Melissa Explains It All: Tales From My Abnormally Normal Life (4 page)

Personally, these genres meant a lot to me for less thinky reasons. Unlike when I shot commercials in New York, a lot of guest roles and TV movies and miniseries let me travel, and this was when I began to appreciate hotel rooms for their free soaps, chlorinated pools, and pillows that felt like a piece of heaven. Traveling also allowed me to eat a lot of ice cream. No matter where we went, Mom and I explored the sweet shops in every new city we hit.

Remember racing home from the bus stop to watch the
ABC Afterschool Special
? They had serious and often controversial story lines that dealt with big-deal, coming-of-age topics like drug and alcohol abuse, divorce, bullying, interracial friendship, and teen pregnancy. They also had ridiculously dramatic names like
Just Tipsy, Honey
;
The Day My Kid Went Punk
;
My Dad Lives in a Downtown Hotel
; and
Please Don’t Hit Me, Mom
. Well, on Saturday mornings, ABC also aired the much lighter
ABC Weekend Special,
a half-hour series for kids. Unlike their more emotionally charged big-sister shows, these episodes were all based on innocent storybook and literary elements or characters—and, hold the phone, I was in one with Drew Barrymore.

In 1985, Drew and I starred in
The Adventures of Con Sawyer and Hucklemary Finn.
(Who wrote these titles?) This was basically a female take on the classic Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn tale, only here, two teen girls try to prevent a robbery and get into lots of rambunctious trouble in the process. Drew won the main role as Con Sawyer, while I was a character named Cindy, who was Con’s spoiled, bratty younger stepsister. About 75 percent of the cast were kids, so it didn’t take long for us to have our own adventures on location in Natchez, Mississippi—with Drew, of course, as our real-life Huck.

Though I was only nine at the time, Drew was ten and still in her contentious, wild child, dope-smoking stage. She was an intrepid little girl with an audacious personality who’d yet to grow into the sweetheart we all love now. One day, she took the group behind our motel to watch her give a French-kissing lesson with costar Kimber Shoop, who went on to play the title role in
The Ted Kennedy Jr. Story
(yup, a TV movie). I’m bummed to report that she didn’t let me come watch her wiggle her tongue in Kimber’s mouth, because I was a year younger than her, but she did teach me how to backstroke in the motel pool and ask me to her room to watch her on TV in
Firestarter.
All I remember is her enormous earring collection laid out by the motel sink. She had these dangling skeleton ones that struck me as a little daring and creepy for a ten-year-old.

Drew also planned a trip to the mall to see
Desperately Seeking Susan
with the rest of the cast. It was during this field trip that I caught a small but telling glimpse of how Drew likely ruled her family’s roost, when she wasn’t controlling our set. As moms and their kids piled into vans to catch Madonna’s 7
P.M.
film debut, Drew announced that she wanted to do some shopping first, so we’d all need to see the 9
P.M.
show instead. A lot of the moms were thrown by this little spark plug’s audacity, but of course, it was my Long Island mom who spoke up.

“My daughter has to learn her lines and then get to bed at a reasonable hour, so she’ll need to see the 7
P.M.
show,” insisted Mom in a firm but rational way.

“What a bitch!” yelled the star of our movie, once Mom was out of sight.

Though Drew’s mom tried to calmly explain that my own mom was just looking out for me, Drew didn’t apologize or look ashamed. I would’ve had a bump on my head the size of the Appalachian Mountains if I’d muttered such an ugly word at that age. She just got back to gossiping with the other, older girls. She also didn’t realize I was in the back of the van, and that I was upset that she’d called my wonderful mommy the b-word. I’m sure she’d take it back now, if she could.

Much more glamorous than shooting on that backwoods Mississippi lot was a job I scored soon after
Con Sawyer,
a CBS miniseries called
Kane & Abel.
It was about two strangers who share the same birthday—and while one comes from a privileged background and the other a poor one, they both get filthy and serendipitously rich in New York City. I appeared in one scene of this movie, but it mattered for two reasons. First, we shot it in the middle of the night, from 11
P.M.
till 6
A.M.
, and I wasn’t even allowed to stay up this late during slumber parties. Even more exciting was shooting in the lobby of the Waldorf Astoria, one of the grandest hotels in New York City.

Though I was nine at the time, I played Abel’s daughter, named Florentyna Rosnovski, during her seventh birthday party (I always played younger than I was). In the scene, my “dad” and I look out at the elaborate room—with its marble floors, glittery chandelier, and black-tie guests—as he reminds me that the night is “all for me.” I wore a flowing pink party gown, and as a child who couldn’t even afford multiple audition dresses, I could hardly contain myself. I was so excited to be in such a fancy room, wearing a fancy gown,
in the middle of the night,
that there was no need for me to act when the director cued me to show Florentyna’s enthusiasm. For seven hours, I was a mini-Cinderella at an elaborate ball designed all for me—at least until sunrise.

As a break from all the dramatic roles, I also liked guest starring on popular TV shows. Two that I loved were
The Lucie Arnaz Show
and
Saturday Night Live,
which I appeared in three episodes of, with hosts Jim Belushi, Roy Scheider, and Billy Crystal. Working on
SNL
came with the best perks of any project I’d taken on so far. I was allowed to stay up late (again!); met musical guest Billy Ocean, who performed my favorite song, “Caribbean Queen”; and took home a Barbie Dreamhouse from the set (they no longer needed the prop, which meant I really scored).

My all-time favorite guest role, though, was for the cop drama
The Equalizer
; I couldn’t get away from the heavy stuff for too long. This hit was the
Law & Order
of its time and starred stage and screen actor Edward Woodward. Between Mr. Woodward’s sophisticated British accent and dashing silver hair, he was like a warm and fuzzy 007. No wonder he became a hero to little boys everywhere. For my part, I played Laura Moore, a young girl who’d hired the Equalizer to help me and my mom, played by Caitlin Clarke, escape an abusive father, played by Kenneth Ryan. This was my first real taste of an episodic show’s demanding schedule, since we worked long days for about two weeks, on multiple locations around Manhattan.

I enjoyed every minute of it, particularly watching how fast the stunts and dramatic physical performances could turn into bloopers, some of which were never reshot. For example, in one scene, Kenneth hits Caitlin’s character with a right-hand slap, but instead she falls to her left; this is so obvious, they redid it. But in another, Kenneth kidnaps me and then carries me up an on-ramp to the West Side Highway and dangles me over it. I felt so bad for the actor who had to lug my body up an incline and then hoist me into the air that I decided I’d help him try to kill me. If you ever catch the scene, you’ll see that as soon as we reach the railing, I throw my feet up on the edge to relieve some of my body weight. My mom held her breath down below, as she watched her baby hang over an eight-lane highway, without a stunt double. After this harrowing experience, she became much stricter about what I was and wasn’t allowed to do on a set.

At the end of my one-year TV blitz, I couldn’t have asked for a better finale—a month in Vancouver shooting a terrific television movie called
Christmas Snow
with my mom and new baby sister, Emily, who traveled with us. This was the first time I’d ever traveled outside the country for work, and I couldn’t wait to get my passport stamped. If you get the chance to see the movie, it’s about a mean-spirited landlord who goes missing during a snowstorm but learns how to be happy when a woman and her kids, me included, rescue him from the bitter cold. The movie stars Katherine Helmond, aka Mona from
Who’s the Boss,
and the unforgettable comic legend Sid Caesar, who I’d adored since he played Coach Calhoun in
Grease.
Sid was the only star I’d ever worked with who I recognized. The first time I saw him, I was intimidated for sure, but I found him to be serious and kind. We didn’t have a lot of scenes together, though I did with Katherine, who was lovely.

I spent most of my time on the set of our TV family’s candy store and dressed in 1920s costumes. If it wasn’t thrilling enough to wear old-fashioned clothes and watch the crew make falling snow from bubble machines, Mom took me and Emily to the World’s Fair on weekends, and I got to ride the log flume as much as I wanted.

Another thing that really stuck with me about filming
Christmas Snow
is how quickly and effectively it rescued me from feeling the impact of my first career-related rejection. I was lying on the floor, watching bad Canadian TV, when Mom got a call that I’d been cut from a scene in
Crocodile Dundee
in which Paul Hogan magically fixes a cut on my knee. I’d shot in Central Park, just weeks earlier. When she told me, I didn’t lose sleep or stop eating my bag of salt-and-vinegar potato chips. I shrugged my shoulders and put on a pout, and then got distracted when Mom asked if I wanted bubble-gum ice cream from the shop down the street. I can’t believe how quickly I bounced back as a kid, and how little it took to get me there. But I was in the middle of a tremendous run, and even at their worst, my childhood blues couldn’t keep me down for long. They were nothing compared to an
Afterschool Special.

Chapter 4

COMING OF STAGE

Like most preteens, I spent my middle school years trying to figure out how I fit in and who I fit in with. But for me, this went beyond wondering if the football star wanted to “go out” (he didn’t) or if the popular kids would ever ask me to sneak out of flute practice to smoke with them in the hall (they did, once, but I guiltily looked over my shoulder the whole time like a nun taking a pregnancy test). While these tween worries were real, they were compounded by the fact that I was living two parallel and very different lives—one in suburban Long Island, and one among Manhattan’s theater community. In retrospect, it was probably good practice for straddling my two worlds today in suburban Connecticut and Los Angeles. Except now I’m trying to impress soccer dads with my orange slices and fight Hollywood’s It girls for roles.

On Long Island, I loved school but had trouble finding my niche. Though I was outgoing, social, and admired by my peers in elementary school because my face constantly popped up in commercials during
The Care Bears
and
He-Man and the Masters of the Universe,
in middle school, my previous classmates were mixed in with kids from two other large schools. That meant four hundred students, few of whom knew me or cared about my reputation, were tossed together like a salad—and I somehow became the raw onions that get pushed to the side. My closest friends began hanging out with girls who snuck out of the house for make-out parties in the woods and had wittier attitudes than mine, so I was rarely invited to bonfires or to play spin the bottle. And while I excelled at impressing teachers, handing in homework on time, and getting good grades—my sharp memory and that Hart family tenacity helped me through trickier subjects—it wasn’t effortless, so I couldn’t claim “the smart kid” as my identity either. I did excel in math and science, and being on Student Council and playing flute in the band made me burst with pride. But in my quest to become a “nerd,” I fell off around “dork.”

Consequently, I did my own thing and kept a few friends from elementary school that I’d see at lunch or on weekends. While most of my peers experimented with beer, pot, and blow jobs after 3
P.M.
, I went into Manhattan every day. I’d moved on from commercials by age twelve, so the distinguished arena of Off-Broadway theater became more and more my thing. Few of my classmates knew about my other world. The stage was where I began finding my people, and it was soon more interesting to me than anything the kids on Long Island could come up with. Let ’em have their cliques and near-miss attempts at popularity and dating. I had a whole secret life, filled with eccentric and smart adult role models, and an audience’s applause every night.

Theater was a different beast than commercial work. The lines were obviously meatier, but the hours were long, budgets were meager, and the critics’ expectations were elusive. It’s similar to being in an independent, extremely low-budget film, where everyone pools their talents to make a piece of art that they hope will resonate with an audience. It’s not like theater is a great moneymaker for actors either, especially Off-Broadway. I think it actually cost my family money for me to do so much stage work, since we put about a hundred miles a day on our car, paid for gas and tunnel tolls, and then hired a wonderful English au pair named Sarah to spend time with my siblings while Mom was with me at most rehearsals and performances.

When I was around twelve years old, I began working with big-name actors, directors, and writers. Three performances stuck out as having the most impact on the person and actor I was becoming. The first was a small lab reading of
The Valerie of Now,
written by Peter Hedges and directed by Joe Mantello, for the prestigious Circle Repertory Company. For those who don’t know, a lab reading is like a one-week rehearsal and performance for theater members, to decide whether the funders want to produce the play—kind of like a TV pilot, but for the stage.

In
The Valerie of Now,
I played a little girl who “rides” a bike (it was attached to a contraption that let me pedal in place) while performing an emotionally gutsy monologue. It was about twenty minutes long and included a lot of ’70s songs like “Stand by Your Man” and Minnie Riperton’s “Lovin’ You,” which I had to listen to over and over to learn the lyrics. (As a twelve-year-old, I’d have much preferred to spend QT with Bon Jovi.) So as I biked down the street/stage, I talked and sang to myself and to the neighbors I passed. It can be hard enough to walk and talk on a stage, but try riding a bike that’s going nowhere, while delivering lines and hitting all the right notes to music you’ve never heard before—including the falsetto in “Lovin’ you/I see your soul come
shinin’
through…” I mean, thank God I don’t do musicals.