THEY'LL NEVER MAKE A MOVIE STARRING ME
By
In another of those disconcertingly anachronistic boarding school stories, the flip and vapid heroine (she fantasizes herself as Katherine Hepburn) attempts to impress the other girls by such daring capers as bleaching her hair and stealing pies from the kitchen and, finally, she borrows a diaphragm to support her made-up stories about boys and dates. But the major preoccupation is with a school tradition called Spread, which each sophomore attends with a senior, and in addition to the general sophomore flurry about dresses and getting their rings and whether you have to curtsy, Alice is tense about whether supercool senior Wendy will choose to be ""her"" senior. As it turns out Wendy fears that association with Alice might compromoise her chances of getting into Bryn Mawr; Alice is disappointed, but her subsequent meeting with a real boy both reassures her about being ""normal"" and (as he probably won't call back) teaches her to enjoy all the ""middles"" of experience without hassling herself over cinematic endings. The implicit theme of a crush on an older girl is buried here in all the silliness, and never faced head on in any case. Alice is right though about the zero possibilities of a movie.