I Coined The Phrase "Grimace Proportions"
How my teenage anti-slang made it into a landmark 1980s comedic film, and entered the American vernacular.
Last night I watched the TCM presentation of Roger Corman’s The Man With The X-ray Eyes (1963), followed by the 1956 Ida Lupino-directed episode of Screen Directors Playhouse, about a deaf woman who unknowingly shelters two killers on the run. Afterwards, flipping randomly through the channels, quietly ruminating on the value of seeing everything and hearing nothing, I came upon a showing of the 1985 comedy National Lampoon’s European Vacation. My rule with this film is that whenever I happen to see it on TV, I have to watch it through the point where the Griswold family arrives in Rome. This is because the section marks my only, albeit uncredited, non-musical co-contribution to cinema history.
In 1984, when I was sixteen, I was in a punk rock band with my high school classmate Quinn Haber. Filled with youthful creativity and a plethora of spare time, Quinn and I would get stoned and make up “teenaged” slang. What may have inspired us was the Frank Zappa song “Valley Girl”, with vocals by Frank’s daughter Moon Unit. The song was very popular around that time. In any case, one of the phrases we came up with was “grimace proportions”, a comic colloquialism for “food”. We laughed and laughed, and added it to the list.
I had a job that summer at Tower Records in Westwood. One afteroon, an exasperated young woman arrived at the checkout counter and told me she needed teenage lingo for a new movie she was producing. This was the same Tower Records where I sold 25 copies of Butthole Surfers’ debut EP to actor Judge Reinhold, and where I shook Luciano Pavarotti’s hand, on the same day.
Poker-faced, I told the young woman some of our made-up, nonsensical, inside-joke fake teenaged slang words. She wrote them down, and with a sigh of relief, thanked me, said she might use some of them, and went into the Southern California golden hour glow. I never saw her again.
Around a year later, I was on vacation with my mom and sisters in the Bay Area. We decided to see a movie. It was National Lampoon’s European Vacation, starring Chevy Chase. We bought tickets and went inside.
The film was genuinely funny. I was sitting in the theater, getting caught up in the increasingly absurd story, laughing, eating popcorn, minding my own business. Then the Griswolds arrived in Rome. Rusty Griswold, played by Jason Lively, approaches a fellow teen, played by Moon Unit Zappa, with awkward romantic intentions. He thinks she’s Italian. Guess what…she’s American! Now that they’ve established this reassuring fact, they can communicate more easily. What would you like to do? she asks. His response: I don’t know, want to scarf some grimace proportions?
My jaw dropped. The theater began to spin. How did it get in the movie? I remembered my encounter at Tower Records. She actually used one of those ridiculous phrases. I was floating.
I now suspect the young filmmaker I met at Tower Records was Amy Heckerling, director not only of European Vacation but teen jargon-heavy Fast Times At Ridgemont High (1982) and, later, Clueless (1995). “Grimace proportions” has since become a minor addition to the American vernacular. Google it sometime. Solid, Jackson.
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That's another movie story right there!
This is amazing, thank you! My brother and I noticed that phrase in the movie and we thought it was genius - we’ve been using it for nearly 40 years now.