![]() ![]() Mean Girls made me feel seen and my insecurities understood. I get chills with the honeyed way Regina asks the newest Plastic, “Cady, will you please tell Aaron his hair looks sexy pushed back?” and in her equally evil but cool, “Because that vest was disgusting!” The humor sounds like music to me. When I watch Mean Girls now, it’s like revisiting an old album I’ve worn to death, scratches be damned. (“You know, it’s not really required of you to make a speech,” Tim Meadows’s Principal Duvall interjects during Cady’s sentimental spring fling address.) I liked the cadence of the jokes in Mean Girls: the surprising lyricism of the phrase “heavy flow and a wide-set vagina” the way, as Karen Smith yearns to mack on her cousin, “Seth Mosakowski” rolls off her tongue the uniquely high school catchiness of the words “the projection room above the auditorium.” It has a unique tempo, marked by a tender heart interwoven with gentle digs at the genre. (Hm.) As Nora and I shrieked with laughter in my basement, I knew I’d fallen in love with Mean Girls and perhaps with Lohan, too. That episode-May 1, 2004-was best known for the inaugural “Debbie Downer” sketch, though I best recall the one where Lohan plays Hermione Granger with gigantic boobs. We walked back to my house, cackling and quoting the Plastics, and then we immediately watched Lindsay Lohan host Saturday Night Live. My friend Nora and I went to the Biograph on Lincoln Avenue, back when the Biograph still screened movies. I saw Mean Girls in a packed movie theater. Pontificating from the pulpit, I was the very closeted poster girl for Jesuit education. ![]() Behind the altar, big, bright, exposed light bulbs dotted the apse as if it were a vanity, making the parishioners Judy Garland prepping for our close-up and Jesus our sleazeball manager, alternately feeding us speed and sleeping pills. Our school’s church was so ugly, we called it Catholic Disneyland: life-size statues of the Saints peered down at parishioners, their robes painted vibrant blues and pastel pinks, their complexions distinctly European. I talked about “getting to know my true self and getting to know God,” and being “fortunate enough to be called to lead Kairos,” and “praying and reflecting on my service work.” The head of the Department of Formation and Ministry-we called it FAM (and, I regret to report, we called its regular participants the FAM fam)-asked me to give a speech reflecting on my time in high school in the context of my faith. I’d just completed four years at a Jesuit high school. This exact moment was the peak of my personal Catholic faith it would all cascade downhill from here. I was giving a speech at our Baccalaureate Mass, a senior class service on the eve of our high school graduation. It was a just niche enough pop culture reference. And even then, in May of my senior year of high school, the movie had years to go before it became a classic, and before “ Mean Girls day” jokes each October 3rd would strip the film of any cool factor. Tina Fey’s high school comedy had come out four years earlier, at the end of eighth grade. “Going into freshman year, I half expected high school to be like Mean Girls,” I told a church full of my classmates and their families. ![]()
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