This Is a Lot Bigger Than Any Domestic Problems You May Be Experiencing

It was a warm June afternoon in 1980, and I was sixteen years old when I walked into a movie theater in Tacoma, WA, and saw my very first R-rated film. It wasn’t some gritty drama or raunchy sex comedy. It was The Blues Brothers. And in that moment, somewhere between the blast of "She Caught the Katy" and Jake’s gravity-defying backflip at the Triple Rock Baptist Church, something changed. I didn’t just watch that movie. I felt it. The music, the madness, the swaggering, black-suited absurdity. It was rock and roll, rhythm and blues, slapstick and salvation all rolled into a hundred-mile-an-hour police chase. And it’s never left me.