I’m thirty-two years old. Mean Girls came out when I was thirteen, though I didn’t see it all the way through until I was somewhere in high school. Once I did, I spent, say, the next five or six years communicating primarily through lines from Mean Girls. Depending on your mileage with Mean Girls, this might sound terrible, but when you consider I was communicating primarily through Chris Carrabba lyrics, I’m pretty sure I upgraded!

This is nowhere near my favorite line from Mean Girls; that honor has belonged to “FOUR FOR YOU, GLEN COCO!” for many years now, and there must be at least fifteen others I prefer to this one. But Tina Fey’s Mean Girls, like Tina Fey’s 30 Rock, is so reliant on setup-punchline, a merry-go-round where the ponies dropping are the former and the ponies rising are the latter. It’s great when it works. I love Mean Girls because it works. It also means that Mean Girls is not set up to do big things within the guiderails I’ve placed. (Rachel McAdams is done dirty by this set of rules in another movie.) Even “Boo, you whore!” fits the setup-punchline mold pretty neatly. “I can’t go out [cough cough], I’m sick,” Karen tells Regina. Regina fires that sarcastic little scud back, hangs up, and the rest is history.

Of the four actresses playing the title girls in this movie, McAdams is the oldest. She was born in 1978; Lacey Chabert, the next oldest of the group, only turned forty last year. Every few years we on the Interwebs do a little check-in on these four to see who’s having the best career of the bunch. Chabert is the only one who hasn’t been in the lead for some amount of time, although she certainly started faster than any of the others. (As far as I can tell, Chabert seems to be living a perfectly stable life, making a good living, enjoying herself, and not losing her mind in front of God and everybody. For someone who was a child actor, this is like winning the Irish Sweepstakes. I am very happy for her.) Of the other three, Lindsay Lohan very quickly got stuck playing Lindsay Lohan, which turned out not to be good for Lindsay or Lindsay in the long run. Amanda Seyfried got stuck playing adorable musical Barbies (Cosette in Les Miserables, multiple go-rounds in Mamma Mia) for a minute, and I’d argue has gotten her best notices for playing Elizabeth Holmes on TV and not for the role she got an Oscar nomination for. McAdams may not have ever become a giant star, but I also think she’s made out as well as the rest of that group. It’s weird to watch people in their twenties playing high schoolers, but maybe being twenty-six gives you a little more room not to be typecast. There isn’t a lot of Regina George in her roles since then. A lot of Morning Glory, a lot of About Time, but not a lot of Mean Girls.