I was 12 going on 13 the first time I saw a dead body,” begins the voiceover of Stand by Me. Well, I was 13 going on 14 the first time I saw Rob Reiner’s classic coming-of-age movie. Based on Stephen King’s novella The Body, it is the tale of four kids hiking along 30 miles of train track to eyeball a corpse, and the adventures that befall them en route: smoking, cursing and bantering; being chased by a junkyard dog; narrowly outrunning a train on a trestle; emerging from a dip in a forest pond covered with leeches.
I viewed Stand by Me with five friends — we called ourselves the “Big Six” — and it immediately became “our film”. We connected with
