Portrait of Jodie Foster as the First of the Movie Girlfriends

By Julie Marie Wade

When I first saw Freaky Friday, in that era
long after tomboy and well before lesbian,
I was much more enchanted by Mrs. Andrews
than by the bratty, braces-bound Annabel.

What I liked best was her pink skirt, bright
pink as bubblegum, cinched at the waist and
fanning out toward the knees like a tutu
made of cotton or felt, not tulle.

But if you believe the premise of the story—
and why wouldn't you? Who wouldn't want
the chance to escape her own body?— then by
the time Mrs. Andrews really gets interesting,

she's actually her daughter. By the time she wears
the velvet pant suit with the tennis shoes (fore-
shadowing Ellen perhaps?) and the false eyelashes
and the excessive rouge; by the time she burns the

turkey and skateboards down the driveway and plays
baseball at the kiddie park and crams all her clothes
into the single wobbly washing machine with the
big-eyed Bassett hound whining, she isn't Mrs.

Andrews at all anymore, she's Annabel, and
I'm starting to feel things for her too. Like when
her braces come off, and she goes to have her hair
curled and her nails done and later, at the marina,

when she stands up in her vaguely patriotic swimsuit,
still her mother inside, still terrified to water-ski
through the hoops of fire— and who wouldn't be?—
she is wishing so hard for her own body back

that I am wishing also. I can't keep track of the way
my desire oscillates between the grown woman and the
growing girl, but I know I resent the hell out of Boris,
the neighbor boy— and there always seems to be a neighbor boy.

He, like me, has been taken in by an idea, the willow stencil
of Mrs. Andrew's form, her long limbs and pursed pink lips,
but in fact it's Annabel, who isn't half as pretty (yet), who
carries a hockey stick and eats a rum raisin banana split

every morning at a coffee shop for breakfast. She's the one
with the bad attitude and the bell-bottom jeans and the faint
swagger I recognize in myself when I'm trying to act
tough, and failing. So part of the fear is falling in love

with yourself, transposed into a stranger's body (some kind
of incest perhaps?). Did I want her jerseys and her moxie, or
to be— more rightly— with her, in that going out for pizza on a
Friday night kind of way, what Boris does so effortlessly,

a simple consequence of showing up, and being a boy, and
trusting if he's patient enough, he can have whatever he wants.
For me, I see, it's going to be a bit more difficult, winning
a woman over. Perhaps she's never thought of me— or herself—

that way, and there's always a Boris standing by when you
need one, and there's always a Mrs. Andrews waiting up,
but by the time that movie was over, I knew I needed to rent
Candleshoe, and when my parents were out, Taxi Driver.



Julie Marie Wade holds a Master of Arts in English from Western Washington University and a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry from the University of Pittsburgh. She has received the Chicago Literary Award in Poetry, the Gulf Coast Nonfiction Prize, the Oscar Wilde Poetry Prize, and the Literal Latte Nonfiction Award. She lives with Angie and their 2 cats in rural Ohio, where she teaches humanities at a college preparatory boarding school.