Classic Rant #446 (February 16, 2011): Wednesday's Birthday On Wednesday

Remember the kid who played Wednesday on the TV show "The Addams Family?"

Her name is Lisa Loring, and she turns 53 today.

Although I preferred "The Munsters" as far as the creepy TV show trend that lasted a few years in the 1960s, one of the reasons I watched "The Addams Family" was because of Wednesday. Even as an eight year old kid, I guess I must have had a crush on her.

She was a cute kid, but in real life, she has had several challenges to meet, and overcome.

Loring was a military brat, meaning that her parents were in the military. She wasn't even born in the continental U.S., but in the Marshall Islands, where her parents were stationed.

Her mother was an alcoholic, and died when Loring was in her teens and way out of the Wednesday character, a role that lasted just two years.

I can't find much about her teenage years, but I know that in her early 20s, she was on the soap opera "As the World Turns," a gig that lasted two years. She turned from a cute kid to quite a vivacious young lady, and she had that soap opera look, if you know what I mean.

She then was featured in "The Addams Family" reunion film on TV (not the theatrical movie), and heck, she was a beautiful woman by this point.

Around this time, she was married and divorced twice.

She then married again, and for a few years in the late 1980s and early 1990s, she was on every talk show known to man with her husband.

Her husband, Jerry Butler, was one of the hottest porn stars of the day.

Need I say more?

I guess she knew what he did for a living when she married him, but she evidently couldn't handle being married to a guy who slept with thousands of women, so she went on all the talk shows--with him, by the way--to discuss this problem she had.

Well, I guess she never conquered the problem, because she divorced him in the early 1990s.

I know that sometime after that, she went to rehab, worked in public relations with a hotel chain, and got really heavy.

And that is where the information stops. I don't know what happened to Loring after this period, and she probably wants it that way.

Which is fine with me. I just have those two images in my mind of her: that cute little kid and that beautiful girl in her 20s.

Now that she is 53, who knows where she is in her life now?