h boy, have I been late on deadlines. Ugh. So I'm back, and I'm tired of the Sandra Cisneros interview. Here's something else instead.

When I was a kid, I read teen magazines the way some people read porn. Even then, I knew wanting pin-ups of Kirk Cameron or Fun Facts on Charlie Sheen was something shameful, and before going nervously to the checkout counter, I slipped my copy of Bop or Tiger Beat in between sophisticated magazines like Newsweek and Time.
This was 1984 or 1985, when teen movies were enjoying a renaissance thanks to such poets of suburban angst as John Hughes and Cameron Crowe. I saw all the movies and when the young male stars showed up in Teen Beat the next week with Alyssa Milano on their arm, I studied them the way some people study baseball stats. Jason Bateman: brother of Justine. Charlie Sheen: Friends call him Chas. Corey Haim: Loves sushi. Corey Feldman: Weird Michael Jackson thing going on. For a year, my heart belonged to River Phoenix - restless nomad, uncompromising artiste, vegetarian - but I was whisked away the first time I saw Johnny Depp as undercover agent Tommy Hanson in the seminal FOX series 21 Jump Street.
Jesus, I could go on like this for days.
Okay, so one of these guys - these pin-up playboys for the preteen set - was named Ilan Mitchell-Smith. He was in Weird Science with Anthony Michael-Hall, and connoisseurs knew he played a martial arts-obsessed baddie in The Wild Life, the flop of a follow-up to Fast Times at Ridgemont High. I even saw him in Keith Gordon's artful and underappreciated film The Chocolate War, an adaptation of the young adult classic by Robert Cormier about the evils of conformity at a private boys school. And it wasn't so long ago that I found myself watching cable, a scene from The Wild Life in which our shirtless rebel shows off with a pair of numchucks, and pondering that cliché of a question: Where is he now?
Only I didn't expect an answer.
As it turns out, Ilan Mitchell-Smith is a PhD student at Texas A&M University, writing his dissertation on Chivalry. He is a husband and a father. I found this out because Alamo Drafthouse owner Tim League - the bad, the brilliant, the only - commissioned Ilan to come to Austin for a screening of Weird Science. And I quickly commissioned myself to interview him for the paper. You can read the article that resulted here. But tomorrow I want to tell you about a good interview I had. With Ilan Mitchell-Smith of Tiger Beat fame.