Diary of a Stage Mother's Daughter: A Memoir (19 page)

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Authors: Melissa Francis

Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Personal Memoirs, #Entertainment & Performing Arts

BOOK: Diary of a Stage Mother's Daughter: A Memoir
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She was right, I’d heard that speech before, and every word of it was true. Still, the speech seemed to go against our best interests at the moment.
“Sounds like she needs you. Why should I emancipate her?” the judge responded.
“Because I will always do those things, whether she’s emancipated or not. Because I’m her mom. She’ll be free to work as long as she likes, but nothing else will change.”
“You sold me. Missy Francis, you are now an emancipated minor.”
 
 
I was legally free to live however I liked, but once again, Mom was right—nothing else would change. I still needed someone to manage my life, enroll me in school, make sure I had health insurance. But I did wonder, for how long?
The first job I did as an emancipated minor was a Kmart commercial. The next project, though, put the work back in working. I was cast in a blood-and-guts slasher movie about a cult that commits mass suicide in a house fire. I played the female lead, Jennifer Rubin, in all her flashback sequences. Her character, the only survivor of the house fire, constantly relives her time with the cult in her dreams, hence the title,
Bad Dreams
.
In the first scene, the leader of the cult, a very scary-looking Bruce Abbott, baptized me in a filthy lake out behind Magic Mountain. Bruce had white hair and startling blue eyes and looked like a burn victim, which could have been a result of the way the makeup artists painted him, but I wasn’t sure. Either way, he was fairly terrifying.
The lake was covered with slime, and I couldn’t see my hand below the surface. I could not believe that they wanted me to stick my head into that disgusting water. There was no way they had the budget to test it to see what toxins or deadly bacteria lived underneath the blanket of sludge that coated the top.
They blew out my hair and applied my makeup, which made me hope that somehow I wasn’t getting dunked. Maybe they’d cut away and replace me with a stunt double. Although I doubted they had the budget for that either. When I noticed all the exact replicas of my outfit stocked in the wardrobe truck, I knew I was getting slimed.
The director explained that the senior cult members would walk me to the edge of the lake, then Bruce would come take my hand and lead me in until I was about waist deep in the water. Bruce would say a few lines and guide my head underwater.
I wanted to run. I knew from past experience, there was no escape. I needed to just man up.
“Are we going to rehearse?” I asked the director, trying to buy time.
“That was your rehearsal. We can’t get you all wet if we aren’t rolling.”
I took a deep breath and prayed for a miracle, but instead, he yelled, “Action!”
I walked to the edge of the lake, and Scary Bruce met me and dragged me in. The thick, putrid water filled my shoes and clung to my calves, and I fought back the urge to vomit as I got deeper and deeper in what felt like quicksand.
Bruce chanted his lines, looking possessed. Every muscle in my body seized up. Finally the moment of truth arrived and he shoved my head underneath the water and into certain bacterial infection.
I guess I didn’t really allow him to push my head all the way under, but just sort of fought away from him as the water started to fill my ears. It all happened so fast. When I came up, slimed and embarrassed, I was hoping that somehow my flailing had looked normal, and I was done. The crew groaned.
“Cut.”
Bruce waded back to shore and wandered off, adjusting his burned skin, and I quickly scrambled to safety. They rushed me inside a trailer, threw me a robe, and started combing the slime out of my hair and blowing the ends with a hair dryer.
The director came into the trailer.
“So
this
time . . .”
Oh my God, I thought. We’re doing it again.
They finished drying me off and restyling my hair in silence. And all the while I knew that this effort to get me warm and clean was leading me closer to having my nostrils refilled with slime.
As the hum of the hair dryer insulated me, I steeled my insides against the inevitable. I had to just go out and do it right, or I’d be marching into stagnant mosquito larva for the next three days. It was certainly getting harder to earn a buck in this town.
They delivered me to the set, and this time the crew looked at me with annoyance. They were clearly put out. I was costing everyone time, and until I did my job, no one was going anywhere.
That was it. I refused to be unprofessional. No matter how inhumane the task was, I was going to do the job I was hired to do. I had hoped that Mom would somehow save me from this, but she hadn’t said a word since the first take. She just frowned in pain, offering no alternative, no relief. I was alone in this torture, and there didn’t appear to be any way out.
“Action!” the director yelled with extra force, willing me to do it right this time.
I let the extras lead me to the edge of the water, and in my mind, I left my body, disconnecting myself from the horror of the experience.
I felt the water once again rise to my waist as Bruce led me back to the middle of the swamp. As my body began to shake with panic, I just let go. I let go of my fear, my sanity, my inclination to vomit. If I could disconnect long enough, it would be over.
I pressed my mouth and eyes closed tightly, hoping I could vacuum seal myself against the sludge. If I could have sucked my ears closed, I would have.
Scary Bruce dunked me, and held me under for good measure. Then he brought me up, and I broke free and stumbled to the edge, as the director yelled, “Cut!”
I’d done it. It was over. I hadn’t done it well, no awards would roll my way as a result, but I least I’d let myself be baptized as directed, and we could move on.
When the movie hit the theaters, the kids from school went together to the Northridge Mall to see it. I didn’t go along. I was mortified that the movie was completely silly and I wasn’t at all good in it. Now a huge group of my peers were going together to sit in judgment of the production and make fun of me.
“They’d all give their eyeteeth to be in it,” Mom said, trying to make me feel better. I was sure that she was right, but it didn’t really help. I knew they were going to give me the hazing of a lifetime after they saw it. I looked ridiculous gulping for air, eyes big and wide as the moon during the fake baptism. The last thing I wanted was to go along and witness the snickering and mocking firsthand.
Besides, it was impossible to watch myself in any production, must less this one. I hated watching myself on television or on a screen of any type. I’d focus on any physical flaw, any bulge of fat or the bump in my nose, and every line I delivered made me cringe. I don’t know why I couldn’t enjoy watching myself. Lots of other performers did. All I ever saw was the faults.
I tried to see being in a horror flick as a good time, but in my heart, I was struggling. Was this the kind of work I had to look forward to? Fifteen was a tough age to be embarking on a midlife crisis, but no matter how much I focused on school or anything else, I couldn’t escape the thought that my career was stalling.
Agents and casting directors expected successful child actors to fail to make the transition to working adult actors, and they didn’t hesitate to speculate about it right in front of me. It seemed to be all that I heard. Other parents seemed to derive glee from my cresting professional failure. I didn’t understand how people could be so hard on someone who hadn’t even achieved her full height yet, but the swords were out and no one seemed to care that I was basically still prepubescent.
“Right! The kid from
Little House on the Prairie
! Has she done anything lately?” another cheerleading mom asked my mom. I was standing right there, and the woman insulted me, in the third person nonetheless. I wanted to ask her if her kid had worked lately, but then she would know she got to me. It was easier to just silently lick the wound.
I tried to act as if I didn’t care, but that made things worse. Mom would accuse me of not caring, which was so far from the truth. I desperately wanted to stop the slide to failure, but I had no idea how. I didn’t even love acting that much any longer. I felt like a puppet mouthing someone else’s words. But I missed the sense of achievement, the sensation of winning, and the pride I’d see in Mom’s eyes that came with completing a job successfully. Getting straight A’s at school was a feather in my cap, but being a successful actress had been a diamond-encrusted crown almost no one else had been privileged to wear.
 
 
When summer rolled around Tiffany didn’t come home from Berkeley. She decided to stay up in northern California, to get a jump on the required classes for sophomore year by knocking out a few over the summer.
The decision felt like a wise move. When she’d come home for holidays, at first, she’d seemed like a new person, free and happy. She’d slept in late, and we’d hung out having coffee and toast until we decided to get manicures and pedicures together or go to the mall shopping. I loved having a pal around the house, and Mom doted on her, at least initially.
But after a few days, Mom was picking at her, criticizing her sloppier appearance or where she threw her dirty clothes, and it seemed to me they couldn’t coexist under the same roof for longer than a week.
“It might be time for you to go back to the dorm,” Mom growled over a heap of wet towels on the rug in Tiffany’s room.
“I will pick them up! Jeez! I’m still using them,” she said from other end of her closet, where she surveyed what little she’d left behind.
Still, Mom didn’t like to be left out of what Tiffany and I did. So she’d come to the mall but quickly wear out her welcome.
“Those pants look tight,” she said from the couch outside the dressing rooms where Tiffany was trying on some new Guess jeans.
“Well, I’m not starving like I was at the end of last year. I could stop eating if you think that would be better,” Tiffany said while fixing her eyeliner in the mirror.
“I’m sure there’s a middle ground between starving and eating pizza and drinking beer. I just don’t want you to gain all the weight you lost. Have you gained the freshman ten? Have you weighed yourself lately?” Mom pressed.
It wasn’t the best conversation to have in the middle of a store. I knew Mom road us about weight because of her own struggles with a fluctuating figure, but inflicting pain on Tiffany right on the spot wasn’t the way to make a visit home a pleasant one. I gave Mom a pleading look.
“What?” she snapped.
“I don’t know,” I said quietly when Tiffany went back into the dressing room. “Maybe go easy on her?”
“Oh, of course. It’s all me. I’m the bad guy. You guys gang up on me and I’m the bad guy. You only bring me along for my wallet. That’s all I’m good for. Pay for your clothes and keep my mouth shut! Why don’t I just take my wallet and go home and see how you two like it!”
Her response was so disproportional to what had come before it, but there was no reasoning with her.
So Tiffany’s decision to get ahead of the course load was brilliant, no matter how thin that excuse sounded.
To my own surprise, I started to strain and blister under Mom’s totalitarian rule. I had always faulted Tiffany for not simply following the party line and promoting harmony. But now that I was carrying out that mandate alone, I realized what a burden it was. It was exhausting to constantly manage Mom’s mood. When she picked me up from school she’d show up angry, and I’d have to cajole her with gossip from school. On a whim, she’d suddenly ground me and stop me from going to the movies with my friends because I had looked at her the wrong way. Sometimes she’d just say she didn’t like my attitude and would refuse to tell me why. She was wildly unpredictable, striking out at me, even hitting me, with almost no warning or provocation.

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