Ignore all the fresh horrors of reality … two School of Rock co-stars just got married!

4 hours ago 1

The world is a dark and dismal place at the moment. Every day we’re greeted by fresh horrors from every quarter. Political cravenness. Environmental collapse. Sign after sign that we as a species have permanently blown the only chance we were ever given, and now we’re on a downward spiral to the end. Never before have we so needed something – anything – to lift our spirits and remind us that, despite it all, there might still be some good in the world.

So thank God for the two kids from School of Rock who just got married.

On Saturday, Caitlin Hale and Angelo Massagli, who played Marta and Frankie in the 2003 Jack Black film, tied the knot in New York. They are now in their early 30s, but they met on the set of School of Rock as children and they fell in love and now they are married.

Do you know how good it feels to hear that? Just off the top of your head, you can think of a million different ways that a headline beginning with “Two of the kids from School of Rock … ” could have ended. Maybe they spent the last two decades addicted to drugs. Maybe they fell in with a group of shadowy Hollywood predators and ended up hollowed out and broken. Maybe they eloped to south-east Asia and got married at the age of 12 with disastrous consequences. Maybe one of them died. There are countless horrible variations on the theme of how this could have gone, because we’ve spent our entire lives watching one child star after another struggle to adapt to adulthood, due to a combination of the corrosive power of fame or a dereliction of duty by their caregivers.

Caitlin Hale, between Maryam Hassan and Jack Black, in School of Rock, 2003.
Caitlin Hale, between Maryam Hassan and Jack Black, in School of Rock, 2003. Photograph: Everett Collection Inc/Alamy

And yet Hale and Massagli have managed to avoid all of this. They fell in love and got married, and they invited a bunch of the School of Rock cast to the wedding, and it looked wonderful. It’s as simple and pure as that.

But why are we hearing about it, you ask? Is there a chance that the pair of them decided to leverage what should have been a happy day to boost their optics in a desperate attempt to revive their flagging movie careers? Not that either, because it appears that both Hale and Massagli have managed to escape the film industry intact. Hale is now a sonographer and Massagli has paved a career in law. So this isn’t just a story about two former child stars who found happiness together. It’s about two former child stars who have achieved the impossible by moving on from the cruel expectations of fame intact, and then found happiness together.

What’s so lovely about this story is that Hale and Massagli haven’t spent the last 20 years dotingly in love with each other. According to the New York Times they fell out of touch after production on School of Rock ended, they each moved on with their lives, attending universities in Arizona and Massachusetts. But when they decided to pursue further studies, they found themselves studying in Florida together and reconnected. They were friends at first, according to Massalgi, but: “Even though it wasn’t romantic, that familiarity we had and our families had when we were younger, really cut through some of those early relationship hurdles.”

And now they’re married. Apparently during their reception the couple and their former castmates danced to Edge of Seventeen by Stevie Nicks, recreating the School of Rock scene where Jack Black gets Joan Cusack drunk. It sounds, by all accounts, absolutely beautiful.

skip past newsletter promotion

In fact, the only thing that could possibly ruin what is almost certainly going to be the happiest news story of the decade, is a television studio hunting the pair down and paying them to leverage this newfound fame into some sort of exploitative and vaguely nostalgic reality show. Please, let’s not allow that to happen. Maybe let’s just let the kids be happy for once.

Read Entire Article
International | Politik|