A high-maintenance single mom going freak-city over two teenage girls in a dingy Indianapolis apartment may not sound like the perfect premise for adolescent arousal -- but throw Valerie Bertinelli into the mix and you've got the steamiest babe next since Barbie's Malibu Beach House.

     The girl who became Eddie Van Halen's hottest lick was pretty much the only element of the '70s chick-com One Day at a Time that struck a chord with male viewers. The 12-step education on women on the verge of nervous breakdowns (think Thelma & Louise with Leif Garrett posters and a laugh track) was undeniably directed at a female audience, but Bertinelli's Barbara Cooper -- the baby sister who eventually burst through her V-necks -- attracted a tidal wave of testosterone.

     Sister Julie (Mackenzie Phillps), a walking rehab manual, acted like a crackhead and looked like the Cryptkeeper. Meanwhile, mother Ann Romano (Bonnie Franklin) was a "rage-aholic" -- or in the show's parlance, "Italian." So it was easy to reserve the softest spot in our hearts -- and the hardest in our jeans -- for Barbara, the family's easygoing enabler who was happy to take a pie in the face if it meant that everyone else could have their cake and eat it too.

     Sure, we admired the shape she gave to a pair of gym shorts as the only girl on the high school basketball team, but we were also attracted to her unflappable willingness to be a Weeble who could take it on the chin and bounce back with a smile. In one episode, good old Barbara relinquished her bedroom so that naughty Julie could soil the sheets with -- gasp! -- a boy. In a later one, she even gave up her freedom when she agreed to raise her big sister's baby because Julie was nowhere near mature enough to handle the responsibility. Barbara's imitation of a grown-up made us realize that this teen hoopster in hip-huggers would someday be the perfect woman to play one-on-one with.

     Still, it was her maturing process that got us interested in the first place. Her transformation from high-top-sportin' kid to tube-top-stretchin' twentysomething was the kind of natural phenomenon they build national parks around. Unfortunately, Bertinelli eventually ditched sitcoms for movies that kept her on the victim's list in every way imaginable -- from being a lusty nun in Shattered Vows to a catalog commodity in I Was a Mail Order Bride to a gambling addict in The Seduction of Gina.