Brooks: Don’t you forget about the 40th anniversary of ‘The Breakfast Club’

A princess, a brain, a basket case, an athlete and a criminal walked into Shermer High School one Saturday and changed the way an entire generation felt about detention.

The date was March 24. The movie was “The Breakfast Club.” The 40th anniversary party starts Monday in Minnetonka.

“If you’re a Gen Xer, ‘The Breakfast Club,’ John Hughes, the angst of those five teenagers – that was a big deal,” said Kelly Jo McDonnell, co-host, with Jason “Bamba” Anderson, of “Latchkey Logic,” a Minnesota-based podcast dedicated to celebrating Generation X in all its acid-washed glory.

Technically, Monday is the 41st anniversary of detention day, which, according to the film itself, happened on March 24, 1984. But the movie debuted in 1985 so that’s close enough for Gen X.

This is a generation that grew up on car rides where your seatbelt might be a seatbelt, or it might just be your dad’s arm shooting out to stop you from slamming teeth-first into the dashboard. Hey, the world’s an imperfect place. Screws fall out all the time.

Anderson and McDonnell will record live a very special “Breakfast Club” edition of their podcast at 5 p.m. Monday at BLVD Kitchen & Bar in Minnetonka. A $5 cover charge gets you snacks, prizes, Gen X trivia and the unwelcome news that 1985 was 40 years ago.

“I mean, 40 years?” McDonnell said, dissolving into laughter with Anderson.

Grim news for Gen X. One minute, we’re dancing in the library, throwing lunch meat at statues; the next we’re older and even less cool than vice principal/detention monitor Richard “Dick” Vernon. A man who once walked out of the library with a toilet seat cover sticking out of his trousers.

Is “The Breakfast Club” a perfect movie? Absolutely not. But it is a perfect excuse to swap jokes and stories that strike deep in the nostalgia centers of the brains of 65 million Americans born between 1965 and 1980. And that’s why McDonnell and Anderson started their podcast in the first place.

This is not an angsty podcast. This is a couple of friends, laughing into a microphone about going to school with a latchkey tied around their necks on a shoestring – while somewhere out there, their audience yells, “Me too!”

“It’s like Kelly and I are sitting at a bar and we’re having a conversation,” Anderson said. “Pretty much everybody that has reached out has said ‘I’m screaming at the radio, ‘Oh my god, that was me!’ To be able to make that connection over an airway on a recorded podcast is pretty special.”

In the year since they launched “Latchkey Logic,” their episode topics have ranged from malls to mullets to the signature scents of Gen X (a heady mix of Drakkar and Love’s Baby Soft.) They’ve talked summer jobs and roller rinks and Pong. They’ve reminisced about the state tournaments of yore and whether “Die Hard” is a Christmas movie (yes).

Sometimes their listeners send in topics. Sometimes they start with one topic and end somewhere else completely.

“We’re never going to run out of ideas, let’s be honest,” McDonnell said. “It’s just been a ball.”

When McDonnell pitched the idea of live-recording a podcast, they had their choice of iconic ’80s dates — including June 5, the day Ferris Bueller (probably) took a day off 40 years ago. They landed in detention instead.

So slap a sandwich together out of Cap’n Crunch and Pixy Stix and head to BLVD in Minnetonka at 5 p.m. on Monday if you want to celebrate The Breakfast Club. Or don’t. Whatever.