Even though I'm a few years younger than Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, I grew up watching the twins as the adorable Michelle on the sitcom "Full House."

As a little kid I didn't understand that Michelle was actually played by two different people. My mom would try to explain it to me. I just thought she was insane. How could she possibly be played by two people?

"Me and Ashley feel like we're totally different," Mary-Kate once said during an interview. That's something that always appealed to me -- to see people who look exactly alike be different.

After "Full House" was canceled and the twins had walked away with two awards from the show's eight-year run, they got into other forms of entertainment.

They started doing movies such as "You're Invited to Mary-Kate and Ashley's Sleepover Party." Every girl my age was dying to own their sing-along tapes. Also, the Olsen twins had awesome fashion sense, and some of their videos were centered on clothes. They were older, but everything they did felt like it was directed to me.

My friends and I idolized them. At every birthday party (which at age 8 and 9 means a sleepover) I went to in 1999 we watched "Passport to Paris" and a few years after that we matured to "Winning London." I'm not sure if we liked the Olsen twins in those movies as much as their cute male co-stars.

"Passport to Paris" and others were the perfect teenage movies. The twins were goofy, they were pretty, and they had a lot of different friends. When we were younger, girls and guys didn't really hang out together, but in the Olsen movies they always had guy friends and did fun things.

They returned to TV in 1998 with "Two of a Kind" and then in 2001 with "So Little Time," which still played to the twin humor and Mary-Kate's tomboyish antics and Ashley's prissiness.

Then they started popping up in the tabloids with whatever famous and not-so-famous boy they were dating that month. Sometimes they went to a football game and their hot cocoa was mistaken for beer, which hurt their wholesome image.

When they turned 18 in 2004, all of the men in the world couldn't be more excited. There were countdowns on the Internet, and Howard Stern seemed to talk about it every day.

That year was also the release of their movie "New York Minute," which was a box-office bomb, but it was my favorite of all their movies. That may be because it has Eugene Levy and Simple Plan in it.

In 2004 the two were also enrolled in New York University. They were going to live the real college life in a dorm: but their version was a penthouse that cost them well over $1 million.

Mary-Kate was getting noticeably thinner and thinner. Under the strain of college and fame, Mary-Kate had snapped and done the inevitable. She had become anorexic. There were also rumors of drug use, but her publicist said that was absolutely not true. The same rumors also haunted Ashley.

Mary-Kate left NYU to recover from anorexia and heartbreak. Her Greek boyfriend, Stavros Niarchos III, broke up with her and then began to date Paris Hilton.

The girls have done little in their real lives that I enjoy. They threw their money around. They pampered themselves. They were famous but didn't seem to do much with their fame.

But I learned while researching this article that they also have done some good things. In 2004 they signed a pledge to allow full maternity leave to all the workers in Bangladesh who sew their line of clothing.

Society wants them to stay adorable, but I want them to show more about who they are. They seem to be fairly intelligent, up-to-date girls with political minds.

The twins seem to be getting better and pulling their lives together. They recently debuted their adult fashion line at the Council of Fashion Designers of America's 25th anniversary awards ceremony. It's terribly impressive. Their look can be very upscale, even preppy, but you can still funk it out with belts and jackets. They've done a better job appealing to the masses than someone like J-Lo. I wouldn't buy her clothing if you paid me.

For my high school long-term project this year, I studied teen-oriented movies and watched more than 150 of them. Although I've enjoyed many of them, there's still a special place in my heart for the Olsens' movies.

Sometimes it's nice just to get away from the teen movies in which every teenager has sex, smokes pot and goes to keg parties. Either the teenagers are not interested in high school or they're too interested. There's a gray area that's not covered very often in movies, and Mary-Kate and Ashley movies give you a different experience.

They are cheesy, are slightly less realistic, have funny, situational humor instead of sexual humor and are refreshing.

I still love their movies. And I'm not ashamed to admit it.