The Girl Zone: Three. Mary Stuart Masterson

Mimou’s best friend both in elementary school and in junior high was her classmate Marina. Marina’s mother was a teacher in the elementary school, a deeply loved and revered woman among the student body, with endless nerves and a soft, almost girly voice, in somewhat stark contrast to her handsome, tall appearance, and her short, if somewhat unruly, graying hair. Mrs. Underwood was every student’s first choice when having to deal with tardiness or lost notebooks or running around hatless, and it was this universal devotion and respect for the teacher that made everyone get off Marina’s case about the fact that she was a teacher’s kid.

It was a small elementary school with less than a hundred students combined in classes one through six, a student body consisting of rural, acquiescent children soft as clay, who abided by rules, and the most intense level of insubordinate behavior was someone yelling “Oh, crap!” once, outside, with no teachers around. The headmaster, who smelled of tobacco, although kept his habit keenly and successfully out of sight, had a horrible comb-over, and was well thought of, but also feared, because he was the only male teacher, and there was so little yelling from the teachers that when he occasionally yelled at somebody, it was a big deal and a major disgrace.

Mrs. Underwood was the leader and organizer of the after school Finnish Baseball Club. It took place on the school playing field on Thursday afternoons after lessons, both in spring and fall. All the kids wanted to attend, so the teams would sometimes be twenty person strong, and it took over an hour just to get everyone to have their turn to bat even once. The games would take forever, but no one had anything better to do, Mrs. Underwood’s Finnish Baseball Club was where it was at, and Mimou remembered those games as one of the few memories of her childhood sports events that were dear and important to her. It didn’t matter at all who won, it was one of those rare occasions when kids just instinctively wanted to take part in innocent, good-natured fun, and Mrs. Underwood’s benevolent presence was the magic touch that made everyone be on their best behavior.

As day slowly gave way to an early evening, the pleasurable loud clack! of the bat hitting the ball exactly right would resonate through the neighborhood, along with shouts and cheers, the sounds of the ball being thrown and caught from mitt to mitt, and Mrs. Underwood’s whistle blows when a runner was put out.

As the years progressed, and elementary school gave way to junior high, the baseball club also became a thing of the past for Mimou and Marina. Healthy outdoors activities and innocent, baggy sweats were replaced by tight light blue Levi’s and staying in, talking about all the stuff that had suddenly become of extreme importance: the shared experience of being a teenager. Mimou would hang out at Marina’s all the time. They would sit on the squeaky leather couch, eating white bread with salami and lettuce, drinking coffee by the gallon, pet Marina’s Cavalier King Charles Spaniel George, watch movies and the brand new Music Television, which Marina’s house received, belonging to a new cable-owning housing co-op after the divorce. Mimou’s house was so far out in the country they only received the three, later four, boring Finnish channels with the only interesting programs on them being the severely forbidden V - Visitors and The Twilight Zone, and later Twin Peaks. Marina would braid Mimou’s long brown hair, Mimou would try on all of Marina’s clothes as they talked about Prince’s When Doves Cry and Madonna’s Papa Don’t Preach music videos with MTV constantly on in the background.

They would discuss having their period and period pains, when to tell an imagined boyfriend you loved him for the first time, clothes and jewelry, fighting with parents, parents fighting, and the divorce in great detail, all of it with equal fervor and seriousness that would have seemed ridiculous in any other situation, but being girls undergoing puberty, with a library of John Hughes movies at their disposal whenever, it was just the right amount. Mimou would spend up to four nights in a row at Marina’s house, these were school nights to add insult to injury, and do her homework at Marina’s kitchen table, and every night, before going to bed, they would pop Some Kind of Wonderful into the VCR and watch it, sometimes talking through some scenes, sometimes just watching, with dedication.

Of course Eric Stoltz, with his visible eye make-up and beautiful red locks, was indeed gorgeous in his intense seriousness and gravity that seemed to somehow surpass that of his parents and anyone else’s in the picture, but it wasn’t the lovely Eric that drew the girls to the glow of the TV night after night.

It was Mary Stuart Masterson.

Mary Stuart Masterson became, for a short period of time, the very essence of female beauty for Marina and Mimou, everything they desperately wanted to be, an idol, a role model in how to respond to the cruelties of school and the surrounding world, how to fight back with attitude and extremely cool hair. Especially Marina was crazy about her, and her enthusiasm was very contagious. They would watch and rewind and watch again the opening credits sequence with Watts drumming exactly to the beat of the opening song, regal and independent and so gorgeous, interspersed by takes of Keith at his gas- and service station job, in overalls, checking oils and whatnot, with hands all dirty from being so cool with a job to support himself in high school. Mary Stuart Masterson was the embodiment of ultimate cool.  The tank top and the man’s suit vest just thrown on top of it, the maroon leather fingerless gloves with fringes all the way through the side of the hand, the short, dyed hair, the tiny car with the red door, the drumsticks sticking out of her back pockets, it was all enthralling, and to Mimou, whose journey with John Hughes had started with Pretty In Pink, continued to The Breakfast Club and Sixteen Candles, and at this point had landed to Some Kind of Wonderful, Mary Stuart Masterson was just as stylish in her rebellious black and white getup and seemingly make-up free look as Molly Ringwald was in her DIY vintage dresses and flowing shirts with pockets and straw hats and immensely cool sunglasses.

Mimou was utterly taken with both Watts and Andie’s fashion sense, and would alternate wearing nothing but floral patterned clothes, and putting on her pinstriped man’s vest with blue jeans and wear all her neon-colored bangles to school. Her most important belongings included a dusty rose colored wool sweater with a rose pattern all over it, off-white lace gloves, bought at a ridiculously low price at a thrift shop, and earrings that were little golden-colored fans that actually opened and closed, with a delicate flower arrangement carved into the pieces, a hand-me-down from her sister Nanouk. Whenever she put on those earrings, the lace gloves and the sweater, she felt like Andie incarnate, graceful, beautiful, and ready for anything at all the world could throw at her. When she felt like a Watts day coming on, she would put on her jeans with her only leather studded belt, throw on her masculine shirt and the vest, and put on grandfather’s old felt hat, to mix it up.

Marina and Mimou would come running home from school, throw their school bags on the couch, put on wild make-up and fix their hair in the craziest ways, and dance all around the empty house to Eurythmics’ There Must Be An Angel and Tears for Fears’ Everybody Wants to Rule the World. Mimou would tease Marina’s gorgeous strawberry blond hair high up, Marina would lend Mimou her most valued outfit, the Easter green polyester two-piece man’s suit, and they would go to school in these provocative looks and outfits and prance around like they were the queens of the entire school, knowing full well that being the country kids in the big suburban junior high, their social status would remain a notch above that of the kids in the observation class, but only a notch, and it would stay that way until the rest of their early teens, so what the hell, the girls never spoke out loud, but thought to themselves, and expressed it to each other in more easy-going terms, let’s have some fun with the hillbilly status. Like the way Duckie’s greased Fifties hair and elaborate costumes in Pretty in Pink were his Fuck You to the rest of the school, so were Marina and Mimou’s off-beat fashion statements and fancy cross-dressing weeks.

It was only way later in life that Mimou learned or took note about how similar in plotline Some Kind of Wonderful was to Pretty In Pink, and learned about how it had been Hughes’ second crack at trying to make it come out right this time around, having the beauty end up with someone from her side of the tracks, both in spirit as in concretely, heightening the socio-economic point instead of the prince charming side. As it is well-known, the original ending of Pretty in Pink had Andie ending up with Duckie, an ending which wasn’t well received with the test audiences, in fact a book Mimou read as an adult, dealing with the matter, mentioned the audience booing at the end. So Hughes rewrote and changed the ending, but always wanted to make another picture that would have the protagonist make the right choice, or, what to him was the only right choice.

It was all fascinating to read, about the constant changes in cast as well as crew on the set of Some Kind of Wonderful, about how the re-writes were so massive that it ended up being a completely different kind of film from what everyone had initially agreed upon to star in or to be part of. Eric Stoltz grew his hair to portray the brooding Keith, only to have to have it cut way shorter because it was figured he wasn’t handsome enough with long hair. The make-up department went so far as to rouge his appearance so that watching the film today it seemed ludicrous that he would ever be the solitary, weird loner guy in all his youthful, exquisite beauty. Even the film’s unattainable snotty beauty queen, played by Lea Thompson, ended up living in the same part of town as the two main characters, thus sort of hampering with the class-awareness point Hughes had originally wanted to make, making the plot in fact more intriguing. It was all good for Mimou, and together with Marina, they really watched the shit out of that film in their senior year in junior high.

Marina and Mimou were each other’s anchors in the pains of growing up in the actual, brutal, prosaic world, Marina being the first person Mimou knew personally, whose parents went through a divorce. Peri represented to Mimou the id, the Yoda of young womanhood, the fantasy world, the imaginary universe where the girls where at dead center. Marina was to Mimou the Mary Stuart Masterson to her Keith Nelson, the Duckie to her Andie. Their bond was one of kids growing up in the same rural surroundings, with years of just the same handful of people to talk to, then suddenly flung into a great big school with completely different social mores and rules. They both knew where they came from, who they were, and what it meant to be a square in junior high. They had suffered through the idyllic, yet stiff country upbringing, where you could run around the hills all day without having to check in with parents because nothing bad ever happened, but also a place where, like in Jane Austen novel’s, boredom and scarce social calendar made for mean gossip and rude neighbors.

Marina was the only person ever to get away with calling Mimou stupid, too. They were once more at Marina’s, doing their math homework at the kitchen table. Mimou was beginning to have trouble with math already, and Marina was trying to help her through a problem. Mimou rose to her feet and went to the refrigerator to get more snacks, and while filling her lap with things she heard Marina sigh something out loud. Having what she would later in life learn to call Gilmore Girls -appropriately a Copper Boom moment, she asked, with her head still in the ice box: “What’s that? Did you say ‘flower arrangement’?” “No!” Marina answered, starting to laugh hard. “I said you have chicken brains!”

Their closeness, which reached its peak in junior high, around the time of their Some Kind of Wonderful –craze, would have been out of the question, and parental stepping in would have been immediate, had they not been going to school every day, not missing one class, and had they not been doing their school work with just as much meticulousness as if they were alone. In a freakish way, Mimou and Marina were able to combine school and hanging out in a way that was way beyond their years, and it was a relationship that was truly equal as well as beneficiary for the both of them. Mimou would, then, feel the stir of something familiar after six years had passed from her close relationship to Marina, when in her twenties she met a woman, also in a school environment, who would become her closest person for the next fifteen years.

As for Mrs. Underwood, when Mimou read in the paper her obituary twenty years later, she cried. She felt horrible for Marina, and wondered where she was, but also felt a sorrow of her own. In a succession of a whole bunch of educators and professors, Mrs. Underwood had been the first one who had had a real impact on her, and quite possibly on all the kids she taught in her time.

While in elementary school, Mimou and Marina had taken part in celebrating an important birthday of Mrs. Underwood’s. All the classes had prepared some kind of salute to her, and Mimou and Marina’s class was supposed to sing a song, and walk up to Mrs. Underwood in a line, each handing her one rose, then stepping aside in a formation beside the teacher. Mimou, afraid of exactly these kinds of situations, clung onto her rose with white knuckles, horrified that she would stumble and fall right into the woman’s lap while trying to hand her the flower. When her moment came, the choreography went smoothly, and Mimou took her place behind Mrs. Underwood. As the song still continued, she spied the teacher’s soft white hairs on the side of her temple, and seeing a tear forming in the corner of her eye, Mimou, too, started sobbing in affection.

Mimou would never in her life be able to bring to mind what the song was that their class had performed, but seeing the handsome, beautiful woman tear up, and feeling the sting of her own choking tears while standing behind her, she remembered the rest of her life.

Further reading: Gora, Susannah: You Couldn’t Ignore Me if You Tried – The Brat-Pack, John Hughes, And Their Impact on A Generation. 2010 Three Rivers Press