Alison Arngrim has been a b-tch since eighth grade.
But in the five decades since that epithet was first hurled her way at Bancroft Junior High School in Los Angeles, she hasn’t always embraced it.
“It took me a long time to figure out which side my bread was buttered on, but once I did, I never turned back,” Arngrim writes in her 2010 memoir, “Confessions of a Prairie B-tch.”
“I will happily, wholeheartedly embrace Nellie Oleson, ‘Little House on the Prairie,’ and all the fans worldwide until the last bitchy breath leaves my body,” she writes.
Yes, Arngrim played TV’s original mean girl — a character who debuted Sept. 18, 1974, on “Little House,” prompting, the following day, the foul epithet from another student at her junior high school.
Arngrim rolls into town Thursday at LIPS — MotorRow ShowPalace, with a covered wagon full of behind-the-scenes stories from her seven years on the show.
Arngrim, it turns out, is not actually a b-tch — at least not during the half-hour of so we chatted by phone in mid-May. No question was seemingly off limits, including her nonrelationship with her real-life brother, who, when she was a kid, molested her several times a week, she said.
Arngrim speaks a mile a minute, unlike her ringleted TV show character, who was sure to enunciate every cruel syllable she uttered to the goodhearted Laura Ingalls, portrayed in the series by Melissa Gilbert.
It’s been a giddy few months for the surviving cast members of “Little House,” Arngrim said. Last year was the 50th anniversary of the show’s premiere, prompting a host of cast member events. Netflix is working on a reboot, although without any of the original cast members.
“My head is spinning,” Arngrim said.
She still acts and is a well-known AIDS and child welfare activist.
Her one-woman show pulls from her autobiography, in which we learn that Michael Landon (TV’s “Little House” producer, frequent director and patriarch of the Ingalls family) was a hard-drinking, tough, but fair boss.
“He respected me,” she writes. “Respect is something very hard to come by for child actors. They are often treated as dumb animals or props, objects to be moved about in service of the plot or the other actors.”
Bare flesh rarely makes an appearance in a world of prairie necklines — unless it was Landon’s own.
“Every time he gets injured, it’s always his ribs. Did you ever see him break a leg or an arm?” Arngrim asked. “No. He breaks his ribs, and then his shirt comes off.”
Arngrim was and remains good friends with Gilbert. But the cast didn’t always get along. Arngrim said she never managed to penetrate the aloof exterior of Melissa Sue Anderson, who played Mary, the oldest Ingalls child on the show.
As for the audiences at her lives shows, Arngrim said while it’s generally more women than men in the seats, it runs the gamut, and is a huge hit within the gay community.
“It started because Nellie and Mrs. Oleson (her mother on the show, played by the late Katherine MacGregor) are high camp,” Arngrim said. “You cannot get campier than Mrs. Oleson.”
Then there are the die-hard fans who have a strong emotional attachment to “Little House.”
“It’s not so much that they want to go back to the show; they want to go back to how they felt when they watched it the first time,” she said, recalling the words of one of her fellow actors on the show, Dean Butler, who played a grown-up Laura Ingalls’ husband, Almanzo Wilder.
One woman told Arngrim she’d spent a year in a body cast. What saved her from losing her mind? Nellie, Laura Ingalls and the rest of the “Little House” gang.
Arngrim’s show highlights the lighter, funnier aspects of being on “Little House,” but sometimes during the audience Q&A, she’s asked to delve into darker stuff.
“I absolutely talk about the whole syndrome of all these people hating me for things I did when I was 12 while pretending to be somebody else,” she said.
Arngrim said she’s still recognized a “minimum of every other day.” The eyes — big, blue and daring you to look away — are a dead giveaway.
Despite the title of her book and show, no one has ever dared to yell the b-word at her on the street or from the audience, she said.
“Once in a while, they do ask me to write (in the book), ‘To one b-tch from another,'” she said. “I believe in giving the people what they want.”