What Mean Girls taught me about Halloween
Karen: Why are you dressed so scary?
Cady: It’s Halloween!
Mean Girls is one of my favorite movies. There– I said it! Hilariously written and directed, it stars a then-teen ‘It Girl’ Lindsay Ho-Han (pre-public deterioration) and has amazing comedic supporting roles by Rachel McAdams (The Notebook, The Time-Traveler’s Wife), Lacey Chabert (Party of Five), Lizzy Caplan (Freaks and Geeks, True Blood), Amanda Seyfried (Mamma Mia), Neil Flynn (Scrubs), Amy Poehler (Upright Citizens Brigade, SNL) and– the one and only — Tina Fey.
Fey, who also wrote the script, touched on an amazingly accurate unwritten rule of “Girl World” about Halloween: “In the real world, Halloween is a night when children dress up in costumes and beg for candy. In “Girl World”, Halloween is the one night a year when girls can dress like a total slut and no other girls can say anything about it. Unfortunately, no one told me about the slut rule.”
I’ll go ahead and say that in some ends of pop culture, this rule isn’t just for high school. Don’t believe me? Go to any state college campus or Old City this weekend. In honor of Emily G’s Unnecessarily Sexy Halloween Costume Roundup, I’ve decided to share a favorite scene. Enjoy:
Tina Fey’s Husband Talks About Her Scar
I want to be Tina Fey when I grow up. I know this is trendy right now, what with the Sarah Palin thing and all. But I maintain that I called dibs first. I wanted to be Tina Fey back when she was still doing Weekend Update on SNL. Because she was hot enough to prove that boys do make passes at girls who wear glasses.
Part of Fey’s allure is the mystery scar on her chin, which has never been publicly discussed. Until now.
In Maureen Dowd’s recent Vanity Fair interivew with Fey and her husband, Mark Richmond, Richmond had this to say about Fey’s scar:
Liz Lemon favors her right side. That’s because a faint scar runs across Tina Fey’s left cheek, the result of a violent cutting attack by a stranger when Fey was five. Her husband says, “It was in, like, the front yard of her house, and somebody who just came up, and she just thought somebody marked her with a pen.” You can hardly see the scar in person. But I agree with Richmond that it makes Fey more lovely, like a hint of Marlene Dietrich noir glamour in a Preston Sturges heroine.
“That scar was fascinating to me,” Richmond recalls. “This is somebody who, no matter what it was, has gone through something. And I think it really informs the way she thinks about her life. When you have that kind of thing happen to you, that makes you scared of certain things, that makes you frightened of different things, your comedy comes out in a different kind of way, and it also makes you feel for people.”
Okay, so we aren’t dealing with tell-all memoir material here, but, still, mystery solved. Turns out, she’s still pretty hot.