MOLLY RINGWALD:
The actress plugs meningitis shots as well as her latest film
Molly Ringwald says she was 18 or 19, a few years after her breakout role in “Sixteen Candles,” when out of nowhere she started to suffer severe headaches that did not stop.
“I was in Los Angeles; I wasn’t in the middle of making a movie at the time, just hanging out with friends,” says Ringwald, whose new Netflix movie, “Kissing Booth 3,” arrives Wednesday. “And I’m not a headachy kind of person. I knew something was wrong.
“I just knew in my body it was something that I needed to be concerned about,” she says.
“So I was rushed to the hospital and I was given a spinal tap, which is not a pleasant experience. But that’s how it was diagnosed.”
Ringwald had viral meningitis, an acute inflammation of the membranes in the brain and spinal cord, and with medical treatment, she soon recovered.
At the time, in the ’80s, there were no vaccines for viral meningitis or the even more dangerous and potentially deadly bacterial meningitis.
But that has changed, and that’s led to Ringwald’s off-screen role as a spokeswoman for National Meningitis
Association and The 16 Vaccine campaign, urging teens and their parents to make sure they get the second of two bacterial meningitis vaccine shots around the time they make birthday wishes on their own 16 candles.
“As many people know, I am the parent of three children,” says Ringwald, 53. “One’s a teenager and two preteens. And I very much believe in protecting my kids. They’re all vaccinated for everything they can be vaccinated for.”
When she was asked to lend her celebrity to the push to make sure teens complete their bacterial vaccinations, her real-life role as a mother, her past portraying teens, and her own brush with the viral form of the illness made her an immediate yes.
The COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdowns that followed caused a large dropoff in routine childhood or adolescent vaccinations, leaving many unprotected from preventable diseases.
“You’re supposed to get the first one as an 11-yearold and then the second one is recommended around 16,” she says of the MenACWY vaccine for meningitis. “And it’s just fallen way off. For whatever reason, parents are not bringing their teens in to get their second vaccinations.
“So I decided to join up.”
A devastating disease
Ringwald’s co-stars in a recent telephone interview included Dr. Oliver Brooks, a Los Angeles pediatrician, and Jonathan DeGuzman, a meningitis survivor.
According to one study, 40% of parents surveyed said they missed vaccination appointments for their children due to the pandemic, Brooks said, adding that the study is now a few months old, and the number likely higher.
The threat of meningococcal disease is a kind of sepsis caused by what Brooks described as “the worst bacterial infection you can have,” describing how a patient can progress from first diagnosis to hospitalization more swiftly than with most other diseases.
“Even if you diagnose it, you can potentially die from it,” he said. “So what I say is it’s an infection that you want to prevent as opposed to diagnose and treat.”
DeGuzman, who lives in National City, was a college student 15 years ago when he suddenly fell severely ill. At the time, vaccines for bacterial meningitis were still new, and he’d not received one.
“My mom actually found me, and she told me I wasn’t responding,” he says. “She was checking me, thinking what I had looked like chickenpox, but it was all over my body and they were turning purple. And after that, she said my legs, my feet were turning purple and black.”
DeGuzman was rushed to a hospital, where he spent the next 12 days mostly unconscious. When he awoke, his mother told him she and his father had started to plan his funeral, so gravely ill he’d become. To save his life, all 10 fingers and his feet were amputated.
“I want parents to know that the vaccine is available,” he says. “It’s really important to have the first dose at 11 or 12, and the second dose, which is a really important one, when you’re 16, so they can be protected once they go out into the world.”
Teens and mothers
Ringwald’s third appearance in the “Kissing Booth” franchise fits neatly into her current advocacy, given the ways in which teens often spread meningococcal disease.
“It’s a sweet movie, very feel good movie, but yes, meningococcal disease, one of the reasons why it hits young people is because of kissing,” she says. “And because of kids being in tight spaces and teen sports and sharing beverages and just all hanging out together as teens want to do.
“So yeah, you could say that there’s a connection there between that and what I’m doing now” with The 16 Vaccine.
As for playing Sara Flynn, mother of teenage boys Noah and Lee in the “Kissing Booth” movies, that bit of fantasy is a breeze compared to the realities of parenthood, Ringwald says with a laugh.
“Being a mother on-screen is much easier,” she says. “In the ‘Kissing Booth’ movies, I like to call myself the Teen Buddha. I’m the one that all the kids go to, and I have very wise, sage advice, and they’re all really happy to hear what I have to say.
“That’s not the case with my own kids at all,” Ringwald says. “I have absolutely zero cred with my own kids, which I think is pretty neurotypical of teenagers.
“They just see me as their mom. I feel like that’s the way that it should be, right?”
That extends to her kids’ interest in their mom’s work, Ringwald says.
“They love to watch other movies,” she says. “I mean, I can’t tell you how many times my [older] daughter’s watched ‘Mean Girls.’ I just watched ‘Eighth Grade,’ which I loved, with my son yesterday.
“But my movies are a little different. It’s always weird,
I think, to see your mom in a movie. I mean, I think they’re super-proud of me, but they prefer just to think of me as their mom.”
As for her trilogy of teenmovie classics — “Sixteen Candles,” “The Breakfast Club” and “Pretty in Pink” — her 18-year-old daughter has seen those, Ringwald says, and the 12-year-old twins will soon.
“That’s actually something that we’re planning to do any day now,” Ringwald says. “I’m getting myself up for it.
“She liked it,” she says of her oldest child. “I feel like it was a little bit too early because there were certain aspects of it that she didn’t really understand, that weren’t age-appropriate.
“But, having said that, she really did get a lot out of it the first time she saw it,” Ringwald says. “It was a very emotional evening for both of us.”