In the 80s my mom got Breakfast Club on VHS at the video store, probably more than once. I definitely watched it more than once. With a pen and paper in hand I paused the VCR and rewound it until I had this scene down. In a short while I had it memorized.
To this day you might find me reciting it, once in a while, here or there, when I’m reminded of it, talking to myself, soliloquizing, rolling around the U-district, or grinding up the hill to get home…
Stupid
Worthless
No good
Goddamn
Freeloading
Son of bitch
Retarded
Big mouth
Know it all
Asshole
Jerk
you forgot
Ugly
Lazy and
Disrespectful…
As a kid my grandma would sometimes bust out a poem she memorized in school. A poem she still had stored in her brain, word for word, 50 or 60 years later. She could recite Rudyard Kipling’s
If–
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
It’s a 4 stanza 32 line poem, and I know she had that first stanza down word for word.
I don’t have any classic poems memorized but I have John Bender’s dad scene memorized. Word for word.