I ♥ Kristy McNichol

Who could forget Kristy McNichol's fresh, tomboyish good looks from the 1970s and 80s?  You could?  Oh.  Well, I definitely couldn't.

The first time I really recognized her face and knew I had seen her before was when ads for "The Pirate Movie" were running constantly on television in 1982.  There was something about those distinctively chipmunk-esque cheeks and her illuminating gaze that captured my nine-year-old heart.  It was one of those infatuations born of the first blush of puberty when wanting to be like someone and wanting to kiss them sometimes crossed their wires.

It wasn't until one late night a few years later while babysitting and surfing the neighbour's cable that I found Kristy McNichol again.  She starred opposite Tatum O'Neal in the movie "Little Darlings", and though I was only able to watch a few scenes before my two-dollar-an-hour babysitting gig ended, I never forgot Kristy in that film.  In fact, I just spent the entire last week of my life trying to track down a copy of it, but $41 on Amazon.com seemed a bit steep to me, so I watched it again in choppy instalments on YouTube instead.

For a movie about two teenage girls at summer camp engaged in a race to lose their respective virginities, it surprised me with its liberal peppering of emotional and psychological depth.  Take this scene (watch it until the 3min20sec mark) between Kristy's character Angel, who is wearing a jean jacket, and Tatum's character Ferris: click to watch video.

Kristy quite simply shines in her portrayal of this wrong-side-of-the-tracks teenager stumbling toward womanhood.  Or maybe I just want to jump back in time twenty-eight years, kick that useless love interest of hers, Randy (played by a sixteen-year-old Matt Dillon), out of their boathouse cum love nest, and make out with her.  (Let us please dismiss the fact that I am presently thirty-five, she was eighteen at the time of the movie, and this is all really a dreamy fantasy of my pre-pubescent, early 1980s self that was concocted out of the boredom of suburbia, a television that had only four channels, and the lack of a VCR.)

After watching the piecemeal version of "Little Darlings" that I pulled together on YouTube, I began to wonder where this brilliant young actress had gone.  The last I saw of her, she was in a few seasons on the television series "Empty Nest" playing the character of Officer Barbara Weston, but that lacklustre late-80s/early-90s sitcom couldn't have been the end of her career, could it?

It was.  Aside from a couple of forgettable roles over the next two years, she removed herself from public life.  As it turns out, she was dogged by rumors of drug addiction for years, especially after she walked off the set of a film in 1982 without warning following a nervous breakdown.  She was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, which is characterized by wide mood alterations with periods of both depression and mania.  It is a condition that is exacerbated by stress, which is why, at the top of her twenty-four-year-long career that began with a commercial for Kraft cheese in 1969, she chose to leave the profession.

Frankly, I miss her, or at least I miss the vulnerable, tomboyish, and occasionally badass sweetheart that she represented.  In a culture that is now fed such hyper-constructed versions of what is deemed to be physically and personally beautiful, a perfection that is just about as attractive as a high-end blow-up doll, it is easy to become nostalgic for Kristy's imperfect yet radiant characters.  She was girl next door we could all dream of actually becoming one day.  She had humanity.

Also? She could really kick some ass when she needed to.