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I once saw a talk by the actress who played Nellie Oleson on Little House On The Prairie and she told a bit of a shocking story.
Her name is Alison Arngrim and she said that what normally would be pretty low key experiences for you and I (buying something at the convenience store, walking down a sidewalk) for her could be like going through a mine field.
This was because at any time some random person might recognize her as ‘Nellie Oleson’ and start yelling horrible things at her.
‘BITCH!’ was the most common thing yelled but some people said way nastier stuff, all in pursuit of revenge on the um, fictional tv character.
It’s so amazing to me that people could see Alison Arngrim trying to buy a soda or something and feel like it made perfect sense to yell at her like she was actually the little girl from the tv show.
Could they really have been so dense as to think that she was actually Nellie Oleson and had lived on the prairie? Or did they think since she was on tv that she was somehow fair game to yell rude things at?
Alison Arngrim explained her own theory of why this kind of thing happened in her book ‘Confessions Of A Prairie Bitch’.
She came to the realization of this theory while she was still working on the show. She was out promoting the show or something and had gone to get a bite to eat while still wearing her Little House On The Prairie costume.
Some girls saw her and not only yelled horrible things but gleefully attacked her:
…I fell to the cement and landed facedown. I closed my eyes before I hit, so I wouldn’t get poked in the eye by anything, and my eyes were still shut tight when I heard my assailants giggle in triumph and run away.
As I lay there, feeling the cool cement against my cheek and hearing the footsteps fade in the distance, I thought, ‘Just how the hell did I get here? I mean, I don’t even know these people, and they kicked me in the butt. Really hard. And now they’re happy about it.’
Between trying to determine if I’d fractured my wrist or cracked a tooth in the fall, I slowly pondered the meaning of all this. I had pretended to be someone else on tv. I had pretended to do things that I don’t normally do and said a bunch of really awful things that I didn’t make up and didn’t really mean.
…I had pretended to be a confident, tough bully, when I was really an insecure, shy, frightened girl who got beat up a lot (like now, for instance). I had done these things because it was my job…
And now, it seemed, I had done it so well, pretended so convincingly, that these two girls really hated me.
…I was never, ever, under any circumstances to wear the dreaded costume in public again. It was simply too dangerous. It incited people.
…I also knew this was not just about the dress anymore. My act, Nellie Oleson, had inadvertently unleashed something in people’s psyches. The injustices that Laura faced on the prairie were too much like the injustices they faced in their own lives.
They wanted to have someone to get mad at. And there I was, in all my smug, ringleted, smirking glory. Hell, I hated me.
Alison Arngrim could change out of the dreaded costume but she couldn’t change out of her own face which many people recognized as Nellie Oleson.
Some people pounced on the opportunity to fuse their own life into the tv story and get back at their own personal Nellie Oleson’s, even if it was at the expense of some poor stranger who was just trying to walk down a sidewalk.
What a sad and bizarre situation… for both Alison Arngrim and the crazy people who couldn’t (or didn’t want to) separate fiction from reality.
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Hi Sisca,
Hey glad to hear that you started up a blog, I’m heading over there right now to take a look.
I read her book too, and it was incredible.
I can also understand what happened. Such characters really evoke a visceral response in kids, and powerful memories in adults. It’s the same reason why I feel like beating some kid’s butt when my stepson tells me how said child mistreated him. It’s not so much that the kid is evil… it just reminds me of the pain of my own childhood (which was all fairly normal, I realize now) and as such I want to erase it all from my stepson’s life. It’s unrealistic and, truth be told, would harm stepson in the long run if I could do it.
All I’m saying is when I was little, I might’ve liked to knock down Nellie Olson if I saw her, too, even though I knew the tv character was fictional.
It’s also a testament to just how perfectly Ms. Arngrim played that part.
Hi Stumblebum!
Yeah it definitely shows that Alison Arngrim was an excellent actor even at a very young age. Unfortunately she had to learn about the side effects of such stellar portrayal of a ‘bad guy’ character the hard way, on hard concrete to be exact 0_0.
She seems to have taken things well though and now has transformed the story of all that harassment into something that makes people sympathize with her POV instead of wanting to do her harm.
I wonder how real-life bullies see things when they grow up. Like when the kid that’s mistreating your stepson grows up will he feel like he did something wrong or still see it as something justifiable?
I think I would’ve preferred to knock down Laura. But that’s just me. :D
Krudler, LOL blasphemy I say!
krudler, I am totally with you on that, especially after Laura got her hair in the bun-of-immediate-maturity.
And, honestly? the fact that the Nellie character turned “good” after Perceval called her pretty just gets my knickers in a twist. The notion that a bad person will turn good just because somebody expresses romantic interest is a HUGE disservice to those who would, for example, keep trying to reform a “bad boy.”
“But if I love him/her enough, he/she will turn good!”
It’s a load of manure and I have no use for it. I love Little House but hold a number of deep-seated grudges against it, such as this one.
Rant over… nothing else to see here. :-)
LOL who knew that there was such an anti-Laura Ingalls (maybe that’s too strong, but you get the idea) sentiment out there? I guess it makes sense though, the bully in Nellie Oleson and the goody two shoes in Laura Ingalls are both destined to rub a lot of people the wrong way.
It would be cool to hear about what Melissa Gilbert’s (the actress who played Laura) experience was re: Little House On The Prairie and how people related to her when they recognized her in public. I’m thinking that no one pushed her down on hard concrete like Alison Arngrim but after these comments I’m starting to wonder :p.
later on in the show, Nellie actually changed for the better, so no. i wouldn’t.
Anon,
Oh hey I forgot about that part, this all makes me want to watch the show again. I wonder if it’s on Netflix or not. Or maybe I’ll just read the books again, haven’t read a word of it since I was six or something like that.
last i checked, they weren’t available on instant play, but Netflix does have them on disc.
Thanks Anon!
Agree! And I read on the web that she was/is Melissa Gilbet´s best friend! :))
Yep you’re right Nairim, Alison Arngrim and Melissa Gilbert were best friends.
Also both of them didn’t like Melissa Sue Anderson, the girl that played Mary Ingalls. It wasn’t necesarrily real hateful or anything, Arngrim described the relationship as “frenemies” lol.