The real Glen Coco from ‘Mean Girls’ grew up in Upper Darby

Tina Fey’s Mean Girls can take credit for some of the most well-known movie quotes in the last 20 years of pop culture, from Gretchen Wieners’ catchphrase, “That’s so fetch,” to Karen Smith’s weather report, “There’s a 30 percent chance that it’s already raining.” In a recent interview promoting the Mean Girls musical movie (in theaters Jan. 12), Fey admitted that her favorite line uses the name of a real person she grew up with in Upper Darby: “You go, Glen Coco!”

In the movie, Damien Leigh delivers the line as he hands out candy canes to high schoolers, prompting Wieners to fear that she’s no longer in Queen Bee Regina George’s good graces. From film to stage musical and now back to film, that quote has stayed in the script — and audiences expect to hear it.

“It’s just my brother’s friend’s name … and now I’ve ruined his life,” Fey joked. When she wrote the script, she used “random names” from people in her life, including Glenn Cocco (Fey changed the spelling slightly).

» READ MORE: We watched ‘Mean Girls’ with a very smart teen. Here is what she thought.

Now a 61-year-old film editor in Los Angeles, Cocco grew up in Upper Darby and has been friends with the Fey family for many years, according to Yahoo Entertainment. Cocco and Peter Fey, Tina’s older brother, attended Upper Darby High School and Temple University together. Before Mean Girls was released in 2004, Cocco saw an early cut of the film at the Fey family home. He thought the line was funny but had no idea that his name would be practically immortalized and still getting laughs decades later.

Cocco is used to people reciting Mean Girls to him and seeing his (misspelled) name on everything from T-shirts to mugs, but he doesn’t think it’s “ruined his life.”

“I get a laugh sometimes when I purchase something using my credit card,” he told Yahoo. “There are a lot of different generations exposed to the movie, so sometimes it’s inescapable.”