Mean Girls: Jenny McCarthy's High School Days

Seems like every time Jenny McCarthy talks about her high school days, someone in the south suburbs gets mad.

October is National Anti-Bullying Awareness Month, and Southland native Jenny McCarthy joined Dr. Drew Pinsky on HLN last week to talk about bullying and her experience on the South Side of Chicago at .

"The girls were vicious in an all-girls Catholic school," says Jenny McCarthy, describing how she was beat up and had her hair set on fire by other girls at school and in her neighborhood.

I watched about 20 minutes of the TV interview as the show broadcast photographs of a teen-aged McCarthy from the 1980s, a smiling poofy-blonde cheerleader.

"If you saw a picture of my hair back in the day ... I was a perfect target," she said. "It was very scary."

The actress attended Mother McAuley in the late 1980s, and as a kid she was a cheerleader for Brother Rice and St. Laurence. Her mother still lives in Orland Park.

You don't often think of the pretty girls getting bullied. More often, you think of them as the queen bees who brutalize others. She talked about her high school years last year on The Ellen Show, according to this YouTube clip, when her book came out, saying how girls tried to beat her up with pipes. She told Dr. Drew that girls even threw pies in her face.

I haven't seen pies in the face since the last time I watched a Three Stooges episode.

Ever since her 1990s Playboy pictorial, in which she wore a school sweater and not much else, McCarthy has caught flak from fellow alums.

Bullying is a perennial problem at high schools, and a topic worth talking about. I wonder how the bullying talk on Dr. Drew and in Jenny's book squares with the memories of other McAuley alums.