On a recent Sunday evening a snaking single-file line of finely dressed, thirty-something men formed at the box office of the Playwrights Horizons Theater on West 42nd Street in Manhattan. Freshly coiffed and visibly anxious, the gentlemen resembled suitors waiting their turns to court a princess. In truth, they simply hoped to score tickets to a sold-out play that, frankly, wasn't even all that good.
The first man in line approached the ticket agent unsurely. "I just wanted to check again to make sure my name hasn't been called," he said. "Where should I stand to wait?"
The next guy, his hair gelled and his suit pressed, asked, "Can you make sure I'm on the list?" A forlorn-looking man standing outside simply mumbled over and over, "I need a ticket, I need a ticket." These men were not here because they wanted to see Dead Man's Cell Phone, a slightly funny play about, as one might suspect, a woman who answers a dead man's cell phone. No, these men were here for Mary-Louise Parker.
What explains the suddenly ascending sex appeal of the 43-year-old actress who, until recently, was best known for her role in the 1991 chick-flick Fried Green Tomatoes? How did the star of such other family-friendly fare as Boys on the Side and The West Wing transform into one of the nation's more coveted sexpots, luring scores of men to see an otherwise unremarkable play? Why does Googling "Mary-Louise Parker" and "MILF" pull up 79,100 hits?
Parker calls it sheer dumb luck. She didn't set out to become a much-beloved sex symbol, she says, it just happened. Her career-changing decision to take a role on Showtime's Weeds as a housewife-turned-pot-dealer, who somehow always seems to end up splayed across a desk in a lacy bra and black panties, was not strategic. "I always took the best thing that was offered to me," says Parker.
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