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2024-05-21 | WebClipping | 2024-05-21 | https://www.washingtonian.com/2024/05/13/the-local-girls-who-inspired-the-hollywood-classic-mean-girls/ | true |
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The Local Girls Who Inspired the Hollywood Classic “Mean Girls”
For decades, Jessica Jackson had a secret: Her high-school social life was an inspiration for the hit film “Mean Girls.”
Back in December, at a wine-drenched Christmas party for a moms group in suburban Maryland, Jessica Jackson got vulnerable. It was deep in the night, and the women were discussing their difficulties—toddlers, divorces—when someone quoted a line from Mean Girls. It shook loose a secret. “Do you want to hear something that sounds like a lie but it’s really true?” Jackson told the room. “I’m the real Regina George.”As proof, she pulled up an article on her phone, a 2002 New York Times Magazine cover story entitled “Girls Just Want to Be Mean.” At that time, Jackson was a 16-year-old junior at Northwest High School in Germantown. She loved Dawson’s Creek and Britney Spears, and when she spoke to the reporter for the story, she thought it was about some volunteer work she’d been doing with an organization that sought to build better relationships between girls. But in the course of their interviews, Jackson said some bonkers things about her social world, which wound up quite prominently in the Times.
An article about teens and “relational aggression” led Tina Fey to buy the rights to Rosalind Wiseman’s book.
At the Christmas party, Jackson read some of these quotes aloud. The most eye-popping pertained to the rules of her high-school clique: “You cannot wear jeans any day but Friday, and you cannot wear a ponytail or sneakers more than once a week. Monday is fancy day—like black pants or maybe you bust out with a skirt.” For several paragraphs this goes on, teenage Jessica laying out her friend group’s dizzying standards for each other. “The rules apply to all of us,” she clarified. When one friend wore jeans on a Monday, “she wasn’t allowed to sit with us at lunch.”
Among the moms at the party, nobody needed an explanation. Jackson’s friends were the Plastics, the catty clique of teen demigoddesses who run the school in Mean Girls, ensconced at their cafeteria table, reciting the ludicrous rules of their group. What Jackson said at 16 was rewritten—almost verbatim—into one of the megahit film’s most quoted moments. This was “On Wednesdays, we wear pink.”
Today, Jackson is 38, an HR director at a software company in Rockville. She called me recently while she was leaving work, en route to pick up her kids from school. I asked if she recognized her quotes when she first saw Mean Girls, back when it came out in 2004. “Of course I did,” she replied. “Tons of them—‘We wear pink,’ ‘You can’t sit with us’—I was tickled. I wasn’t mad.”
Jessica Jackson enjoys the film—despite her teen words being voiced by the Plastics. Photograph by Magdalena Papaioannou.
“It would have been cool to tell everyone in the world that I was part of this amazing cult-classic movie,” Jackson explained. But until that Christmas party, she says she’d never brought it up with anyone—not in her adult life. To explain her connection to the movie, she would have had to dredge up the article, which “does not paint me in a very good light. I say the most awful things. I’m the example of the mean girl, I’m the Queen Bee. I’m not even the antihero—I’m the villain.”
Jackson is bubbly and warm, a bleached-blonde suburban mother of two who loves cats and Disney princesses. She’s the kind of person who hosts an International Women’s Day event at her company each year; at one of them, she gave a presentation about how “women can either be a sex symbol, a mother, or a bitch,” then explained how each archetype fits into the corporate world. Aside from her love of pink and fondness for outrageous pronouncements, Jackson is not a person who resembles the Plastics—but somehow she’s partly the model for them. To understand how, you have to rewind a bit, to about a decade before she decreed Mondays jeans-free.
A good place to start is the rumor. The way I heard it, Mean Girls was based on a cohort of exceptionally cruel private-school girls who emerged in DC in the ’90s, girls who were so mean that administrators hired an expert to tame them. For the movie’s 20th anniversary, I figured I’d find some of them—the bullies and the victims—and ask what manner of unholy prep-school viciousness could have possibly inspired such a film.
But here’s the thing: When I started making calls, the rumor fell apart. Yes, at one point that particular school engaged the services of an expert to sort out its girls—but so did dozens of others all over the DC area. The expert was Rosalind Wiseman, who wrote a book about the cruelty of adolescent girls, which Tina Fey went on to adapt. So even though the prep-school thing was false, I figured there must be women in this region whom Wiseman had written about, whose experiences had therefore made it into the film. Hoping to find them, I called her.
According to Wiseman, the Mean Girls origin story begins in the 1990s, when she graduated from college and moved back home to DC. Her hope was to work with refugees, but while job-hunting, she invented a side hustle: teaching prep-school girls martial arts. This began at Georgetown Day School, then expanded to Sidwell Friends and to Wiseman’s alma mater, Maret. Soon, her work ballooned to schools all over the area, plus a home for pregnant teens.
At the time, Wiseman was 22 or 23—not much older than her pupils. She listened as they talked about their lives, and it struck her how often they discussed other girls: how important and complicated their friendships were, and how painful and elaborate their cruelties. “I felt it was important to go to the foundations of why girls were doing the things they were doing in their relationships with each other,” she told me. “I wanted to give them the skills to self-reflect as they were operating in the world.”
So Wiseman pivoted, asking schools if she could try out a different kind of workshop—not self-defense but relationship-building, the kind of thing we would now call “social-emotional learning.” Administrators said yes. Within a few years, Wiseman was a fixture at a broad mix of the region’s public, private, parochial, and alternative schools, teaching girls—well, not to be nice, exactly, but to disagree respectfully, to not abuse one another’s trust, to have friendships based in dignity, and to navigate the barbarism of adolescent life.
If you remember the end of Mean Girls, then you know approximately what these workshops were like: The junior girls report to the school’s gymnasium, where Ms. Norbury, the put-upon math teacher played by Fey, stands before the bleachers and teaches them to be less cruel. The girls raise their hands if they’ve ever said something mean behind a friend’s back, then they handwrite apologies and read them aloud to their peers. For years, Wiseman led those exercises, almost exactly as they appear in the film.
At that time, Wiseman was working with what she called her “Girls Advisory Board.” It was akin to a focus group: about a dozen teens from all over the region, who would regularly give feedback on her curriculum. “That group of girls were the people who said, ‘Tuesdays we wear that, Wednesdays we do this,’ ” she explained. They had a huge influence on her work, and aspects of their lives appeared in the movie. I asked if she’d give me some names.
Within 16 minutes of calling me, Zeina Davis was crying. She was remembering the late ’90s, before she joined the Girls Advisory Board, when she attended a Catholic middle school in Rockville. Her peers would torment her for her weight and curly hair, for living in a condo, and for being of Arab descent. “There was a mean-girl virus that was rampant in that school,” she said. “They used to put Wite-Out on their desks, scrape it, and then sprinkle it in my hair to make it look like I had lice.”
Mean Girls made Zeina Davis feel “seen.” But she worries that viewers “still want to be Regina George.” Photograph by Magdalena Papaioannou.
In her lowest moment, Davis fell victim to a particularly cruel ruse: A friend called one of their classmates and asked her opinion of Davis, who was secretly lurking on the phone. The result was devastating. “ ‘Oh, I just want to punch her in the face and she’s so fat and she annoys me so badly,’ ” Davis recalled hearing. Recounting it, she paused briefly to sob. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m 38 years old and it still hurts.”
Middle school was the saddest and most afraid Davis has ever felt. Then, at the beginning of ninth grade, she joined the Girls Advisory Board. Its mission was, in part, to end bullying between girls. Joining GAB felt like a way to solve a problem that had otherwise made her feel helpless—a reclamation of power after a few dreadful years.
Every other Tuesday in the early 2000s, a flock of girls would ride the Metro into DC and disembark at Mount Vernon Square, heading for a rowhouse nearby. They’d pop up the tall cement steps into what was once a dining room, where they’d sit around a huge wooden table and discuss their lives. Members of GAB would help solve each other’s problems, plan events to uplift local girls, and advise Wiseman on her work. “All of us were sharing our innermost fears, our hardest stories, our most embarrassing moments,” Davis said. “We were open with our pain.”
“I would say hi to people from my classes, then eat a Pop-Tart in the bathroom.”
During those years, Wiseman was writing a book about the social landscape of adolescent girls, which became her bestselling parenting guide, Queen Bees and Wannabes. For research, she interviewed Davis extensively, and some of her stories made it in. The three-way-calling attack was one of them, and another was when Davis started at a new school in tenth grade and ate her lunch in a restroom stall. “I didn’t want to look like I didn’t have a friend group,” she explained, “so I would kind of walk in circles and say hi to people from my classes, then I would, like, eat a Pop-Tart in the bathroom.”
When Queen Bees came out in 2002, Wiseman was in her early thirties, already a luminary in the burgeoning field of quelling cruelty between girls. For that, she became the central figure of that New York Times Magazine story, “Girls Just Want to Be Mean.” The story hit newsstands with a sickly pink cover, the phrase “Mean Girls” splashed across in huge text. Among the story’s readers was Fey, then a head writer at Saturday Night Live, who bought the film rights to Queen Bees.
In January, at a cafe in upper Northwest, Margaret Talbot admitted that she’d never seen Mean Girls. “I don’t own the phrase ‘mean girls,’ I didn’t even invent it,” she said. “But through this article”—the Times Magazine story she wrote—“it did enter the culture, and I feel mixed about it.” It troubles her to hear women called “mean girls,” often to trivialize or diminish them. Still, she thinks the term caught on because it “gets at something real.”
In the early 2000s, Talbot learned of a cutting-edge psychological theory: that adolescent girls are not, in fact, nicer than boys. Instead of socking each other on the playground, they bully through “relational aggression”—exclusionary cliques, caustic gossip, and arcane social cruelties. “I’d had some personal experience with the ingenuity of girls when they wanted to be dominant in a social setting,” Talbot said, so the theory resonated. It was “a useful antidote to a tendency to idealize girls, to imagine within feminism that women always had each other’s backs.”
To learn about relational aggression, Talbot began following Wiseman around DC, shadowing her at the workshops she was running, then interviewing her while they drove between schools. “She was super-vivid in her descriptions,” Talbot recalled, “and almost anthropological in the way she would lay out these different types of characters and maneuvers.” From Wiseman, Talbot learned about “fruit-cup girls,” who feign helplessness for male attention, and “bankers,” who hoard secrets to deploy as social currency. Her article mentions the diabolical tactic of leaving a message on a girl’s family voicemail asking if she’s gotten her pregnancy test back, knowing that her parents might hear.
“But it’s one thing for an adult like Rosalind to be imposing these categories and seeing these phenomena from the outside,” Talbot said. For her story, she needed “informants from the inside,” some in-the-flesh catty teens to dissect the mechanics of their cliques. That’s how she found Jessica Jackson; Wiseman referred her to a girl she knew whose friend group “was governed by actual, enumerated rules.” In the story, Jackson—then going by her maiden name, Travis—is described as an “amalgam of old-style Queen Bee-ism and new-style girl’s empowerment” whose behavior is in need of reform.
The Girls Advisory Board deeply influenced Wiseman’s work—and later, Mean Girls.
Top left to right: Rosalind Wiseman and Jessica Jackson. Bottom left to right: Zeina Davis and Tanzi Crayton.
But here’s the thing: Despite her cliquish behavior, Jackson was a member of GAB, a teen who grounded her identity in supporting other girls. “I grew up with a single mom who was a bra-burning hippie feminist turned corporate tech powerhouse,” she explained. Back in the ’90s, she would often hear her mom on the phone with female coworkers, dispensing career advice and telling them what behavior not to accept. “I listened to her empower other women, and I was so in awe of her. I just wanted to do that, too.”
In GAB, Jackson felt like she was “changing the world singlehandedly,” and she was excited for the Times to highlight that work; she’d told friends and family to expect the article. But when she read it, she was stunned. On the page, she found an array of barbed remarks about other girls, ones that weren’t off the record but that she’d said without considering they might be relevant enough to print. The story, she felt, presented her as the opposite of everything she stood for. It was humiliating. “I’m the example of the mean girl,” she said. “The whole article listed me as the opposition to [Wiseman’s] movement.”
Jackson’s displeasure makes sense; there’s a sting to some of the story’s lines. But Talbot doesn’t remember her as villainous—actually, she said, she came to admire the girl’s “flair and insouciance,” the “ingenuity” of her cliquish behavior. Their conversations made Talbot reconsider the kinds of girls who intimidated her in high school, whose antics are “kind of delightful as long as they’re not actually cruel,” which she didn’t think Jackson’s were. I think the story communicates that. On the page, teenage Jessica strikes me as clever and rollicking, her cattiness a mark of irrepressible verve.
When I finally met Jackson, at her snug yellow house in the suburbs, she made me a “meantini.” This was a cocktail of her invention: an admixture of ginger ale and vodka, plus splashes of fruit punch and cranberry to achieve the desired level of pink. As she stirred, she seemed breathy and scattered, which she eventually addressed outright: “I am so nervous,” she said. “I’m going to have a drink and then I’ll feel better. Dude, if I cry, I hope the earth swallows me whole.”
The issue was talking to a reporter. The last time she’d done so—besides a previous phone call with me—was for the Times story, which is still a source of shame. But on the phone, she’d thought I seemed “normal,” so she invited me over to set the record straight. She’s never been a mean girl, she insisted—though she’s certainly an “undercover celebrity.” That’s due to her odd connection to Regina George, Mean Girls’ glamorous and tyrannical Queen Bee.
For emotional support, Jackson had invited her friend Tanzi Crayton, whom she met as a teenager in GAB. On a small balcony, the three of us drank meantinis from etched-crystal flutes. We bantered for a while—about our kids, the baffling return of Y2K fashion—before the conversation drifted to Mean Girls. Crayton said, “When I’ve watched it over the years, I’m like, ‘That’s Jessica right there—like, that’s a direct quote. You need to send my girl a check.’ ”
At a 2004 viewing in Silver Spring, Jackson and others saw bits of their lives onscreen. Photograph by Paramount/courtesy of Everett Collection.
Once Jackson read the Times story, she never returned to GAB, so she wasn’t there in the spring of 2004 when Paramount rented the AFI theater in Silver Spring for an advance screening of Mean Girls. Wiseman, the guest of honor, brought friends, family, and an assortment of GAB alums, Crayton among them. “I just remember being so starstruck,” Crayton said. “When Ros’s name came up in the credits, we were all cheering. And I saw little traces of us that were incorporated in some of the lines and the scenes.”
I called a few GAB alums to ask about this—about how it felt when they first saw the movie and encountered various fragments of their lives, like when Lindsay Lohan’s character eats lunch alone in a bathroom stall and falls victim to a three-way-calling attack. “It felt a little like, wow, these are my stories. Oh my God, that’s my childhood,” Zeina Davis said. “I definitely feel like I have a hidden part in Mean Girls.”
But her connection to the movie is bittersweet, particularly due to the three-way call, which is essentially a humorous aside. “It certainly made me feel seen,” she said, “but to have it played out as kind of a laughable moment—I’m like, it was real pain. They didn’t show how horrible it made me feel afterward, crying and begging my parents not to make me go back to school.” She worried that the film had glamorized something ugly. “You do not walk away from that movie and think, ‘We’ve got to change society.’ I do feel like you walk away and you still want to be Regina George.”
Crayton initially loved the movie—she bought T-shirts and posters for her room—but over the years, she’s reassessed. “I don’t think that people really got the true nature of what Queen Bees and Wannabes was about,” she said. “They touched a little bit on that in the end—the girls mended those fences and were able to coexist without being so nasty to one another. But everybody always quotes the crazy stuff, the bad stuff, the catty stuff. Nobody ever quotes any of the good things.” She calls it a “complicated movie,” one that’s genuinely funny but also perpetuates the “myth that young women can’t get along.”
Notably, Jackson’s relationship to Mean Girls is less fraught. “It wasn’t a public statement about me, it didn’t say my name,” she said. Hearing her teenage remarks in the mouths of various Plastics felt “so surreal,” but it “wasn’t obvious to anyone else the way it was obvious to me.” This freed her to love the movie: She thinks it’s hilarious and likes the positive ending.
“Everybody quotes the crazy stuff, the bad stuff, the catty stuff. Nobody ever quotes any of the good things.”
As for Wiseman, she consulted on Mean Girls, but she first watched it in full at the AFI screening. “My experience of that was this kind of like—horror is a strong word, but it was like seeing a picture of yourself that you’re not really sure you want everybody to see.” She found the characters “so real” and “scary” and their meanness true to life. But after the movie came out, she learned that girls were dressing up as the Plastics for Halloween. “And it’s like, damn, girls subvert everything I do, all the time. I try so hard, but the opponent is formidable.”
After a few pitchers of meantinis, dusk fell, a string of lights blinked on, and the chill pushed us inside. Crayton headed home, but there was still something I wanted to understand—namely, the provenance of the rules. In the film, they’re authoritarian and exclusionary, a way to assert dominance over friends and create distance from social inferiors. Wearing pink on Wednesdays is not nice.
Days before, on the phone, I’d asked Jackson directly if she was a Queen Bee. “So, let’s do some layers here,” was her bristling reply. “When you’re confident and bold, are you a bitch? Are you Miranda Priestly? Do I only get to be either Taylor Swift from ‘Teardrops on My Guitar’ or Regina George?” For what it’s worth, Jackson has a “wild affinity” for Regina, for her fashion and brazen self-regard. Still, she said, the character is “not a representation of myself in high school, even though her quotes and my quotes are the same.”
Skeptical, I asked to see Jackson’s yearbooks, so she popped down to the basement and emerged with a stack. Opening one, she pointed to a picture of a jaguar mascot. “You see that? That’s me in there.” Before I could follow up, she’d moved on. “These were easily the most popular girls,” she said, her finger atop some identical blonde twins who apparently later became Ravens cheerleaders. Then she noticed another girl. “Anybody’s Regina George would be her, because everyone hated her but wanted her to like them.”
Remembering high school, Jackson was ebullient. Beside her couch, she performed a cheer that she’d invented as a freshman for a senior she had a crush on, a football player whose various castoffs she’d kept as totems: a pencil he bit, the program he fanned himself with at graduation. It didn’t feel like I was watching a dictator.
But if Jackson wasn’t mean, then why the rules? When I asked, she seemed bewildered. “It wasn’t a big-enough part of our lives or friendships that I remember, like, how we came up with them. Let’s say they were, at best, a phase.” She added that she and her friends “wanted to wear skirts on the same day. We made up all kinds of random songs and fake little clubby things. We weren’t the mean girls by any means.”
But as I puzzled, two of Jackson’s comments rattled around my brain. “Teenage friendships are a lot like teenage love,” she’d said. “Her laundry ends up in your clothes, you’re in each other’s closets and cars and dinner tables and bedrooms.” That thought seemed related to this one, an offhand remark about the actor Sydney Sweeney: “I just want to be her best friend really hard. We would braid each other’s hair and I would tell her all my secrets. I want us to smell the same. I want our periods to sync up.”
To Jackson, friendship seemed to mean sameness and melding—mingled laundry, matched perfume. So I asked if she thought the rules were about formalizing intimacy. “Wow, what a poignant point,” she replied. “Like, you killed it.”
“I’m also going to throw this out there,” she added. “There is a Disney movie called Wish Upon a Star starring Katherine Heigl, from the ’90s. I loved that movie. I watched it over and over again.” The movie features a Plastics-like popular clique, “and I remember those gals having specific rules about, like, shaving your legs every day, and this or that. I never forgot that.” Then she brought up the Pink Ladies from Grease. (“What made them friends? They had the jackets, it was a thing.”) “So maybe it has something to do with that,” she mused.
Of course, I thought—it’s classic high school, emulating movies to make life feel cinematic. But Jackson had slightly misremembered the plots. She described those two cliques as essentially benevolent, when both are a little mean. In Wish Upon a Star, the happy ending involves Heigl’s friends abandoning their rules, and in Grease, the Pink Ladies mock Sandy at a party—Sandy, who never gets to wear the pink jacket and belong. The misreading, though, is telling; it’s why the women of GAB are vexed about Mean Girls, that even though the ending is harmonious, it’s possible no one remembers it right.
About a week after our meantinis, Jackson called me on the phone. While we talked, she texted me two things she’d just encountered online. One was a social-media post from NARAL Pro-Choice America that said, “On Wednesdays, we fight for abortion rights.” The second was a screenshot of a pink crew-neck sweatshirt with “On Wednesdays, we smash the patriarchy” across the chest. She suggested we both buy it so we’d match.
I laughed at this, baffled by the life cycle of culture—how Jackson’s rules, a form of ritualized closeness filtered through film tropes, were themselves made into a villainous and exclusionary teen-movie speech, which then became iconic enough to meme, and now has been appropriated by corporate girlbossery into political sloganeering and Instagram products, which Jackson—the original Plastic—scrolls past on her phone. But it meant something to her, this reframing: her high-school quotes reclaimed from meanness, now a call to action, asking women to support one another.
“This is what I love,” she told me. “ ‘On Wednesdays, we wear pink’ is not a fuck-you to those who don’t wear pink, but it’s power, almost—it’s like, we’re the shit. On Wednesdays, we wear pink, we smash the patriarchy. It’s everything.” I think she finally felt understood.
This article appears in the April 2024 issue of Washingtonian.
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