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coming out like Meredith Baxter had recently done.

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My Meredith Baxter Birney crush dates back to a short lived series "Bridget Loves Bernie" with her Jew hubby at the time.

She was an early shiksa template on my young tween mind.

I moved from her to Cybill Shepherd [I LOVED her in "The Heartbreak Kid"] and then to Susan Blakely, then to Melanie Griffith ["The Drowning Pool" & "Smile"], who was at least closer to me in age, then to ...

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Here's what she looks like now. I remember "Bridget Loves Bernie". It was supposed to be THE hit show of 1972-73. It was based on the 1920's hit Broadway play "Abie's Irish Rose"

The play also provided the basic plot inspiration for the 1972-73 television series Bridget Loves Bernie (CBS), which starred Meredith Baxter and David Birney (who later became husband and wife in real life) in a kind-of reversal of Abie's Irish Rose in that Birney played struggling young Jewish cab driver/aspiring playwright Bernie Steinberg, whose parents ran a modest family delicatessen, and Baxter played Irish Catholic daughter of wealthy parents Bridget Fitzgerald, who falls in love with and elopes with Steinberg to the disappointment of both sets of parents. (The casting also inverted real life, since Birney himself is of Irish descent.) Unlike the play and radio show that inspired it, Bridget Loves Bernie would be cancelled after a short enough life because CBS reputedly tired of protest letters the show's intermarriage theme received---despite the show placing in the top five ratings for its season.