Dead Gay Son

I don't smoke. Although everyone in my family and most of my friends are smokers, my lifetime cigarette consumption is maybe a single pack. And those barely count because I was either piss ass drunk or breaking up with someone while I was smoking them.

There are a ton of reasons to be glad that I never started smoking. Obvious cancer issues. Cigarettes are expensive. I have asthma and if I'm going to exacerbate it by smoking anything, it had better be weed. So yeah, mostly it's a good thing that I don't smoke.

There are, however, two situations (barring the aforementioned piss ass drunk and breakups, that is) that cause me to wish I did smoke:

-- To have something to do with my hands, and...

-- When I watch Heathers.

For anyone who a) didn't grow up in the 80s, b) isn't a female, and/or c) doesn't think being mean is awesome, Heathers was a movie about mean girls. This wasn't the post-2000, Lindsay Lohan-style mean girl, either, the Heathers were mean fucking girls. See, back in the bad old 80s, everyone had big hair, ostentatious outfits, and knew adolescence was all about making other people feel shitty about themselves. There were no self-esteem workshops. There was no Adderall. No, there was being an asshole and doing blow, and this is why Heathers is great.

Not only are the Heathers a clique of bitches named Heather (except for Winona Ryder, who is only slightly less loveable than she was in Beetlejuice), they torture one another with violent croquet games and call one of their overweight classmates "Dumptruck." Yeah. Bitches.

So Winona Ryder's character, the only non-Heather in the group, gets pissed and starts offing her friends with the help of Christian Slater back when he was young and hot. The actual circumstances are a bit more complicated, but basically the Heathers get what's coming to them and Christian Slater goes crazy and, in a creepy pre-Columbine trenchcoat situation, tries to kill Winona and blow up the school during a pep rally.

Which Winona Ryder survives, but not before sticking an unlit cigarette in her mouth and standing at the exact perfect distance from the explosion so that the cigarette gets lit and she coolly smokes it down, knowing that Christian Slater is dead and the Heathers won't bother her anymore.

GOD. If I could guarantee that every cigarette I smoked from here on out would be lit in such a fashion, I'd have a voicebox by the time I hit 40.

Until then, I'll have to settle for Heathers being remade for Broadway. I love this just like I love my dead gay son. If I had one.