Melissa Explains It All: Tales From My Abnormally Normal Life (3 page)

The audition was at 1515 Broadway, in the heart of Times Square. This landmark now houses the Viacom headquarters, including Nickelodeon, which would later produce
Clarissa Explains It All
—but in the early ’80s, it was just a random office building dwarfed by Forty-second Street’s booming porn and prostitute business. Once I got inside, I quickly scanned the waiting room and noticed that all the girls looked like me—blond hair, blue eyes, big smiles.

Even so, I was booked for the Splashy job. I partly credit my lucky dress, which I’d continue to wear to most of my auditions until I outgrew it. (It still hangs in my closet, in case I ever have a daughter.) But at this, my very first shoot ever, I had lights, cameras, and what felt like a hundred people staring at … my four-year-old boobies in a bubble bath. I was mortified. In the end, though, it didn’t matter how I looked naked because the client only used shots of my hands in the commercial, and then featured another blond-haired, blue-eyed child’s face and body in the ad. I didn’t even know I had been replaced until Mom recently told me the story. I’ve been telling talk show hosts for years that the little nudie girl in that bubble bath is me, even though I secretly wondered why she didn’t look familiar.

Splashy was a win for my early career, even if our manager did turn out to be a real swindler. (Rule number one of showbiz: Never give an agent or a manager a dime before booking a gig.) Mom fired him after my fifth audition. She began managing me herself and quickly learned how to promote my all-American looks among the industry’s top agents. I became a pro at acting like a little adult to make my mom and the casting people happy. I was officially a working girl (not in a
Pretty Woman
kind of way).

*   *   *

When I was just starting out, I worked mostly in commercials, and my parents rarely fussed over my ability to land the jobs over and over again. They never told me I had a special skill or called all the relatives when I booked a gig. So to me, acting was just something I did in my free time, the way other kids play sports or take ice-skating lessons. In fact, I acted, danced, and joined Brownies, though acting always took priority. Sometimes I’d even miss a dance recital, talent show, or graduation to Girl Scouts so I could make it to an audition or shoot a commercial. But I never thought this happened because my parents were positioning me for a bigger career. More like Mom was learning that our business thrived on relationships, and if we skipped meetings or opportunities, our agents, managers, and casting directors would stop sending me out for jobs.

Commercial auditions were a blast for me, and it helped that they were quick and dirty. My parents didn’t have a fax machine and e-mail hadn’t been invented yet, so agents sent Mom scripts in the mail or read them to her over the phone, and she’d write down my lines. Then she’d recite them to me (I couldn’t read yet) and I’d memorize the part at home, in the car, or in the waiting room of the actual audition. I had the memory of a Bronx Zoo sea lion—I learned my tricks fast and performed them with ease and grace. In the audition room, I’d be in front of two to ten gruff grown-ups, including a casting director, director, producer, and the discerning client. I’d stand on a masking tape X that marked my spot, look right into the camera like the host on
Romper Room,
and say my lines with enthusiasm and boatloads of charm. Ta-da!

“Great, thank you,
next
!” the casting director would shout. On to the next blond kid …

After my audition, Mom always treated me and whichever sibling came along to a snack, like a blueberry turnover from Au Bon Pain, broccoli pizza in Midtown, or an ice-cream Chipwich to split. (Seriously—we were too thrifty to buy one for each of us.) Once after an audition in Harlem, I wanted KFC, which meant taking a detour home through a sketchy part of town. Mom told us to roll up our windows and lock the doors, and then she freaked out when a group of men began chasing our car down an alley. She swore up and down that they were after us, but as it turns out, we were just on a one-way street and they were trying to tell us to turn around. We couldn’t hear what they were saying because our car was so tightly sealed, but even still, we never trolled for goodies in that neighborhood again.

After a long day in the city, I’d zone out on the ride home. We spent up to twelve hours a week in transit for my jobs, and once a year I’d hear Mom scream about clocking so much time in the car—usually when she reached her breaking point, often during tax season. Don’t even get her started on how she went into labor in the Midtown Tunnel when she was pregnant with Lizzie. Usually, though, I’d just close my eyes and fantasize that all the ’80s lyrics on the radio were about me. I’m never gonna dance again either, George Michael. I just called to say I love you.

*   *   *

Back on Long Island, elementary school life was significantly less glamorous than I let my peers think. After a few ads ran on TV and in the local papers when I was in fourth grade, and I began to noticeably miss school for auditions and shoots, kids began to ask a lot of questions. Do you ride in a limo? Do you live in a mansion? Do you know ALF?

I dodged answering most of them, usually by changing the subject or rolling my eyes, since it all sounded so stupid and suck-up-y to me. The truth also wasn’t half as interesting as their perception. My mom drove a white Oldsmobile station wagon with a wood panel down the side. We lived in our cramped ranch at the end of an isolated block and used my dad’s lobster traps as end tables and his old ship’s wheel as the top of our coffee table. It would be a few more years before my girlfriends would care that I knew Joey Lawrence but not a puppet alien.

I think all this bobbing and weaving is why I liked running into my audition friends in the city—Joey, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Soleil Moon Frye, and Lacey Chabert, to name a few. Since we shared the same acting “hobby” and saw each other a lot, I felt like we had this time-consuming interest in common that I didn’t share with the kids at home. They just got what I did, and I didn’t have to explain it to them. It also helped that I was too young to view my city friends as professional competition, though we were often going for the same roles. (The parents, on the other hand, were in it to win it. Most saw dollar signs from the start.) A lot of times, the means to a job was acting like a kid—like trying to roller-skate for a part on
Another World,
or riding bikes with Joey Lawrence and Soleil Moon Frye during a Ron Howard audition for
Little Shots
—so it hardly felt like we were working. We were encouraged to just be ourselves, so if we got booked for doing our best, we thought we deserved it. Years later Soleil told the press a story, while I was sitting next to her, about how she ran into a little girl in the elevator after auditions for the
Punky Brewster
pilot and was so worried that she didn’t get the part because the child told her mom that
she
did. After the interview, I confessed to Soleil that the elevator girl might have been me. I never would have said this to be mean, but I did land a lot of jobs because I was such a confident child. That said, we all know who scored
Punky,
so clearly bravado only goes so far.

Between the ages of four and twelve years old, I booked more than a hundred commercials, including national spots for Life Savers, Twinkies, Arnold Bread, Tylenol, Barbie (sadly, no freebies here), and the first Chrysler minivan. I also kept busy with regional work. I crammed so many lines into my child-size brain that some of them decided to stick around forever, like the commercial I did for Connecticut Natural Gas:
“You can probably tell just by looking at me that I’ve been a homeowner for years! Nice, isn’t it [while gesturing to my giant dollhouse]—Dutch colonial, three bedrooms, very up to date. But believe me, a big responsibility. Especially when it comes to saving energy…”

I’ll spare you the rest, but suffice it to say that reciting ads took up a lot of my time and gray matter in those early years. In between, I did some TV work, took on modeling jobs for catalogs and ads, acted in feature films, and started to do theater too. I was an aspiring Shirley Temple—that quintessential child actress whose success story I worshiped, and whose signed pictures, movie posters, and porcelain dolls I collected and still have today.

I accomplished a lot of different stuff at a young age, but commercials could be the most grueling, though not because I learned pages of dialogue or worked eighteen-hour days. One of the most challenging jobs I did was a Barbie pony commercial, because it tested my young discipline and self-control in a big way. Here, two other girls and I were asked to peek over a table at a row of beautiful, shiny plastic horses. Each one had a silky mane and a foot raised, as if it were frozen in mid-canter, but we girls could only
look
at these toys—no touching allowed.

Every time the director yelled “Cut!” a prop stylist rushed to the table to brush, style, spray, and essentially play with the horses’ hair, which was torture for me, because I wanted in on the action too. Instead, I had to sit still and do my job on cue. I’d learned about self-discipline early on, when I worked with Bill Cosby in a pudding commercial. Every time a giggly, Jell-O-eating child “misbehaved”—say, mentioned that he had a stomachache or asked to trade his chocolate dessert for vanilla—Bill promptly gave ’em the boot. So from then on, I always respectfully did what I was told while flashing a camera-ready smile, even if it drove me insane.

Sometimes I could go too far in my eagerness to please. I once shot a Fritos ad that sold the salty corn chips as an incentive for children to clean their plates during meals. For this spot, I had to eat chunky forkfuls of meatloaf, peas, and mashed potatoes—and after every bite, drink from a tall, cold glass of whole milk. For three hours, I did nothing but bite, drink, bite, drink, bite, drink. We did these takes no less than what felt like fifty times, and although the director offered me a spit bucket after I chewed my food, I swallowed it all down instead. I was too embarrassed to spit in front of strangers, and as a result, Mom said this was the only time she’s seen a person literally turn green. As if things weren’t nasty enough, the director then asked me to cram my face with nothing
but
Fritos—one at a time, in handfuls, throwing them in the air and trying to catch them in my mouth … By the time we wrapped, I’d eaten enough meat and potatoes to sustain an army of lumberjacks, and to this day, I still have an aversion to corn chips. I can’t even smell them without gagging. Good thing Fritos had yet to invent some of the flavors they have now, like Chili Cheese and Chutney. Chutney! I’d have barfed peas for days.

*   *   *

It was during these adventurous and influential years that my parents insisted I was just like all the other kids, that my friends thought I would be the next Elisabeth Shue, and that I saw compelling signs that both impressions were legit and meaningful. I’ll never forget the time that all my worlds seemed to come together in a way that made sense, felt really good, and validated the person I wanted to be when I grew up. And yes, it had to do with a commercial job.

For some reason, I don’t remember the audition for my favorite Rice Krispies ad, but I do recall loving the actual shoot, because I was asked to play an upright piano that made no sound as a make-believe Snap, Crackle, and Pop danced along the ledge. I really had to use my imagination to pull this off, instead of simply memorizing lines, since I talked to three invisible cartoon men who danced on soundless keys while singing, “It’s fun to put Snap, Crackle, Pop … into your morning!” The animated characters and the piano music were added in post-production.

The commercial aired a few months later, around the time that my second-grade teacher, Mrs. Tresham, had a baby. Although she was in her thirties, I fantasized about being her best friend—she was pretty, kind, and really young compared to the frumpy old schoolmarms who stalked the halls at Cherry Avenue Elementary. When she was out on maternity leave, all of the students, especially the girls, couldn’t wait for her to get back and tell us about the new addition to her family. It was a huge event in the life of a seven-year-old.

The day Mrs. Tresham returned, she called me to her desk after class.

“Melissa, I’ll never forget seeing you on TV while I was in the hospital having my son,” she said. “Your smile really helped me get through labor!”

As an adult who’s given birth three times now, I can’t fathom having a warm association with anything that happens when you’re in that much pain. But as a child who looked up to Mrs. Tresham, I remember feeling so important to be part of such a big, happy moment for her. My hobby was actually special enough to help someone I really liked, and she first recognized me on the television and then acknowledged me in real life. The kids also gave me the adoring nickname “Rice Krispie Girl”—which I guess you could say was my first “character name,” long before I’d become known as Clarissa or Sabrina. It was my
Romper Room
dream come true.

Chapter 3

THE DAY MY TIPSY DAD WENT PUNK AND HIT MY MOM (OR, MY YEAR IN TV MOVIES)

Though cereal commercials and magazine ads made me a local celebrity among teachers and friends when I was young, my reel truly started to fill up when I did a succession of TV guest appearances, movies, and miniseries from 1985 to 1986. I think the TV movie and miniseries genres were particularly significant to boosting my early career because they played such a big role in mid-’80s television. Back then, Sunday was the most popular night for TV watching for families, and the miniseries and made-for-TV movie formats were all the rage.

I’m no cultural historian, but I suspect the reason for this was twofold (at least). First, both genres were self-contained stories, even if told over multiple episodes. Studies say sixty million households had cable in 1985, 88 percent of whom subscribed to an extra cable service like HBO or Showtime and already tuned in to prime-time soaps like
Dallas
and
Knots Landing.
So the notion of a movielike experience on TV was more popular than a Rubik’s cube in study hall, especially since they covered dramatic topics like eating disorders, kidnapped children, and murderous teens. Second, one 1986 poll said the average American household had their boob tube on for seven hours a day, so sinking into a network movie or series was a welcome part of their routine. As a busy mom of three who loves to DVR
Grey’s Anatomy
and
Friday Night Lights,
two of the closest shows we now have to a popular miniseries, I can relate.