favorite TV shows, music, and movies have on our society and psyches. She investigates why pop culture matters deeply, from The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Seinfeld, to Sex and the City and Mean Girls, to Beyoncé, Taylor, and Barbie. She has written eight books, including the New York Times bestseller Seinfeldia, When Women Invented Television, Sex and the City and Us, and So Fetch: The Making of Mean Girls (And Why We're Still So Obsessed with It).
Armstrong applied the “Page 99 Test” to So Fetch and reported the following:
Page 99 of So Fetch talks about all of the young Canadians who played the high schoolers surrounding the main characters in Mean Girls. The film was shot in Toronto, so most of the ancillary roles went to locals. Many of them knew each other, both from growing up together and from seeing each other on auditions, which gave them a real high school energy. To me, it’s perfect that this is my page 99. The Canadians are among my favorite parts of the book. I’m always drawn to the people on the outskirts of productions, the less-appreciated ones who make the whole thing work. Particularly in Mean Girls, these ancillary roles were critical because Tina Fey’s script was bursting with one-liners to the point where almost everyone got at least one memorable moment or line. Even more interestingly in the case of Mean Girls, many of these Canadians would become lastingly famous for their one-liners because the movie, which came out in 2004 at the beginning of the social media era, was a foundational text for the memes and GIFs that would define Web 2.0 and Millennial culture. There was Stefanie Drummond as Bethany Byrd, innocently explaining that she used super-jumbo tampons because, she said, “I can’t help it if I’ve got a heavy flow and a wide-set vagina.” There was Jonathan Malen calling his mom on his cell phone during a school-wide meltdown and crying, “Mom, can you come pick me up? I’m scared.”Visit Jennifer Keishin Armstrong's website.
Hearteningly, the relationships on the set of Mean Girls appear to have been the opposite of the relationships at the center of the film. Fey and director Mark Waters created a supportive and collaborative environment that made most of the young actors feel seen, appreciated, and warm toward each other. Many reported that there was little hierarchy between, say, the high-schoolers in general and the Plastics who were the main characters, played by the then-famous Lindsay Lohan and the future-famous Rachel McAdams, Amanda Seyfried, and Lacey Chabert. They all played catch and indulged in pranks between takes. (Two of the Canadian boys convinced the Plastics that because milk came in bags, or “bladders,” in Canada, they actually drank it through a straw stuck right into the bag, like a giant Capri Sun. They then had to demonstrate this and essentially got drunk on milk.) Waters encouraged each actor to do many, many takes, right in a row, of their major lines, which might be one reason the lines came out so well in the final cut; there were a lot of options to choose from.
Because those lines were so good, and because they ended up fueling endless GIFs and memes in the decades to come, those Canadian actors had to grapple with a very strange kind of fame. In one strange example, internet sleuths identified actor David Reale as the guy who played Glen Coco, the character famous for getting four candy cane grams, even though he had no lines and was not credited in the film. (He’d wandered onto set to say hi to friends that day and ended up pulled into a few scenes, his face barely visible.) But someone online cared enough to compare his profile to that of Reale, a working actor who has appeared in TV series such as Murdoch Mysteries and The Boys. Others found themselves trending under very specific circumstances: Malen’s “Mom, can you pick me up?” line became ubiquitous during one year’s Met Gala as celebrities walked the carpet in their outlandish outfits. Miranda Edwards’ line, “I’m from Michigan,” delivered when a teacher presumes she’s from Africa because she’s Black, has soared during difficult discussions about race relations.
The Canadian high-schoolers’ arc reflects the wider arc of the movie, from its origins with real-life school kids in Rosalind Wiseman’s non-fiction book Queen Bees and Wannabes, to Fey’s adaptation of it, to the high school world it created onscreen that so many Millennials related to that it became a bedrock of internet culture. Mean Girls has continued to catch on with new generations, both as a film and as an online phenomenon. It has since turned into a hit Broadway musical and, now, a movie version of that musical. As such, it shows few signs of slowing down on its way to classic status.
My Book, The Movie: Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted.
The Page 99 Test: Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted.
The Page 99 Test: Seinfeldia.
The Page 99 Test: Sex and the City and Us.
The Page 99 Test: Pop Star Goddesses.
The Page 99 Test: When Women Invented Television.
--Marshal Zeringue
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