* * *
When Clarissa wrapped in December of 1993, so did my atypical high school experience. It’s a wild thing to work through adolescent growing pains while playing a character doing the same. I think living out Clarissa’s dramas—in which every problem comes with a solution—kept me from feeling like I had to experience a lot of them on my own. And some situations, like when Clarissa obsessed over what to wear for her school picture, were so outside my reality that I didn’t relate. I did, however, really understand Clarissa’s unrelenting desire to drive a car. I shot so many episodes about Clarissa itching to get behind a wheel when I was fifteen that because of her need to experience horsepower, I wanted this, too. I’d like to say it lifted when I got my license, but my need for speed continued well into my twenties, when I graduated to race car driving (more on this later).
Rather than revel in the fact that I played the lead in a sitcom, which means my world literally revolved around me for four years—a teenager’s dream come true, right?—I somehow came out of these years feeling more responsible and introspective than smug and insufferable. I was also totally exhausted. Seventy-hour workweeks, spending tons of time in airports, changing schools, my parents’ divorce, shifting friendships, studying for the SATs, and then finally applying to New York University made me eager for a fresh start. Of course, I’m leaving out perhaps one of the biggest energy-sucks of all—boys. But they’re up next.
Chapter 7
STRAIGHT FROM THE HART
Teen girls are like Hormone CNN: all guy thoughts, all the time. I was boy-crazy back then like everyone else, but I was also an underdeveloped pixie. Most dudes barely noticed this people-pleaser with a late-bloomer’s body—particularly when there were other gals around, flaunting their self-confidence and burgeoning curves. To young hornballs, hanging out with me didn’t feel like headline news, though I did hit a few make-out milestones like everyone else.
At fourteen years old, it felt like I’d waited forever for my first kiss. Most of my friends had already played tonsil hockey, and I wanted to do the same. But for my big moment, I wasn’t going to settle for any zit-faced kid with a tongue, so I held out until I had a real crush to make a memory. Enter Chris, a grade younger than me and skater-boy cute. He had dark, straight hair that was combed over to the right side of his head and revealed a shaved scalp beneath. For ’90s teens, this was as popular a cut as the Bieber style was for a bit. And like most boys his age, he gave me just enough attention to keep my hopes up, but then pushed me away, which held my interest.
The pilot for Clarissa had just been picked up, so I was about to shoot thirteen episodes in Orlando and embark on a grueling and unfamiliar schedule. I knew this first kiss would take planning, but I could handle it. My closest friend that summer was a girl named Jessica, so I asked her to have a one-on-one talk with Chris. She told him I really wanted him to be my first, and that I’d be in Florida for the rest of the year, so I wouldn’t want to “go out” or anything.
Chris agreed to these conditions and met us in Gillette Park, a popular spot for locals to carve their names into picnic tables, attend our town’s annual Oyster Festival, and make out like nobody’s watching (though they usually are). On this big day, however, it was all about my Bonne Bell strawberry-flavored mouth. While Jess disappeared with the other boys, Chris and I awkwardly sat on his skateboard, trying not to slip off, and shared an amateur and sloppy kiss that was over in a flash. I don’t think I ever ran into Chris much after that, but with my first significant smooch out of the way, I was free to make out to my Hart’s delight.
Though my first real kiss went smoothly enough, I can’t say the same for my first on-screen kiss. The professional rite of passage happened during an episode of Clarissa in 1993, when I was sixteen, with a character named Paulie. This was also the first time I had to lock lips as Clarissa, so the show’s producers were careful to let me know, before I read the script, that I’d be puckering up that week. I was really afraid it would be embarrassing and awkward to do this in front of hundreds of people, including the crew I’d grown close to. I also knew I’d have to do the scene over and over, until we got it “right.” It’s not like I’d kissed a ton of boys in my own life so far. Frankly, we could be at this all night.
Though the producers said I could help choose Clarissa’s “love interest” from three head shots, when they laid them out I suggested we go with anyone but an actor called James Van Der Beek. (Oh, come on. I know people think he’s dreamy, but I never got the appeal.) This was five years before he began getting naked with most of the cast on Dawson’s Creek. But despite my objections, guess who they cast? Yup, my opinion didn’t weigh as heavily as I’d hoped. On top of not being hot for my costar, I was dating my first serious boyfriend, Mike, at the time (more on him later), so I had to overcome a nagging feeling that I was about to cheat on my man—in public, with a stranger, for all to judge and watch.
During rehearsal, James and I both got really uncomfortable as I went in for the kill on the Darlings’ sofa. And then, before I could reach his thin lips …
“My girlfriend is not going to like this!” he blurted out.
“Neither is my boyfriend!” I shouted. I said this in a snotty-teen-girl-rolling-her-eyes way I’d learned from my sister Trisha; she always pulled off more attitude than I could. It’s not like I wanted the kiss to happen! I needed to make it clear I wasn’t happy with this. He was no Mike.
I’m sorry to say that I don’t remember a lot about the kiss itself. I think I buried that memory in a deep, horrified place reserved for times I passed gas in school and flirted to get out of speeding tickets. But to this day, I still have a small panic attack—call it PTSKD, Post-Traumatic Screen-Kiss Disorder—when I read a kissing scene in a script. Even if I swish with Listerine and use a lip stain coated with Chapstick to avoid a mess—a trick I learned from the makeup gals on Clarissa—it’s rarely a sexy thing. In fact, in my newest show, Melissa & Joey, Joey Lawrence uses enough lip balm for both of us, creating such a thick barrier that there’s hardly any skin-on-skin contact. It’s hard to get turned on when it feels like you’re kissing one of Madame Tussauds’s wax statues. Not smoking or eating onions at lunch is also a kindness. On a recent episode of M&J, one actor had to bite into a chicken leg and then mack on me. He really housed that bird and, with a mouthful of greasy flesh, immediately swooped in for the kiss. I was disgusted by the scene and couldn’t understand why he didn’t take a tiny, fake nibble for my benefit. Meanwhile, Joey chuckled off to the side, the thought of it making him reapply his Carmex, I’m sure.
At least Van Der Blah and I got it right in six takes. In a film, a director and DP might ask you to do it twenty-five times, to get the most beautiful shot. It requires choreography. Put more light on your lips. I need your face toward the camera. I need more space between your faces while you kiss.
Then there’s the question of whether to use tongue, and how much. When I was single, I went for it—but seeing that I’m now married with little boys who’ve watched Mommy’s work, it’s super embarrassing to act like I’m into the kiss when I know my spouse and kids are going to watch it while sitting right next to me on the couch. I don’t even want to consider what my mother-in-law thinks of all this. So I just try to throw myself into the character and push everyone else out of these racing thoughts.
It’s also hard to do a passionate, open-mouthed kiss without tongue, yet scripts call for it all the time. It feels like you’re eating an ice-cream cone with fish lips. Mario Lopez still swears I got frisky trying to do this in the final scene of our movie, Holiday in Handcuffs. When the director yelled “Cut!” Mario jumped around yelling, “You slipped me the tongue! She slipped me tongue!” The more I protested, the louder he got—not unlike the way my six-year-old throws a tantrum over a candy bar at the grocery store checkout. The way I see it, either A. C. Slater deviously slid his slinky Latin tongue into my mouth, or we accidentally “bumped” into each other. As for my best on
-screen kiss? Balthazar Getty and I had some wild and spoof-worthy make-outs in a pilot we did called Dirtbags, but the suave Adrian Grenier (my costar in Drive Me Crazy) tops the list.
Though some girls might have taken more advantage of going to a high school with famous actors, I usually kept my mouth and legs closed to them. I was so busy making new friends, keeping my grades up, traveling south all the time, and working on Clarissa that I didn’t really make time for PCS boys. Plus, the ones I crushed on—like Donald “Shun” Faison and Dash Mihok—treated me like a sweet little sister, so I never let myself get too caught up in daydreaming about them. Now the big, strong electric guys on set who saw me the same way? They took over my dreams day and night. I was hot for men in their twenties who lifted heavy stuff. Maybe it’s a Freudian thing, since Dad owned a construction company, or a Long Island thing, since everyone drinks beer from the can—God forbid they get caught with a frosty glass.
I did date one budding actor when I was fifteen years old, but he wasn’t from school. I first saw him when I went to watch the rehearsals of a small stage production of The Sound of Music with my sister Liz, near our apartment in Greenwich Village. My mom and her best friend/our agent Ayn wanted me to check out two brothers she knew. The younger was Lizzie’s age and in the play, and the older always took him to rehearsals. When we all left the theater that day, with the boys a few steps ahead of me and my sister, I dragged Lizzie as fast as I could, so that when they held the door for us, we’d be able to make some eye contact. Big Brother let the door slam in my face.
I bumped into him there the next week, however, and we casually started dating. I don’t remember how it happened, but I never told him about the theater incident. He had a stupid way of flirting where he’d try to surprise me with a quick shove into a pile of trash or a street lamp, and then say, “Watch out for that garbage!” I somehow found it charming, even if it was gross. Being with him was also one of the first times I’d hooked up with an aggressive, hands-y kind of guy, so I dressed in layers to make it more difficult for him to get what he was after. I’d wear a trendy leotard top with a snap crotch, tight jeans, a big belt, combat boots that took forever to unlace, and finish the look with a flannel shirt tied around my waist. This was during Nirvana’s reign, and I liked mixing their grunge influence with punk styles, though all the extra clothes were really meant to slow the boy down. I think of our tricky make-out sessions when I flip past Fox on the TV, since the boy in the story was Danny Masterson, who played Steven Hyde on That ’70s Show. His younger sibling was Chris Masterson, who played Francis on Malcolm in the Middle.
Not every meaningful man in my life at that time was a booty call or love connection. In 1992, I got to know Joey Lawrence while I was working at Nick in Orlando. This was decades before he could hold me at arm’s length with his shiny lips. We saw each other at auditions throughout our childhood careers, and he’d been starring as Joey “Whoa” Russo on Blossom for the past two years and was in Florida to visit his girlfriend Kellie Martin, who was about to wrap her part as Becca on Life Goes On and was working with John Goodman on Matinee, which was shooting at Universal Studios. Joey asked me if I wanted to join them for dinner, and Kellie and I became fast friends. I had no idea then that these two people would make such a huge impact on my life in very different ways—one as my costar on my favorite project to date, Melissa & Joey, and one as a lifelong friend. Joey then came back to Orlando, not long after that trip, to bury a time capsule with me for a televised Nickelodeon event. (The capsule, which won’t be opened until the year 2042, includes VHS tapes of both Clarissa and Blossom, as well as a disposable camera with pictures of me and some random Clarissa friends on the Universal lot.) At this affair, Joey brought his new girlfriend, Jennifer Love Hewitt, with him, and we had yet another chummy dinner together.
I have to admit—one of the best things about Joey was his taste in women. I was so deprived of girlfriends my age on Clarissa that when I met Kellie and Jennifer, I grabbed on to them and didn’t let go until I was pried away. I did the same with JoAnna Garcia and Sheeri Rappaport when they were on Clarissa. In fact, I gave all the female guest stars, upon arriving at our Sunday table read, an invite to a sleepover at my condo on Monday and Friday nights, plus lunch every day with me at the commissary, a ride on Back to the Future during break, and a trip to the Slime kitchen to taste the goo they had backstage on the studio tour. Was I desperate for camaraderie or what?
* * *
For all the fun of teen flirting, lust, and friendship, these feelings had nothing on that of my first love. I fell hard in the summer of 1992, when I was sixteen years old and back in Sayville visiting my dad. A bunch of my on-again/off-again Long Island go-out friends were hanging out in town by the local pizza place, where most kids met up at some point during a night out. I was there with a boy named Tim, who was a super cute, popular guy who wouldn’t have given me the time of day when we were in public school and before I was on a TV show. I’d been casually dating him for a few weeks, but that night while Tim was off skateboarding somewhere, a group of guys pulled up in a white Chevy Celebrity. They were from Patchogue, the town just east of Sayville.
Among them was a boy named Mike, who was very tall, skinny, and had an extremely outgoing personality. Like my first kiss, he had long, floppy, dark, skater hair. I clearly have a type—if they didn’t look like Danny Zuko, they looked like Pauly Shore. He also had a quirky sense of humor and self-confidence like I’d only seen in the older men I crushed on around the set. Even though he was only a year older than me, Mike knew how to flirt like a man—he was big on flattery and eye contact—and I liked that he could drive and had his own car. He asked me, my sister Trisha, and two of my girlfriends if we wanted to go for a ride, without a real destination, which meant ditching Tim, but oh, well. I thought this was dope because it reminded me of when people cruised in the 1950s. (See: every other scene in Grease.)
We ended up at my dad’s house, and the whole gang came inside to hang. Dad was now a bachelor and didn’t have a lot of rules. He is also the ultimate smartass, so he didn’t hold back on joking around with my crush. As soon as Mike and his buddies walked into the house, Dad began his interrogation.
“How tall are you?” he asked, in a deep, fatherly tone.
“About six two,” said Mike.
“I didn’t know they piled shit that high,” Dad said with a snorty chuckle, to let us know that he thought he was hilarious.
Good thing Mike’s humor was on par with Dad’s, or he might have run for the hills. I also wouldn’t have known how to read him. That night, Mike told me his name was Jimmy and gave me a fake number, but I saw right through his prank because it was so Dad-like. I showed him my number in the phone book and told him that I could get us on MTV’s Hanging with MTV to see his favorite singer, Morrissey, perform if he wanted to come visit me in the city. (MTV and Nickelodeon are owned by the same parent company, so I took advantage of my connections.) He called the next day.
I broke up with Tim, and for the rest of the year, Mike and I acted like a clichéd, first-love, “nothing else matters” teen couple. We were naive to heartbreak and adored each other with abandon. It only took a few weeks for me to fall head over heels in love with Mike, and we spent as much time together as we could. He was a high school senior, so he visited me in Florida when he was on break, and I spent more time in Sayville than Manhattan when I was home. At Dad’s house, the fridge was always stocked with Bud, there were no curfews, and I knew where he hid the spare key, so I could easily come and go as I pleased. Though the scenario might have led to discipline issues with other kids, I was already living as a responsible adult for most of the year in Florida. I could handle the autonomy without getting pregnant or arrested.
I was in love for the first time in my life, so I decided it was time to lose my virginity to Mike. Six months had passed, which was the amount of time I’d promised myself I’d wait before having sex with someone I dated. Not so unlike how
I orchestrated my first kiss (or most pivotal moments in my life, really), I carefully planned this night to be perfect. Mike’s birthday happened to fall on the same day as the Young Artist Awards ceremony in Los Angeles, so a lot of special moments would be happening at once. My mom and her new boyfriend, Leslie, got us our own suite at the hotel; they probably thought that we were already “doing it.” For the ceremony, my Clarissa stylists helped me pick out a Betsey Johnson strapless lace baby doll dress and thigh-high boots. For extra oomph, I wore a Victoria’s Secret corset underneath. It not only looked sexy when I won the award (the first of three for me as Clarissa), but it turned Mike on, too. I packed a Victoria’s Secret teddy for what would come later.
Melissa Explains It All: Tales from My Abnormally Normal Life Page 8