Don't you forget about her: Molly Ringwald visits Lorain County Community College, Oct. 24

[Event preview by Charles Cassady, Jr.]

Photo by Collette Lash

Collette Lash

 

Cleveland Movie Blog writer Charles Cassady, as he has confessed before, has a certain ironic association with YA movie goddess Molly Ringwald. Back when he graduated from college (Syracuse University, if you must know) with a relatively valueless degree (Journalism, if you must know), he at least had a monthly column in a NY-based entertainment magazine and a promise that he was going to be flown out to do an interview with Miss Ringwald, then at the height of her John Hughes-collaboration movie career.

Not a bad start for a new graduate setting out on a fresh, exciting career, Cassady thought.

But, right after Cassady arrived back in Cleveland, the ad agency behind the magazine informed him the interview was off. Then it shut down the magazine altogether. It was a harbinger of how Cassady’s subsequent decades would unfold, as a series of heartbreaking personal and professional setbacks.

The good side: after years of intense therapy, Charles does not blame Molly Ringwald personally for his pain and torment. He is convinced she is a nice person and had nothing to do with ruining his life, not really. Molly Ringwald need have no fear of Charles Cassady when she comes to Lorain County Community College’s Stocker Arts Center on Friday, Oct. 24.

Pretty in Pink (August 7th at the Palace Theatre, Playhouse Square)

[PRETTY IN PINK  screens Thursday August 7th at 7:30 pm at the Palace Theatre, Playhouse Square.]

Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.

Actress Molly Ringwald and myself have a fateful tie. I don't believe you young, millennial attention-deficit/autistic kids reading the internet right now appreciate just how big an icon Molly Ringwald was in the 1980s. She made the covers of Time and Rolling Stone, acted in a series of teen-movies-with-heart scripted by John Hughes.

But here's the Charles Cassady connection. When I graduated from college during the darkest Reagan years, I had my first entertainment column - granted, only a monthly - with a magazine published for cinemas by a small New York ad agency.