Formative Performances: Anna Chlumsky in “My Girl”

The next performance I want to write about is one that’s close to my heart in a weird way.

When I was a wee lass, I was obsessed with My Girl. I don’t even remember when and where I saw it. All I know is that the main character, Vada Sultenfuss, immediately became a personal hero of mine. She was a hypochondriac with a boy for a best friend, a mortician for a father, and a crush on her young-ish English teacher. She wanted to look more grown-up and feminine but also be one of the boys. She was terrified of death and fascinated with it at the same time. She loved having a woman in the house until that woman became interested in her father.

She was passionate, bratty, angry, imaginative, curious, scared, funny, and determined. I couldn’t take my eyes off of her. I wanted to be Vada with her ridiculous name and her gutsiness in taking an adult writing class when she was eleven years old. For a period of time, this girl was my hero. I owned the novelization of the book, for crying out loud, and read it over and over again until the pages turned brown at the edges and fell out of the binding.

I haven’t seen the whole movie in a decade, and I can’t say with any objectivity if the film is as good as I remember it. I don’t care. Anna Chlumsky, thank you for inhabiting a girl like Vada and showing me that little girls could be as weird and complicated and stupid as little boys. Thank you for this, and as a return for the favor, I’ll pretend that My Girl 2 never existed.