Remembering Rhonda

A short memorial for a girl with big hair

When I was in my mid-20s, I became obsessed with Mormon fundamentalism for some reason. Not with the intention of converting, but more with an idle curiosity about its historical origins. I read several autobiographies of women who had left the FLDS — plural wives and young girls who wrote about unspeakable abuse, like Elissa Wall and Carolyn Jessop. And of course, because the apartment I was renting came with complimentary HBO, I was watching Big Love. Religiously, you might say.

Last week, the actress Daveigh Chase died from meningitis. She was only 35 years old. She’s perhaps best remembered as the voice of Lilo in Disney’s Lilo and Stitch or the evil psycho killer girl from The Ring (how’s that for range?), but I knew her as Rhonda Volmer.

Her hair is so big because it’s full of secrets

It’s pretty amazing, and took some very intense balls for the creators of Big Love to make Rhonda Volmer the meanest character in the whole series. Everything about her screams victim: she’s a young girl, barely a teenager, forced into a polygamous marriage with a septuagenarian man that calls himself a prophet. (Roman Grant, played by the formidable Harry Dean Stanton. He should be the main villain, but even he gets humanized by the writers, like when they show him tenderly holding a newborn and talking about putting aside differences for the sake of “family”).

Throughout the series, several characters fall for Rhonda’s shtick, only to get thrown under the bus so fast, you’d think this bitch was Mackenzie Shirilla. Despite her baby eyes and voice, Rhonda is anything but innocent. She uses sex, blackmail, and calculated cruelty to get what she wants, pitting one character against another, again and again. She’s sociopathic and manipulative, and never once lets her hair down, even when she briefly becomes a stripper. Like I said, intense balls in that writing room.

I hated her. I loved watching her. I couldn’t stop. That was the whole point.

I’ll probably end up writing more about Big Love in the future, because that series really meant a lot to me, in a way that I still can’t quite explain. But for now, I wanted to memorialize Rhonda. Or rather, Daveigh. When I read that she died after experiencing homelessness, I couldn’t believe it. Or rather, I could. The death of James Van Der Beek in February was a tragedy that sparked both sorrow and outrage. On social media, people were furious that a GoFundMe page had been established for Van Der Beek’s family. Of course, donating was optional, but since a cell phone can sometimes double as a judgment machine, the internet was awash with complaints about charity for a well-known actor.

Alyssa Milano wrote about how fame and wealth are not mutually exclusive, and personally, I felt that the Van Der Beek GoFundMe should have been more of a wake-up call than a stroke of divisiveness. As the years and decades have progressed, we Millennials have seen all our nation’s wealth grow increasingly concentrated among just a handful of individuals (and I can name them — doesn’t it feel like you know where all the money is hiding sometimes?) In January, I quit my job, leaving a Fortune 500 company that I had worked at for 10 years, which is a considerable career. At the time of my resignation, my salary was roughly equivalent to the salary that my mother was paid as a community college professor in 2000. My parents have owned three homes in my lifetime, and just returned from a cruise on the Danube river, but I expect to never own even one home. My next vacation will be to Cleveland, Ohio. (I mean, I’m very excited, though. A best friend is getting married and then we’re going to the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame!)

On Big Love, Rhonda’s ultimate fate is unclear, but plenty of young Mormon fundamentalists get thrown out of the cult or run away, experiencing homeless like Daveigh Chase evidently had. We can’t know anything about her financial situation or much of what preceded her sad death, but I just know this: every single one of us deserves a social safety net that actually works. In-fighting and finger-pointing is exactly what the trillionaire (trollionaire?) wants.

I hate that Daveigh wasn’t able to turn her life back around. I’ll probably end up thinking about her anything something reminds me of the FLDS. To be gone at 35 is to give up on so many possibilities. I’m 41 and feel like I’m just getting started. (See: this Substack).

Rest in Power, dear Rhonda.