Operation Wifebeater (or, as some of us call it, Operation Drag Franklin Down To The Dungeon And Double-Team Him) was such a success that upon our return to Orlando, joreth and emanix decided that an encore was in order.

Well, of the outfits, at least. There’s only so much your humble scribe can take, after all.

In any event, I had the opportunity for a quick photo shoot outside joreth‘s house, which was quite a lot of fun, and went rather well, I think.

Yeah, you all wish you were me, I know you do.

I took quite a number of pictures, which you can click here to view.

Later, we all piled into the car to go hang with a bunch of Orlando poly peeps and watch Weird Science in the park.

This was, as it turned out, the second time in forty-eight hours I watched Weird Science. The three of us had watched it at the hotel after Frolicon (because, really, what else would the three of us do in a hotel suite together miles from home with nothing else making demands on our time?).

Now, I’ve seen Weird Science many times as a kid. The only things I really remembered about it were Kelly LeBrock, geeks, Kelly LeBrock, a party, lightning, a Pershing missile, and Kelly LeBrock. And something about a shower.

The last 26 years have not been kind to that movie. To adult eyes, it’s a total suckfest, made of equal parts of suck, fail, and awful.

A couple weeks back, one of zaiah‘s other partners went on a highly entertaining tear about John Hughes. The man built himself quite a respectable media empire off of a very specific type of teenangst movies; namely, teen-angst movies aimed at privileged white middle-class suburban kids for whom the greatest of all life’s challenges are “my parents don’t let me do whatever I want” and “I’m not popular at school and I can’t get the popular girls to have sex with me.” Compared to, say, being born into a North Korean slave labor camp (which is where I’ve started calibrating my “serious life problems” scale these days), they have it pretty damn good.

The movies, as I said, haven’t aged well. Take, for example, the cringe-inducing scene in Weird Science in which Kelly LeBrock decides to push the main characters outside their comfort zones by taking them to…

…a bar whose patrons are black people. As in, people who have darkly-pigmented skin. Cue the shock and horror of the privileged suburban protagonists encountering the Other for the first time, and hilarity ensues.

Or, err, fails to ensue. I found myself wincing through the entire scene.

The wincing came back at the movie’s climax, where a bunch of mutant biker thugs–perhaps the scariest thing that can possibly exist in John Hughes’ world–come crashing into our hapless protagonist’s party, and they have the moment of realizing their own personal empowerment by calling the bikers “faggots.”

As a side note, though, I must say I do admire the fact that Michael Berryman has created something of a successful career in Hollywood on the back of “I have a weird-shaped head”.

I also didn’t realize that Chet from Weird Science is none other than Bill Paxton, who also played Hudson in Aliens. There is, apparently, a Bill Paxton pinball machine.

But I digress.

The Orlando poly peeps were very cool. I met some awesome folks, with whom we ventured out to a Steak & Shake, on account of emanix never having been exposed to that particular facet of American pop culture before.

On the way back, we drove past a building with some absolutely fantastic graffiti on the wall, and had to stop for an impromptu photo shoot.

There are quite a few more; Click here to see them!

This last one is what happens when I’m using an unfamiliar camera, and I set the shutter to 12 seconds rather than 2 seconds exposure. Wasn’t quite what I was expecting, but kinda turned out neat anyway.