This ditzy blonde ain't no dummy.
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In the witty, looks-conscious world of Friends, Lisa Kudrow is, at 33, the oldest, the only blonde, the first to marry, and, with her Vassar degree in biology, the most conspicuously educated. Which must be what makes her philosophical about the chain of ditzes she's played--from massage therapist/folksinger Phoebe Buffay on Friends, to Albert Brooks's date in Mother, to a temp in the indie film Clockwatchers, and now to the airhead who pals around with Mira Sorvino in Romy and Michele's High School Reunion.
"Life's a lot easier when you're dumb," Kudrow offers. "You don't take things personally because you're too dumb to get it. Plus, people tell you a lot of information they shouldn't be telling you because they think you're too dumb to do anything with it." With Kudrow and Sorvino heading the cast, the Romy and Michele set was, by Hollywood standards, a brainpower derby: "Mira, I decided, was just a thousand times smarter than me," says Kudrow. "She speaks Chinese! She went to Harvard. Harvard is like rock and Vassar is scissors. Rock beats scissors, Harvard beats Vassar."
Romy and Michele is about two twentysomethings reinventing themselves for their high school reunion. Kudrow, whose father is migraine doctor Lee Kudrow, actually did go to her own five-year college reunion. That was after she met Conan O'Brien ("The truth about Conan and I is that we've always been good friends and we tried dating for three months of that"), but before she married French adman Michel Stern at Malibu's Saddlerock Ranch in a wedding by party czar Colin Cowie ("He gave us a deal because my father was his doctor and had realiy helped him with cluster headaches"), and, of course, before Friends, with its $75,000-plus per episode. She didn't bother to reinvent herself for her fellow Vassar alums ("I think the only lie I told was, like, by omission, by not telling them, 'Yeah, I have soup for dinner every night and I still work at the headache clinic'"), but Hollywood has obviously done the job since.
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Wolf Schneider