Thus began a deep-seated obsession with any female that had psychic powers or special powers. The sister genre here, obviously, were the books and movies that featured “the female witch.” These were almost as good as the psychic power genre, because the girls had similar special abilities and could kick butt just by thinking it or casting a spell (especially appealing for an asthmatic).

While there are certainly some great pieces of work that fall into both genres– Brian de Palma’s “Carrie” and “The Fury,” the woman-in-jep period piece “The Eyes of Laura Mars,” or even “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”–if I’m honest with myself, the one that made the most lasting impression on me was, in fact, the very corny, “Worst Witch.” While even at 8-years-old, I was well aware that this film wasn’t really all that good, for some reason I became strangely obsessed with it. So much so that, as I’m sure my mother can tell you, I sat, many a weekday planted directed in front of the T.V. in my favorite Japanese floor chair that my father brought back from a Tokyo business trip, watching this film (which played on heavy rotation on HBO) over and over and over again.

“The Worst Witch” was essentially the story of Mildred Hubble, the klutzy, terrible student at Miss Cackle’s Academy for Witches. It starred a goofy Charlotte Rae (Mrs. Garrett from “Facts of Life”) as Mildred’s nemesis, an aloof Diana Rigg (from the “Avengers” as Charlotte Rae’s sister) and Tim Curry as a wizard who sang a musical number in a bat-tie.

In retrospect, I think this film resonated so much with me because of two reasons. First, you need only look at this clip of Tim Curry to recognize that this is pure camp.

Second, even as a young child, the actress who played Mildred (Fairuza Balk) had a ferocious kind of intensity (the same intensity you see in her as an adult in “American History X,” “The Craft,” or “Personal Velocity”) that, for whatever reason, as a child, I found (along with her barely perceptible Canadian accent) absolutely arresting. As a result, I loved Mildred Hubble. I adored Mildred Hubble. I wanted to be Mildred Hubble—and I really wanted her tabby cat, to which I was allergic. Yes, I’m aware that this is all a little creepy.

Although I’m not sure if I would ever advise anyone (except maybe if you have children, and then maybe even not) to view “The Worst Witch,” what’s interesting to me is that, when I look up Balk today, she often inspires this same infatuation that I had with her as a child as an adult. While she may be considered in “cult actress” in part due to her role in “The Craft,” (which likely attracted a lot of weirdo male followers), I also think it is because of her strong and defined personality, and propensity towards the subversive – qualities she even had as a child, when she played the misfit Mildred Hubble and the young Dorothy in “Return to Oz.”

While there’s no “proper” definition for the cult actress, what is understood is that the cult actress’s appeal is most definitely not “Hollywood,” sometimes to their misfortune. However, what they do offer instead – I’m thinking of people like Mary Woronov and Tuesday Weld – are a slice of the outsider; a quality of they are “wiser than they are playing.” Cult film stars are in short, not for everyone. But those few people they are for are devoted to them because they offer something different – something special.

Back in the 90’s, before the IPod or the Internet, the way I learned about new music was a) from mix tapes b) 120 minutes on MTV c) Sassy or Rolling Stone magazine or d) much cooler people than myself. I owe d) to my discovery of Kim Gordon and Sonic Youth.

When I was in high school, I was required to take a sport. I was not particularly athletic, so, sophomore year, I joined junior varsity crew for all the wrong reasons: the draw of being on a boat, and given that I went to boarding school, the enticing idea of getting on a bus and driving somewhere 20 minutes away (a lake) to do said sport. While I can’t say much for my crew aptitude (I only did it for one season), my first day, I did meet a girl who joined crew for possibly the very same reasons.

With her chunks of Manic Panic-ked hair and black combat boots, she looked about as out of place as I felt, so I sat next to her and her friend. And when I asked the girl what she was listening to and she said Sonic Youth, I told her I loved that band, when in truth, I had only seen a portion of the video “Bull in the Heather” (which featured Kathleen Hanna from Bikini Kill, which would later become one of my favorite bands) on MTV and hadn’t really decided if I liked Kim Gordon’s breathless, speak-y vocals or the dissonant guitar noises.

But when my new, potential friend got really excited about my lie and asked me if I preferred their earlier noisier, edgier work “Sister” and “Goo” for example, to “Experimental Jet Set, Trash & No Star,” and looked encouragingly at me when she said “edgier,” I kept going and said I also preferred their “more raw and experimental work” and was “concerned” about the new direction they were “headed in.” This seemed to excite her more, and she asked me what I was doing that weekend, and suggested we maybe go to Boston with her and her best friend (the girl who was seated next to her with the shaved head), and we became friends—although for the next few months, I remained uneasy about the friendship, until I went home for vacation and managed to actually listen to the whole Sonic Youth discography.

In time, Sonic Youth grew on me, particularly their album “Dirty,” which I continue to listen to, even though it represents, to many people, Sonic Youth’s shift from chaotic noise rock, to a shinier and more produced sound. To this day, the album has the affect of making me feel kind of cool and arty when I listen to it, despite the occasionally dumb lyrics. And there’s something about the band has this universal affect on people. Even as they’ve gone on to conquer Starbucks and “Gossip Girl,” Sonic Youth has managed to remain badass. (Sadly, the same can’t be said of some of my favorite musicians, like Liz Phair.)

I think it is because the band is all surface – icy, well dressed, detached, and while enjoyable, ultimately a bit empty. And I think, that we can owe this quality to Kim Gordon. While Thurston Moore is undoubtedly one core of the band, (and I don’t mean to leave out Lee Renaldo or Steve Shelley who also contribute more than just a face for the music), without Kim Gordon he seems kind of goofy – like an overgrown child. Kim’s platinum hair, X-Girl outfits, and flat voice give Sonic Youth its unmistakable edge.

It is no coincidence, (at least to me), that Kim Gordon started out in the NYC art scene, writing for Artforum and working at Soho galleries. There’s something shamelessly art star whore about Sonic Youth. Although they are talented, I can’t help but feel as though they have mostly become who they are because they played the game right. Sophia Coppola, whose movies are always lovely to watch visually and good at evoking a brief, fleeting mood, but ultimately not much more than that, has the same vibe. Still, there’s much to be said about someone who can package “cool” so successfully– or still seem cool, after making as idiotic a video as the one below.

I was sixteen when I picked up Lorrie Moore’s Who Will Run the Frog Hospital. At the time, I was still taking school book-list recommendations, and hadn’t figure out that I should read the New York Times Book Review or the New Yorker to discover new writers on my own.

Little did I know, that an author who was considered to be one of the most impressive writers of her generation wrote this novel that I had picked up from the airport. The book jacket had deceived me. Short and flimsy, it was plastered with a People magazine blurb, and the back jacket copy suggested that this was a breezy coming-of-age novel about two teenaged girlfriends living somewhere vague in upstate New York, right outside of Canada.

Meanwhile, Moore’s career reads like an MFA writer fairytale. Self-Help, her first collection of short stories, was her MFA Master’s Thesis. After her MFA writing teacher referred her to legendary agent Melanie Jackson (famous also for being Thomas Pynchon’s wife), Jackson sold the collection to Knopf when Moore was just twenty-six. This, my friends, almost never happens.

Berrie Carr, is a typical Moore character – witty, dry, a lover of word-play and puns. She is, in so many ways, Judy Benjamin, Samantha Baker, and Gidget all wrapped up in one. The novel begins with Berrie as a middle-aged women vacationing in Paris (a kind of “middle-aged-woman-in-Paris-scenario” that always reminds me of another wonderful book, Jane Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight). She is watching her marriage fall apart. “In Paris we eat brains every night.” She thinks. “My husband likes the vaporous, fishy mouse of them. They are a kind of seafood, he thinks, locked tightly in the skull, like shelled creatures in the dark caves of the ocean…Me I’m eating for a flashback.”

As Berrie’s marriage unravels, she thinks back to her girlhood in her hometown of Horse Hearts and her beautiful best friend Sils. Working together at “Storyland,” a kind of low-rent Disneyland, Sils and Berrie had the kind of best friend relationship—together unconquerable, tough, and better than everyone else—that can do as much damage as good.

Buried beneath Moore’s unassuming book is every memory, painful and exhilarating, that you have about adolescence. A reviewer of The Sunday Times (London) said it better than I ever could: “If you have ever been driving a car on that first warm day of spring—a day when summer once again seemed possible—and heard a song that immediately propel you into a moment from the past richly suggestive of the future, you’ll understand the poignancy and brilliance of Moore’s novel.”

I read Who Will Run the Frog Hospital in one sitting and immediately went out and purchased every other book Moore ever wrote. It was only later, when I was talking to a boarding school girlfriend who grew up in Manhattan and knew about smart, Manhattan-y things like the New Yorker and Harper’s, that I found out that Moore was considered to be a “classy” writer. So classy, in fact, that I could excerpt the book for my senior high school yearbook page, and never grow embarrassed by the choice.

While not all of Moore’s work still does it for me – the jokes sometimes seems dated, the mentality of her novels strangely Midwestern for this 10-year plus New Yorker who has never been to Wisconsin, and The Gate at the Stairs, her long-awaited book, in so many ways a disappointment, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital will always stay with me. The deceptive averageness of the work made it seem, just for a moment, that maybe one day I too, just another suburban zero, could become a writer. And it is also because of Moore that I was introduced to so many other writers who later entertained and enlightened me – Deborah Eisenberg, Ann Beattie, Lydia Davis, and Alice Munro. She remains, to this day, a gold standard.

In a way, it is to Moore’s credit, and the wise publishers who packaged her, that she seems so accessible. Jonathan Lethem said of Moore’s recent novel, A Gate at the Stairs: “Great writers usually present us with mysteries, but the mystery Lorrie Moore presents consists of appearing genial, joshing and earnest at once — unmysterious, in other words, yet still great. She’s a discomfiting, sometimes even rageful writer, lurking in the disguise of an endearing one.” And that, I think, sums up her appeal – she’s an everywoman, but no, not really.

My first introduction to being a woman was through the movies. And the three movies that were most pivotal in shaping who I one day would become, one way or another, had a lot to do with what ran on repeat on HBO and Sunday afternoon TV.

I suppose I could have done worse.  The women featured in “Private Benjamin,” “Gidget,” and “Sixteen Candles,” aside from all being flat-chested (a sign that I must have known well what was coming for me someday), were all charming, multi-facted, and most importantly, striving for something beyond the typical. Although none of these films break any kind of major Hollywood boundaries, these weren’t the girls that took off their glasses, got a makeover, and suddenly turned hot, as in so many of the films I saw as a kid, but the girls that dared to be different and tough — and that was hot.

In “Private Benjamin,” a young and radiant Goldie Hawn, (who beat out Sissy Spacek in “A Coal Miner’s Daughter” for an Oscar in this role), all big blue eyes and a grin that puts her daughter’s to shame, is the suburban Judy Benjamin, an airhead who decides to join the army when her wealthy husband (Albert Brooks) drops dead on their wedding night. Although plot might seem familiar to you — “Stripes,” (but without the token bouncy 80′s boob scenes) or “Clueless” and “Legally Blonde” (this film likely inspired both)– and the film’s Hollywood-feminist ambitions may seem a bit dated, Hawn’s performance makes the film.  She’s terrific at playing a ditz with depth. (The only actress that comes close these days is Anna Farris.) And co-star Eileen Brennan (who whether she likes it or not, will always remain “Mrs. Peacock” to me after her role in “Clue”) is not so bad herself, playing the tough captain foil to the flighty Judy.

Sure, in retrospect, there’s some lameness here when Judy inexplicably morphs from the worst student to the best and is moved to an elite all-male unit, as well as when she falls for a French gynecologist who gives her a first orgasm, but ultimately, Judy’s fish-out-water scenario really resonated with me as a young kid — and still does today.  Maybe it had to do with having a suburban homemaker mom who brought a fondue set camping, but “Private Benjamin” made me really believe that one day, I too could become a smart, tough, independent women, who also liked to paint my nails. And while I don’t care much for New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis, she did say something about Nancy Meyers (writer of this film and later writer/producer/and director of successful female comedies “Parent Trap,” “What Women Want,” “Something’s Gotta Give,” “The Holiday,” and “It’s Complicated”) that I think is worth noting: Meyers “makes female-specific indulgences that, at their irresistible best, are testaments to the power of fairy tales.” Indeed, Private Benjamin was, and still remains, in many sense, my fairy tale — not the princess gets the prince, but the princess gets everything she ever wants.

Another blonde I was smitten with (embarrassingly enough) was Frances “Gidget” Lawrence.  I say embarrassingly because the Gidget I loved was played by Sandra Dee (not Sally Field, who later reprised the role), of the “look at me I’m Sandra Dee” made famous by “Grease,” forever synonymous with pure and chaste – not particular suitable for a once teenaged wannabe riot grrrl, is it?

Sandra Dee’s Gidget is a perky, perfect, tomboy. She just one of the guys — a short little goofball — who defies expectations by becoming, first, an admirable surfer, and second, a truly viable love interest when the guy (Moondoggy) realizes that it is much better to date a girl he has common interests with, than a stacked but boring hottie.

Little did Gidge know how much she schooled me.  Sadly enough, I think I can owe my feigned interest in many a “boy” thing — music, skateboarding, colorful sneakers, for example — to this film. And while I grew to one day love music unabashedly on my own (not just to please a boy), I can’t say the same about skateboarding. Regardless, Gidget taught me right.  Tomboyish girls (or perhaps I really mean, girls who have interests that might not be characterized as typical), at least on the East Coast, are not only a lot more attractive to teenaged boys than girly-girls, but the kind of girls that later grow up to become women.

I always think that White Stripes song where Jack White sings “Yeah, you’re pretty good looking…for a girl, your eyes are wide open,” is about a girl like Gidget: she “good-looking,” therefore more like a boy, and because she more like a boy, she’s smarter. Do what you will with that (yes, I’m aware that some of it is kind of screwed up), but I can owe my part of my rich inner life and eclectic interests to good old Gidge.

And then there’s the red-head – Samantha Baker, of “Sixteen Candles.” Well-dressed, sulky, and easily embarrassed, Sam was the girl that I and every single female in my age bracket related to. She was absolutely average – but in the most perfect way. She wore hats! She had unpopular friends who were actually secretly the coolest! She lived in her more attractive sister’s shadow, only her sister wasn’t really all that attractive! And most of all, she lusts after the hottest guy in school, Jake Ryan, who, OMG! actually loves her back! Sam fends off a stalker geek, makes witty quips, and has her birthday forgotten (and honestly, who doesn’t have this totally awful victim fantasy every once in while, the aftermath which involves a insane family guilt trip that results in all kinds of amazing rewards and a crown in the but, no, really, “my life is the shittiest” category). The beauty of Samantha Baker’s character is that she’s cool, but doesn’t know it — a quality that also proved key in shaping who I later would become.  Exceedingly normal, average people, at least so it seemed in John Hughes world, in fact grow up to become better people who find true happiness.  As her father tells her, “When it happens to you, Samantha, it’ll be forever.” And so began my quest to be as obviously average (and likable!) as possible.