S-Mean Girls

The title means something. Bear with me.

To fully understand, Im going to have to blunt. The beginning of my life was not normal. I tried come in "Sunny Side Up" but the doctor turned me down with salad servers. My mom was very pleased at his adeptness, however, I think this started me off with problems, amongst other things.

The goal of my intro is not to bore you with a litany of deets, yet, some are pertinent to the issue. Intellectual property theft, again. So, my first experience was of being manipulated and may have been the cause of many seriously bad headaches in my 20's.

So begins the backstory to MEAN GIRLS: (try spot the similarities like I did watching it for the first time.) 

Jump to Crocker Middle School. I was 11 and new in the USA after emigrating from South Africa. Apartheid was coming down, and my Dad thought it best we vacate the country. He planned it well, and we successfully made it into a good part of California, or so we thought. Carrie Fischer was a student there many years prior.

In SA, I, Janice, had friends and things were fun. Lots of Jews like us and we had a good life. Here, however, on the surface it seemed similar, but as time went on we all learned of deeper things. The first real friend I had here was named Katie Lofthouse. She was a boyish, funny and introspective girl and she had a friend Kim Brown, who lived across Hayne Rd. from her. They grew up together. 

Katie was protective of Kim, and I only found out later why. She had had two brothers die. Both families were very down and had serious issues. One of Kims brothers fell off a waterfall at age 9 and there was a plaque to him over the drinking fountain at the elementary school, where my brother Wayne attended. (I thought that was a strange thing to do since he fell of a waterfall to his death.) The other brother died in a cessna plane crash where he flew into a mountain. He was older, like in his 20's.

Kim had a dog that had seizures.  Everyone seemed depressed and sad in some way. Katie's mom was an alcoholic and drank beers all day while her husband was a shrink who cheated on her. She wasnt that attractive, but probably was when she was younger. The 3 daughters, Katie being the youngest, looked different form each other, yet the middle one, Karen, looked the most like the mom, like a cherubim. She seemed the cheeriest of the bunch and I never met the eldest, bc she was out of the house at 18. The eldest was a punk rocker and got Katie into bands like The Cramps and PIL. Katie introduced me to New Wave, and alternative music which I liked very much. Depeche Mode, Erasure, Yaz and New Order. I still like them to this day.

So in Mean Girls, they switched our names. I researched the writer of the book that supposedly inspired Mean Girls, but I think that's a cover. My name Janice was switched with Janis the artist deep thinker, weirdo who loved in the US, while Katie was changed to Cady, the South African transplant who didnt fit in - a newb. Now the story of Cady being made popular was actually a thing that hapened after I separated from Katie and Kim and started hanging out with a girl named Bery Zontos and her friend Heather. (The Heathers come to mind here, with Winona)

Bery and Heather were party girls, and they'd rip out the school parking lot Senior Year to get Burger King in Bery's 914 Porsche. Id go with them as I had beautied up in my Junior year of HS. 

I think my friendship with Katie and Kim started to wane as another girl named Lisa joined our group and was jealous of me or something. There was a lot of backbiting in those days and idk, I just was adapting to my surroundings, not tryna cause any more harm. My parents were divorcing in 1983 and our house was a place of unrest, as my father was seeing his female business partner, whom he quickly married in 1985.  

Anyway, you see the premise. I was from SA and Katie (not Cady, Janis in MG) was the friend. There was a gay male character put in for transagenda in MG, but the gay guy in our school was Michael Dennis and he wasn't really friends with anyone I knew, but he did remind me of Cindy Cowper, a very masculine girl in SA that I used to swim against and always come in second to! It was like they were alter egos haha! I guess this was my first experience with the oppo culture. I, at some point was shown a book about hermaphrodites and saw that Mexicans had that in their culture. I also learned that Mexicans were all over California as the gardeners around were all Mexican. They would howl at us on our bikes when they passed by. It was kinda creepy sometimes...

I'd have to watch the film again and take some notes, but there were so many similarities to the story, it was uncanny! I mean (pun intended), how many girls named Janice come from South Africa to America? Hmm.. How many mean Katies are there? And lets get real. Katie was brutal. She was angry, cynical and depressed. She made me laugh though. She had an edgy humor and cut to the quick. She dogged every "popular girl" she could and was a quick study in terms of personalities. She was bullied very badly by a boy named Greg Feldstein in Elementary School before I arrived at Crocker. He was unkind and mean to her so she became resentful and hated him. I think in retrospect, she might have liked him, but he didn't like her or maybe something happened early on with them. Greg turned into a teenage alchie and I saw how the boys were stealing the parents booze a lot in rich Hillsborough.

The boys were also very spoiled and could basically get away with shit. One boy attempted rape me with a rufi one day at my house. I didn't know what happened until much later. Paul Buncke, now a successful construction company owner in Tahoe. He never copped nor apologized to me for that. His father was a famous surgeon who adapted a big toe to a thumb surgery or something. 

Anyway, a lot happened in my life. I will rewatch the film MG although it makes me cringe and get back to this. Just know, Ive been sold. Ive been ripped off more than once by the deep state who seem to think anything and anyone is fair game. FO to them and the ship they came in on. Justice will come, soon.