Another movie that features the North Shore prominently is Tina Fey’s Mean Girls (2004). Set in Evanston at the fictional “North Shore High,” the film follows protagonist Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan) as she navigates the social treacheries of what has largely been accepted as “the typical American high school.”

When the film came out, I distinctly recall whispers that North Shore High was based on New Trier — the high school I was set to enroll at in a year’s time. (This prospect only exacerbated my pre-freshman nerves.) As the years progressed, the certainty with which my classmates affirmed this rumor grew to the point where we all accepted it as fact. “Tina Fey worked in Evanston. She knows about New Trier,” we told each other in weirdly reassuring tones. We dismissed the fact that Evanston had its own high school that undoubtedly contained pretty, wealthy blondes, a few of whom were presumably mean. We disregarded the reality that Tina Fey based Mean Girls on the book Queen Bees and Wannabes by parenting expert Rosalind Wiseman, who carried out the majority of her research at the National Cathedral School in Washington, D.C. That didn’t matter to us. We were convinced. Probably just as convinced as those poor Arlington Heights kids who think they had a beach somewhere.

I spoke with a few childhood friends about this shared experience, this odd self-delusion we devoured.

“To be fair,” says Derrick, a graduate of neighboring Evanston Township High School who now works in radio in Boston, “Even though Mean Girls was set in Evanston, we thought it was based on New Trier too.”

It probably doesn’t alleviate any misconceptions when New Trier “Trevians” make it a point of conversation to introduce themselves as graduates of “the school Mean Girls was based on.”

“My college friends gave me a lot of shit about that,” says Carly, a childhood friend from my hometown of Wilmette, now a publicist in Chicago. “I was so obnoxious about [Mean Girls] freshman year.”

I myself am guilty of misrepresenting New Trier for my own conversational benefit. I recently had post-work drinks with some new co-workers in Washington, and once we exhausted the usual conversation topics of “Where do you live?” and “Where did you go to college?”, we resorted to the age-old but tireless “Where are you from?”

I always demure when someone asks me that particular question. “Oh, a suburb of Chicago.” I might specify “Just north of Chicago,” if I’m feeling chatty. Never do I claim provenance from the city itself. Although I was born on the North Side and spent a substantial chunk of my early years a stone’s throw from Wrigley Field, born-and-bred Chicagoans are even more merciless than New Yorkers in shaming zip code poseurs. The backpedal is never graceful.

This time, I elaborated. Why not make an impression?

“Oh, I’m from a little town just north of Chicago.” Silence. “It’s actually kind of well-known.” More silence. “Mean Girls was based on my high school…?”

“Did you go to New Trier?” asked a girl across the table.

“Yes,” I said.

“You people never shut up about Mean Girls,” she said. “Why do you think that’s something to advertise — that mean girls went to your high school?”

I pathetically followed up with a John Hughes justification (“My aunt lives three doors down from the Home Alone house!”), but the damage was done. This girl, in all her cantankerousness, was absolutely right. Why on Earth do we brag about graduating from a school that so closely resembles a parody?

“Truthfully,” Carly from my hometown says, “I think [we] believe we’re the premiere area in Chicagoland. Essentially the Beverly Hills of Chicago. But on a grander scale, we realize that’s not all that special. A bunch of big houses on a lake isn’t really a claim to fame. I think people feel the need to justify its mark.”

Here we can pinpoint the central insecurity of many North Shore residents and ex-pats. We grew up in “the Beverly Hills of Chicago” or “the Westchester of Chicago,” not vice versa. No one refers to Pasadena as “the Wilmette of Los Angeles” or Wellesley as “the Lake Forest of Boston.” There’s an innate inferiority complex lent to all Chicagoans that’s especially magnified in those who consider themselves the area elite. It’s a Second City complex.

And in glorifying the slice-of-Americana essence of the North Shore as remedy to this complex, we overlook the rhetorical core of Hughes’s work: Shermer, Illinois is not a perfect place anymore than it’s a real place. It was not created to portray the North Shore — however you choose to define it — in a wholly positive way. Even the least angsty film in the Hughes portfolio, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, was still pretty angsty. (“Ferris, my father loves that car more than life itself.”) Pretty in Pink wasn’t just a love story; it explored the suburban wealth gap, the malaise of privilege. Sixteen Candles, in the proudest of Hughes traditions, conveyed the daily mistranslations that take place between parent and adolescent. Even Fey’s Mean Girls depicted the North Shore as a multilayered locale: a place that, once you peel away the absurd façade of conspicuous consumption and social playacting, contains real people with real problems that can translate across generation, gender, class, race and even nationality.

Ultimately, Hughes’s movies didn’t accentuate the North Shore as an especially distinctive place. The purpose of Shermer was to act as an Everytown, U.S.A., a vessel in which John could deliver relatable stories. And he didn’t just pick the North Shore because he lived there. He understood the place held value not in its distinctiveness, but in its translatability. And therein lies the cure for Second City complex: Worry less about defining the North Shore on a national scale, because the North Shore, in spirit, might define the nation.