As Nona in ‘Pete & Pete,’ Michelle Trachtenberg was joyful, dancing with abandon
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Every actor is distinguished by the parts they play and the projects they play them in. I’m not saying it was a career peak for Michelle Trachtenberg — no one wants to peak before they turn 10. But on hearing the news of her untimely passing, Wednesday at 39, my mind went straight past Dawn Summers on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and Georgina Sparks on “Gossip Girl” to Nona F. Mecklenberg, the character played by Trachtenberg — the names rhyme — in Nickelodeon’s “The Adventures of Pete & Pete,” the greatest children’s show of the 1990s, or any other decade, and, really, one of the best shows ever to emanate from a television.
Michelle Trachtenberg, who starred in ‘Harriet the Spy,’ ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ and ‘Gossip Girl,’ was found dead in her home Wednesday at age 39.
Nona was introduced in the show’s second season as a best friend and sidekick for Danny Tamberelli‘s younger Pete (Michael C. Maronna played his older brother, also named Pete), someone to match him in intensity and independence, if not quite in rage and hate of authority. It was Trachtenberg’s first credited role, and if she comes across as a bit of a novice, that is not inconsistent with the series’ heightened, stylized approach — it shared cast and crew with indie filmmaker Hal Hartley, and included a lot of alt-world musicians among its cameos and cast — which magnified the stuff of suburban life into something out of Homer. Trachtenberg and Nona set out together on that sea of life.
The character, a co-conspirator in Little Pete’s grand schemes and an ally in a war against the show’s extravagant bullies — one of whom, nicknamed Pit Stains, also has a crush on her — became important enough that in the third season she joined the opening credits, alongside Pete, Pete, Mom, Dad, Mom’s Plate (she had a metal plate in her head), Ellen (Pete’s friend and sometime crush) and Petunia, Little Pete’s glamour girl forearm tattoo, who could do “25 sacred dances, including the Leningrad slide.” Nona’s forearm was permanently in a cast, not because of any slow-to-heal injury but because she liked the way it made her skin itch. Very “Pete & Pete.”
Blake Lively, Rosie O’Donnell and other Hollywood figures are paying tribute to Michelle Trachtenberg, who died at 39.
Nona’s slice of the titles shows her in a blur of motion, extracted from the third-season episode “Dance Fever,” in which at a school function she tries to avoid dancing with her doting father, played by Iggy Pop, who croons a plea for her to join him on the floor: “I held you on my bended knee / I tucked you in the sack / I carried you around so much / I sprained my lower back.” (The band is Luscious Jackson, who were a little bit famous back then.) Little Pete is going to great lengths to avoid dancing at all, including chugging 15 gallons of creamed corn. But there will be dancing.
There’s no single way that any of us will be remembered, and certainly not in the case of a public figure, when the community of rememberers might include millions of strangers. The “Buffy” fanship is certainly sharing some thoughts about the double death of Michelle and Dawn. But I’m thinking about Nona, dancing and that moment of joy and abandon, that happy blur. (“Pete! That’s it! Follow my lead!”) Co-creators Will McRobb and Chris Viscardi wanted to make something “funny, sad, strange and beautiful,” as they put it to me once. It’s all there, and who could ask for more?
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