Melissa Explains It All: Tales from My Abnormally Normal Life

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  For Mom, my guiding light and biggest fan.

  For Mark, the love of my life.

  For Mason, Brady, and Tucker: you gave me my favorite role yet.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Introduction

  1. Champagne Wishes and Clam-Free Dreams

  2. Room to Romp

  3. The Day My Tipsy Dad Went Punk and Hit My Mom (Or, My Year in TV Movies)

  4. Coming of Stage

  5. Being Clarissa

  6. Is That Teen Spirit I Smell?

  7. Straight from the Hart

  8. Moms Do the Darndest Things

  9. An A for Effort

  10. Abracadabra! Another Hit!

  11. Just Say “Why Not?”

  12. The One That Never Got Away

  13. Our Traveling Family Circus

  14. It’s All About the Canapés, Baby

  15. Are You Ready for Some Football?

  16. Four Things I Never Learned to Do for Myself

  17. When Mommy’s Worlds Collide

  18. Abnormally Normal

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Photographs

  About the Author

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION

  For years, people have been asking me why I haven’t written a book, and my answer is always the same: Because I don’t know how it ends yet. I was talking about my book and my life, because the most satisfying end to any book is when the main character dies. But then I thought about this and realized that I’m not sure how I’d make the two coincide in a memoir. Without getting too dark, my life could be snuffed out before I get to write a book or I could end up in a straitjacket that doesn’t let me use my hands. So I decided to just do it. Better now than never.

  So here it is finally. And I could kill Oprah for going off the air before she could have me on to promote it.

  When people meet me, they want to know what it was like growing up a child star, if I keep in touch with old cast mates, what happened during my half-naked-photo-shoot phase, how I spend private time with my husband and kids, about my best “mom advice,” what it was like to work with certain celebrities, and if I’m as “normal” as they think I am. The short answers are: cool, sometimes, drugs, snuggles, wing it, fun, sometimes. If you want to hear me dig a little deeper, you’ll need to keep turning the pages.

  You may have even bought this book hoping I’d tell you how to get your child into Hollywood, meet your dream guy, vote, or raise your kids. But I’m not big on lectures, and if you wanted an advice book written by a ’90s teen star, you should’ve bought one by Jennifer Love Hewitt or Alicia Silverstone. I like to think of myself as more of a storyteller, so that’s what I’ll attempt to do throughout these stories—lie on my imaginary couch and tell tales from my life that I hope will explain me to you.

  This doesn’t mean I haven’t learned anything from my past thirty-something years in this world. So I will now share with you my top twelve life lessons. They all relate to themes or stories you’ll find in this book. I hope they’re helpful. Follow them at your own risk.

  1. Editors don’t like when you overuse exclamation points, so don’t do this when you write your own book. Save it for Twitter!!!!

  It was also hard to write without smiley faces and LOLs to get my tone across. I hope you’ll tell people that this made you LMFAO anyway. Oh, and by the way, this book totally MAGG (makes a great gift)!

  2. Own a lucky dress.

  It doesn’t have to be fancy, expensive, or covered in pennies and rabbits’ feet. You’ll know it works when good stuff happens while wearing it. Owning lucky lingerie can be helpful too, but that’s a whole other book.

  3. If you want the world to see you as a “good girl,” don’t party hard or often, unless it’s with my mom.

  Preferably in a wig and go-go boots. Her, not you.

  4. Tequila always leads to a memorable night, one way or another.

  Best-case scenario: you’ll make new friends. Worst case: those friends will encourage you to get into a hot tub with no water or ride the bull at a Mexican nightclub. Err on the side of caution and bring along some sober friends to save your ass if you need it.

  5. If you ever find yourself in a situation where you’re exhausted and miked, don’t make crass jokes. People who bravely bash you while hiding behind their computer screens will care too much.

  Other inconvenient times to forget you’re miked: when you get the burps from soda, have “Gangnam Style” stuck in your head, or if you dish about a roll in the hay from the night before.

  6. The best part of being the boss is that you get to be bossy.

  People like to say there’s no “I” in team, but I never understood why this matters if you’re in charge. You can also transpose the letters in the word “team” to get “meat,” and that has nothing to do with running an efficient business either.

  7. Always eat a spoonful of lentil soup on New Year’s Day.

  It brings good fortune and is full of B vitamins. Counting your coins is so much more fun when you have lower stress and depression, less PMS, a sharper memory, and a lower risk of heart disease.

  8. Never wear mascara.

  I borrowed this one from Mom, but I tell everyone it’ll make your lashes thinner than an Olsen twin by the time you’re twenty-eight. Forget I said this if you want to offer me a contract to be the face of Maybelline.

  9. Know when to ask for help.

  If your own skills make you look wretched, chubby, or lame with a hot iron, lean on people who can make you seem pretty, slim, and not smell like burnt hair. Always give them credit for this, or you’ll seem like a tool. And then no one will be there to fix the streaks from your self-tanning experiments except you.

  10. “Having it all” means holding your baby in one hand and drinking a Bloody Mary through a straw in the other, while your sweet and hunky husband massages your neck.

  Bonus points if you can do this while running a conference call on your cell phone, taking the Xbox controller from your other, misbehaving kids, and keeping your slicked-back ponytail in place. (Note: I only achieved this once. But, man, that day I really had it all!)

  11. If you get caught carrying sex toys through airport security, hold your head high and own it.

  This goes for vibrators, furry handcuffs, and any sort of edible undergarments. Maybe you wanted a snack for the plane ride; they don’t know. Lots of women have worked hard to earn us these sexual freedoms, and no TSA person can ever take that away from you.

  12. The only regrets you should have are for the things you didn’t have the guts to do.

  Don’t let fear get in the way of speaking your mind, kissing your coworkers, or jumping off cliffs with thirty-foot drops. Keep reading, and you’ll know what I mean.

  Love,

  Melissa

  Chapter 1

  CHAMPAGNE WISHES AND CLAM-FREE DREAMS

  Actors often joke that show business should be called “the broke business.” Us Weekly only writes about celebrities who’ve made it big enough to have massive homes, designer clothes, and swank personal lives. But most entertainment people actually struggle their whole careers to succeed in mus
ic, movies, or TV—only to end up as background artists, stand-ins, and piano men at their local pubs. Lucky for me and my family, my career started rolling at four years old and hasn’t stopped since. In fact, it helped rescue us from being broke, rather than caused it.

  I come from a long line of blue-collar folks who pride themselves on their hardscrabble work ethic. Dad was a twenty-year-old cabdriver in Northport, New York, when he met my mom and got her a job as a cab dispatcher at the age of sixteen. Four years later, when they got pregnant with me and decided to have a shotgun wedding in the backyard of my grandparents’ house (I guess all that “free love” of the ’70s came with some consequences), Dad had just started working with his brother Charlie, breeding clams and oysters at Charlie’s shop on Long Island. Every night, Dad came home from work in his dirty T-shirts and cut-off jean shorts, with grime under his fingernails and smelling like low tide. But Mom didn’t mind at all. She knew what it was like to pound the pavement, too, since she occasionally sold trippy tie-dyed baby tees at street fairs, and after I was born, spent the next ten years either pregnant or breastfeeding my siblings, Trisha, Elizabeth, Brian, and Emily, all while managing our acting gigs. Mom and Dad were also following in their parents’ footsteps. Dad’s mom, Ethel, worked as a phone operator to support her four children when her husband died just weeks after my dad was born, and my mom’s father was a plumber, willing to build or fix anything for anyone to help support his wife and kids. So from a young age, I was aware that you had to work hard to pay for the things you needed or wanted—and for what your family needed or wanted, too.

  My parents never let on about any financial stress or struggle when I was young, though times were hard with a baseball-team-size family and seasonal careers, at best. In fact, my mom almost didn’t take me to my callback for Splashy, my first acting gig, because the thirty-dollar train ticket was too expensive. She changed her mind when my manager convinced her I’d make good money if I got the part. But I always felt secure, since we had a house, a car, and food on the table. I never had a reason to feel that other people’s lives were better than mine.

  My parents did a good job helping us feel happy and safe, so I’d have had to look really close to see how frighteningly broke we were, though the signs were there. For instance, every night Dad dropped his pocket change into a five-gallon water jug in his closet, hoping to save up for his dream boat, a Bertram yacht; Mom routinely dumped it out to give us milk money and pay a neighbor to cut the lawn (the jug never got more than a quarter full). We ate simple homemade meals mostly made with clams, since Dad brought them home from work for free. (To this day, Anthony Bourdain himself couldn’t convince Mom to touch a slimy mollusk, in any recipe.) Even at Christmas, when my siblings and I made really long wish lists, thinking Santa was our ticket to rake it in, we were fed the super-confusing line, “Pick five things. Mommy has to pay Santa for the presents.” But it really wasn’t until the owner of my dance school called me out for wearing torn ballet tights for the third day in a row, in front of all the other girls in their new Danskin wardrobes, that I realized how bad things were and how upset it could make me. Her words stung, especially since I took dancing very seriously and didn’t want to be judged for anything but my skill. At least we were able to pay for my classes, and when they exceeded our family’s spending limit, this same owner let me student teach the four-year-olds on Saturdays to pay for an extra day of pointe lessons. The little ballerinas called me “Miss Melissa” back then, as I taught them to jeté across the studio. I was only ten years old.

  Acting and modeling were mainly how I contributed to the family pot, though it never felt like “work.” To this day, I have no clue about how much money I made on a commercial, guest star role, or any other gig until well into my Clarissa years. All I remember is that at an early age, I booked a lot of jobs, partly because Mom rewarded me with toys when I did. By the end of my eight-year commercial acting career when I was twelve years old, which nicely corresponded with the age I outgrew plastic figurines, I’d acquired over a hundred Barbies, plus dozens of Strawberry Shortcakes and a bunch of My Little Ponies. Holidays may not have been lucrative, but working sure was.

  While I loved the idea of winning a job, I never worried too much about losing it, for money reasons or otherwise. I liked acting like a goof during auditions, letting nice women do my hair and makeup, and then shooting the commercial, TV show, or movie with encouraging and creative people. Some of my favorite shoots were also very kid-centric and involved junk food, which helped—like a Twinkies commercial at seven years old and a Life Savers Fruit Flavor spot at eleven. In this last one, I played paddleball and checkers with giant Life Savers and kids I knew from the audition scene. (Nobody you’d know, unless you followed kids’ commercials.) We did this wearing neon outfits and eating rolls of sticky Life Savers, so I basically rode a major sugar high for eight hours, while dressed like a young Debbie Gibson. What kid wouldn’t love to spend her day like this—plus take home the clothes every once in a while?

  As soon as they could gurgle and coo, my other four siblings began landing jobs, too. In their own ways, they helped our family pay the bills, and if Mom was shlepping one of us into the city for auditions, she figured she might as well give my siblings the option to join in the fun. My sister Emily’s ultrasound was even used in All My Children for a pregnant character on the soap (our agent knew about Mom’s baby bump and passed along Emily’s first “head shot” to the producers). Once she was born, she was supposed to play the baby, but production moved up the shoot date, and since Mom wasn’t due for another twelve weeks, she couldn’t save the job, short of a scheduled C-section. My siblings and I collaborated sometimes, as when Trisha and I did a Tylenol commercial playing sisters. One of our most fun family performances was a silly little Showtime movie my mom produced many years later, in 1996, called The Right Connections. It starred me, Elizabeth, Brian, Emily, our two-year-old sister Ali from Mom’s second marriage—and believe it or not, MC Hammer. We knew it wouldn’t win us an Emmy, but it was a blast to be on set with family, cracking jokes and doing our best white-kid rap with Hammer. By then, the guy had blown most of the fortune he’d earned from his music career, and if that wasn’t embarrassing enough, here he was being upstaged by my two-year-old sister in a cable movie.

  * * *

  Like anyone, my parents were always trying to move up in the world, so they moved a lot when I was young—first from a friend’s converted garage when I was born, then to a condo, and finally to the ranch my dad still lives in. This last house was on a dead end, with only five other homes on the block, and the street was close enough to the railroad that the house shook like an old roller coaster whenever a train passed by. The surrounding woods made it feel like we owned more property than we did, especially in the winter, when the whole neighborhood came over to ice-skate on a nearby pond they thought was ours. (We never corrected them.)

  I was in my twenties when my friend Joe, who also grew up in Sayville, teased me about literally living on the “other side of the tracks.” This was when I realized that my family raised us in the less affluent area of a rich town. We swam in other people’s pools and admired their beautiful homes and pesticide-rich yards. I also coveted their wheels. My sisters, friends, and I played a lot of MASH, a game that’s meant to predict the home, spouse, number of kids, and car you’ll have as an adult (MASH stood for mansion, apartment, shack, house). This is how I learned about luxury cars like BMWs, Mercedes, Jaguars, and Porsches—all of which made my MASH list, and as an adult, turned out to be the order in which I owned each one. But back then, my parents were often on the outside, looking in. It’s hard to keep up with the Joneses when your Oldsmobile doesn’t burn rubber.

  By contrast, my childhood BFF Nicole, who I met in second grade, also lived in my town but seemed to have it all. She was sweet, gorgeous, and an only child—an enviable trifecta, even for a confident actress with awesome siblings. Because her Dutch-born mom worked for a
n airline, and her dad was a football coach during the school year and a lifeguard on Fire Island in the summer, Nicole traveled a ton—Paris, Hawaii, Holland—and had a boat. In the summer, she’d invite me to the beach, where we’d sunbathe on her skiff and eat butter-and-Dutch-chocolate-sprinkle sandwiches from a real picnic basket. What a difference from the PB&J my own mom threw in an old Macy’s shopping bag when we hit the shore.

  Nicole always got a kick out of spending time with my huge, loud, and crazy family, as I envied that Nicole got all her parents’ attention and could travel on a whim, since they were a small unit. Meanwhile, my family’s vacation splurge was to a corny Poconos time-share at a family ski resort, once a year. My siblings and I thought we were rolling with the homies because we had a “vacation home.” After a day on the slopes, we put on our swimsuits and dove into a deep, cherry red bathtub, which we called our “hot tub.” We spent hours splashing around and talking about how many times we skied Renegade, the only “serious” black diamond run on the mountain. Years later, my sister Trisha and I went back to the resort during her college winter break and couldn’t believe what an anthill Renegade really was. Another surprise: that our tiny “hot tub” only fit two kids, much less five.

  As a grown-up, I live on the right side of the tracks, in a well-off coastal suburb outside Manhattan, not so unlike the one I grew up in. I’m not oblivious to the similarities, or the fact that I upgraded from my childhood. But the life my parents gave me offered a perspective I’m grateful for and that some of my neighbors lack. I can see the value of making my boys share a room (in a six-bedroom house), wear hand-me-down clothes, and learn to fix a bike chain and a clogged toilet. So I don’t regret my beginnings, because they helped me become a grounded mom, wife, and friend. They also helped me appreciate pool-hopping. Why deal with all that time, money, and maintenance when you can slide on your Havaianas and head to the neighbor’s?