The Sheedy Effect

I don't ordinarily focus attention on my personal tastes, but as I look back on my life, I realize that I have had secret crushes on women who look like Ally Sheedy (including Ally herself) since the early 1980s.

Now whether this is purely coincidence, or due to the fact that she seems to have inspired a vast cross-section of women who are approximately my age, I don't know.

But there's more than just a look about Ally...it's her whole persona. I seem to remember quite a few young women maturing into the "new" feminine roles of the 1980s principally along paths that Ally herself tread.

Not being a woman myself, I can't really begin to comment on her specific contributions to the Social tranformation of American culture in the late 20th-Century...but I have a "strong feeling" that history will ultimately recall that Ally Sheedy was as instrumental in transforming the Social Landscape of late 20th-Century America as anyone.

EDIT: 10/7/06
Before comments start "pouring in" (lol), I should mention that director John Badham ("WarGames", "Short Circuit") probably tried as hard as anyone to keep Sheedy's career on a respectable trajectory, but was himself a victim of the very social transformations that were examined in his films. But Badham and Sheedy BOTH left their footprints in the muck of the 1980s, at least in the USA.

EDIT: 10/9/06
So you don't mistake me for a star-struck stalker, there's a deeper reason I chose Ally Sheedy as my topic. In "WarGames", computer-junkie David Lightman (Matthew Broderick) is trying to research computer-genius Steven Falken's published work to figure out a secret password into the WOPR computer (at NORAD, unknown to him) to play games online (a novel idea in 1983, when the movie came out).

Jennifer (Ally Sheedy), being more interested in Falken (John Wood) than his computer, reads that Falken's wife and son died in a tragic car accident while Falken was working on the WOPR. Sheedy's heartfelt response is momentary, but totally believable for the purpose of moving the film along (David instantly realizes that the password is "Joshua", the name of Falken's son.)

I remember this moment even years after seeing the film, and that fact alone ranks Ally Sheedy as a model actress in MY mind.