On Wednesdays we wear Pink

“On Wednesdays, We Wear Pink” is one of the many quotable one-liners from the 2004 movie “Mean Girls.” At first glance, you may be skeptical about the quality of this movie, but it is surprisingly good! (Or unsurprisingly if you’re a Tina Fey fan like myself.)

If you haven’t seen it, I will use Kenn Adams’s Story Spine to provide a brief summary. First of all, we start off with Cady Heron, a previously homeschooled teenager who is now about to attend a public high school. She quickly encounters the craziness that is the high school experience, including all of the usual cliques. This is a great setup for the story, as it is essentially universal to most North Americans, as most have gone through or are going through high school and can relate to all of the societal pressures to fit in.

Cady’s newfound friends devise a plan to take revenge on the “Mean Girls” of the school, which includes ways for Cady to get “in” with their group. However, the more that Cady pretends to be a mean girl, the more she ends up actually acting like one.

We reach “The Climax” of the story when everything blows up in Cady’s face, and the “Burn Book” she and the other Mean Girls made is distributed throughout the school. All the girls see a bunch of mean things that others say about them. This prompts a session with the school administration where Cady starts to realize how toxic her actions were and how many people she was hurting along the way.

The story ends up with Cady patching things up with the people she wronged, getting back on good terms and staying true to what she really cares about. She’s not just smoothing things over; she’s also figuring out what really matters to her, diving into her genuine values and interests.

Drawing from Emma Coats’s 22 Rules of Storytelling, you admire Cady for her faults, learning her lesson, and then trying to do better—not about how she became popular or that she won the Mathletes competition. Also, the story very clearly knows what it is not—e.g., a gripping drama or an intense “film noir.”

The way the story was communicated through movie form, with witty and easy-to-remember one-liners, as well as recognizable actresses, definitely helped to enhance the story. I don’t believe that if this exact story were told in another way, such as in print form or as an audiobook, it would have been as iconic and reached as many people as it has.

It’s silly, it’s fun, and perhaps most importantly, it’s extremely relatable for at least the majority of millennial women, as we have been through high school and know the stereotypical cliques and how badly we want to fit in. And while the movie holds a mirror up to society and offers many lessons, it notably has only one story to tell, with the moral being that you should always be true to yourself.