Little girls today may be encouraged to imitate the trampy looking dolls that fill the toy shelves, but Brooke Shields was a living Bratz doll for much of her formative years, and yet the she had the strength to stand up and walk away when she’d had enough. The little girl who quietly got knocked around by others was gone, and in her place was a forty-year-old woman who wasn’t going to be quiet any more while other people used her to push their own agenda.
Turning forty this year and more or less Shields’s peer, she was one of the icons of my childhood. In the summer of 1980, there were two R-rate movies I begged available adults to take 13 year-old me to: The Shining, because I already loved Stephen King, and The Blue Lagoon — for obvious reasons. And those damn Calvin ads…