she doesn't even go here, y'all
Mean Girls and my High School diploma turn 20, and I'm feeling some Texas nostalgia
On October 3rd of every year, this meme blazes through my Instagram feed like wild fire on a hot windy day, and for good reason.
I’m not the only woman with a pulse (especially a Millennial woman with a pulse) who has strong feelings about the 2004 classic, Mean Girls.1 The movie has staying power for a reason. The themes are evergreen—social cliques, friend dynamics, fashion statements. The quotes are addictingly quotable—“she doesn’t even go here”, “on Wednesdays we wear pink”, “so you agree? you think you’re really pretty?”. And, the fashion is a perfect time capsule of the early 00s—low rise everything, layered tanks and tees, frosty makeup with over-plucked eyebrows.
Mean Girls holds an even higher ranking in my personal canon because it was released the same year I graduated high school—2004. Meaning, Cady Heron and Regina George could literally be my peers. We grew up with Lindsey Lohan and Rachel McAdams on our Cosmo and Teen Vogue covers, and anyone who graduated in the early 00s can tell you without context or hesitation who the Regina George of their school was.
This particular October 3rd meme cycle, however, feels especially poignant because this year, the movie turns 20 years old. Connecting those dots folks—I graduated high school twenty years ago. Even more poignant is the fact that I am literally in flight writing this on October 3rd on my way to my hometown for my 20-year high school reunion. Talk about the universe being up to something.
There is a certain amount of cognitive dissonance in high school reunions, especially when you don’t return often to visit your hometown. My parents moved to a different small town in the Texas panhandle the summer after I graduated, so even when I go “home” to Texas, I have rarely made the trek up to my hometown over the past decade. If you understand the geography of Texas, this makes sense. It’s a six-hour roundtrip drive from where my parents live now. Everything is indeed bigger in Texas.
For thirteen years of grade school, I spent every single day with most of these humans (I graduated in a class of 30 kids). After graduating, our class dispersed in the normal way: some went off to college or technical school, some moved for adventures. Over the years, many of my graduating class trickled back to my hometown to run the family business (farm or ranch) and/or raise families of their own. Others remained in Texas, while a handful, like me, left Texas altogether to settle many states away. I lost touch with a lot of my classmates simply due to the very nature of geography.
Most people assume I went to a small suburban school or a private school when I say there were 30 kids in my graduating class. This couldn’t be further from the truth. I grew up in a sparsely populated county at the very top of Texas where farm land, ranches, and miles and miles of open blue sky dominate the horizon. The closest “international” airport is 100 miles away (I still have to have a connecting flight to get there from Seattle). According to the last Census, the county population came in at a whopping 5,285 people with 1,130 of those residing in my hometown, meaning there are more cattle than humans in the county.2 I know people who have graduating classes that big. So maybe I am the Cady Heron of my Seattle friend group?!
I remember daydreaming of living in a city as a child and young adult. Having access to public transport, museums, concerts, fashion, and culture was deeply appealing to me. I devoured movies and magazines, as if reading and watching would be enough for me to absorb some level of elegant and urbane qualities. Perhaps it worked to some degree. As a child of educators, my friends and classmates who were farmers’ or ranchers’ kids called me “city girl”—it was likely just a joke, but it ended up being a moniker so embedded in my psyche (albeit now, wildly hilarious to me) that I was well into my 30s before I dared to wear a pair of cowboy boots as a fashion statement. The imposter syndrome ran deep. Even today, when I pull on a pair of cowboy boots I feel a fleeting sense of silliness because I don’t need them to feed the horses at 5 am every morning before school starts.
I have been known to say that I love Texas more when I don’t live there, which is only partially true. Living true to my word, you’ll see me clopping my way around Seattle in my Ariats or vintage Justin boots or layering a bolo tie with my “city girl” necklace stack. You might even overhear me whine about the quality of Mexican food in the PNW or wax poetically about my mother’s cowboy casserole.
My love of Texan culture doesn’t begin and end with cuisine and fashion (shocking, I know). I’m the first to criticize many aspects of Texas—politics and purity culture, especially—but Texas is kind of like a sibling to me. I can criticize it all day long from any angle I please, but when a non-Texan says anything remotely critical, my Eldest Daughter Defense Mechanism is activated. This is largely because I know so many down-to-earth, lovely humans in Texas. I had an upbringing that I may have daydreamed of escaping at the time, but I look back upon with mostly nostalgia and love. By now, I’ve worked through much of my layered or complex feelings around the conservative, extremely evangelical religious constraints I experienced as a kid.
I also learned a lot. So much of what I like about myself and so much about who I am as a person is because of where I grew up. I was taught that hard work is a way to respect yourself and those around you, that leading with kindness is always the right answer, and that showing your bold pride in where you live is not just okay but encouraged. And, also, I learned the value of a go-to casserole, the word “y’all,” and a really good hairspray, the bigger the hair, the closer to God, amirite?!
All this is to say, I’m excited to spend a few days in a place that literally raised me with my oldest, dearest friends who knew me “back when” I was still that know-it-all Well Actually Kid. This weekend is homecoming, and we’ll be catching up in the stands as we watch this generation of Gruver Greyhounds on the football field. So, if you need me, you know where to find me—just follow the Friday night lights. I can’t wait to see the new adult versions of the kids I once knew so well. Some of them will have kids of their own, all of us will have a few more wrinkles and grey hairs, and maybe a few of us, like me, will still just be here trying to make “fetch” happen.
And, color me surprised, but the reboot with Reneé Rapp was an absolute delight. I wrote about this in one of my early Well…Actually posts, THAT’S HOW PASSIONATE I AM ABOUT THIS MOVIE/MUSICAL FRANCHISE.
I wrote this as a guess, and then LOL’ed after a quick Google search, which tells me I’m right. According to an USDA agriculture report, there are 285,421 cattle/calves in the county. In other words, for every human in Hansford County, there are 54 cows. God Bless Texas, y’all.
Enjoy!
"you go, Glen Coco!" is one of my top movie quotes of all time