Molly Ringwald Thanks Airline, Pilots for Saving Father With Emergency Landing

Molly Ringwald posted a rare tweet praising Southwest Airlines on Thursday after she says they made an emergency landing to save her father’s life.

Ringwald, one of the most iconic actresses of the 1980s, didn’t elaborate on her father’s condition. However, she thanked the airline as well as the doctor who was flying alongside her father for attending to whatever ailment he suffered from.

“We all love to publicly vent against airlines,” she tweeted. “But today I would like to thank Southwest Airlines and the doctor who happened to be onboard. They emergency landed the plane for my dad. Because of their speed and professionalism, my father’s life was saved.”

Ringwald’s father, Robert Scott Ringwald, is a jazz pianist. He and Adele Edith, a chef, raised Ringwald and her two siblings in Roseville, California, just outside of Sacramento. As a child, Molly Ringwald recorded an album of Dixieland jazz with her father and his group, the Fulton Street Jazz Band, called I Wanna Be Loved By You.

That love of jazz music persisted, as Ringwald released another record in early 2013. Except Sometimes includes a cover of “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” by Simple Minds, the song that became the iconic theme of The Breakfast Club.

“I grew up in a home filled with music and had an early appreciation of jazz since my dad was a jazz musician,” Ringwald said in a statement shortly after the album’s release. “Beginning at around age three I started singing with his band and jazz music has continued to be one of my three passions along with acting and writing. I like to say jazz music is my musical equivalent of comfort food. It’s always where I go back to when I want to feel grounded.”

The cover song is not the only way Ringwald has been revisiting her previous work. Earlier this month, she wrote an essay about The Breakfast Club and how it has aged, especially in the context of the #MeToo Movement, of which she was a part.

“It’s hard for me to understand how [director] John Hughes was able to write with so much sensitivity, and also have such a glaring blind spot,” she wrote. The essay was published by The New Yorker.

“I thought about it again this past fall, after a number of women came forward with sexual-assault accusations against the producer Harvey Weinstein, and the #MeToo movement gathered steam,” Ringwald continued. “If attitudes toward female subjugation are systemic, and I believe that they are, it stands to reason that the art we consume and sanction plays some part in reinforcing those same attitudes.”