From the Department of Holy-Crap-How-Did-I-Get-to-Be-This-Frakkin’-Old? comes the news that today is Molly Ringwald’s 40th birthday. Forty. Wow. Hard to believe that so much time has passed since I first laid eyes on her in the first season of The Facts of Life. (Yes, I’m one of the three people that actually remembers her being on TFoL, before she was jettisoned along with several other girls in the second-season retool.)

Of course, everyone knows her breakout role was in the seminal Eighties teen flick Sixteen Candles, in which she played hapless Samantha Baker (hence the title of this entry), whose entire family utterly forgets her sweet-sixteen because of the chaos surrounding her older sister’s wedding. (As it so happens, I caught a few minutes of Candles on TV the other night; I still think it’s pretty damn funny, although I grant that you maybe had to be there at the time to think so. If I ever get around to having kids, they probably won’t understand enough of the cultural underpinnings of the movie to get the jokes.)

I’m not shy about admitting that I had a pretty hard crush on Molly back in her Sixteen Candles/Breakfast Club days. She was about my age and her characters seemed like girls I might actually know, as opposed to the usual perfect automatons created by Hollywood make-up artists (Ferris Bueller’s girlfriend Cameron, for example, was utterly cool and utterly beautiful and no one like her has ever existed in any high school anywhere on this — or probably any other — planet.) Molly’s career faltered as she matured — she reportedly turned down the lead roles in both Pretty Woman and Ghost (doh!) — but she luckily managed to avoid the drugs, booze, and general nonsense that befell many of her fellow “Brat Pack” contemporaries.

A year or two back, the Girlfriend and I saw Molly Ringwald in the touring revival of the Broadway musical Sweet Charity, and although I know the critics weren’t very kind about her performance, I thoroughly enjoyed the evening. Maybe that was simply because I enjoy seeing someone I used to like return to the spotlight, or maybe it was just another case of the critics being unnecessarily harsh and snobby. Either way, it was good to see her again. I’d love to hear that a comeback is in the offing…

(Hat tip to SamuraiFrog, who brought this my attention and shares some similar sentiments about Ms. Ringwald…)