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 music, 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.