Melissa Explains It All: Tales from My Abnormally Normal Life

by Melissa Joan Hart

  As if I weren’t busy enough, Mark and I also decided around the same time to move, after two years in our Encino ranch. We wanted to find a place that was a little less sexy and also smaller, since it was just the two of us and all the extra rooms in the house were inviting squatters—my sister, her boyfriend, my brother, and Mark’s vagabond band members among them. We’d also been itching to find property in our favorite vacation spot in the world, Lake Tahoe, and by selling our giant Encino house, we could use the profit to make that dream come true. We found an unfinished construction in Sherman Oaks, one town over from Encino, which excited us since we could add our own touches to it.

  While unpacking boxes and simultaneously polishing and prepping for Mute that spring, I shot a pilot for Fox called Dirtbags with Laura Bell Bundy, a regular on Guiding Light, and Balthazar Getty, best known for his roles in Lord of the Flies and Brothers & Sisters. Dirtbags was an acting job for me, not directing or producing, but it felt good to exercise multiple skills on several projects at once. The script was originally written as a small workshop play to test its small-screen potential. I’d done it the previous summer as a favor to the show’s creator, and Fox thought it would make a great series. It was about a group of twenty-something friends who lived in a blue-collar suburb outside Boston and were stuck in their high school glory days.

  The weekend after we wrapped the pilot, I became pregnant with my first son, Mason, and I began to worry about how I’d hide my bump on the show if it got picked up. Turns out, I had no reason to sweat it. Five weeks later while I was dancing with Bill Murray at a party held after his annual Caddyshack Charity Golf Tournament in Florida, my agent called to say Dirtbags wasn’t on the fall schedule. I was disappointed and really wanted to see this show fly, but with our little one coming, I knew I had something even bigger on the horizon. I blurted out our baby news to Bill—I’d golfed in the event for two years running, so we were friends—and he was the first outside the family to know!

  Life began to move again at the pace I liked. I returned to shooting Mute in June for six days at Mom’s house, with a crew that was basically paid in lobster: I had Dad overnight us a generous lunch to thank my team for working for so little. My belly grew. We worked on the house, but now with a baby on the way, it began to feel unsuitable for a child, given its steep driveway, busy nearby road, and many stairs. After living there for only six months, we sold the place to comedian Wayne Brady, who I knew from his days as a “pizza delivery boy” guest star on Clarissa, and moved to a Mexican-style ranch around the corner. I was nine months pregnant. Come hell or high water, I’d make a home for our new family yet.

  Work and family grew in tandem. Mute premiered at the Palm Springs International Festival of Short Films, which was a big deal for me and Steve. On January 11, 2006, I gave birth to our first beautiful son, Mason Walter, at a whopping nine pounds. He had big blue eyes and an infectious smile, which made my twenty-four hours of arduous labor feel worth it. I spent that first month recovering in bed from the natural delivery, with help from my family and Mark’s. I may have been home with a newborn, but that didn’t stop me from submitting Mute to every prestigious film festival around. Once I was up for it, I dragged the little man to showings all over the country, including the Tribeca Film Festival, Vail Film Festival, and Sonoma International Film Festival. Mommy’s groove was back.

  When the festival frenzy died down, I couldn’t help but think, If I could turn a dream into a project for me, why not do it for my husband too? I was so proud of my little short film. I thought it turned out fantastically for a low-budget, limited-location film, and it was a passion project that I made happen from beginning to end. As for Mark, he needed a new label, since Lava, his previous one, had dropped him, and he was having major complications with his asshole manager. This meant he had thirty newly written songs but no label to release his record and no manager to find him a new one.

  Once Mason was old enough for my sister Ali to babysit him, I set off to take music business classes at UCLA. Mark’s a talented musician but hates the business side of his job, so as his best cheerleader with an enterprising spirit, I thought I’d start a label for him—complete with distribution, radio play, and an iTunes connection, which was a new technology at the time. Mark found a great producer, put together a band, and went to New Jersey to record an album. I stayed home with Mason and took care of business. Once the record was complete, we realized the process was costing us too much money and marital stress, so we passed his tunes on to a smaller label to take over. While all this was happening, unbeknownst to us, one of Mark’s demos made its way to Clive Davis, who liked it for his new American Idol rocker Chris Daughtry. In the midst of putting out his own album, Mark was nominated for a Grammy for Daughtry’s song “It’s Not Over.” We were all bummed when he lost to Bruce Springsteen’s “Girls in Their Summer Clothes.”

  * * *

  The day after Mason celebrated his first birthday, I went back to work. I’d landed the part for the ABC Family Christmas movie Holiday in Handcuffs, which was shooting in Calgary, Canada, for five weeks. I took Mason and my brother Brian, so he could watch my son, as I didn’t have a nanny. In the movie, I play Trudie, who gets dumped by her boyfriend on Christmas Eve and kidnaps a new guy, played by Mario Lopez, at gunpoint so she isn’t humiliated in front of her family. I worked twelve-hour days, and on weekends, Brian, Mason, and I went to Banff National Park so Brian could get some snowboarding time, and I could practice ice-skating for a big scene in the movie (we traded off babysitting duty). It wasn’t a conventional arrangement, but growing up, our family always combined business with pleasure and family time, so I knew how to make it work for us. My job brings me to such interesting locations that I really like to make the most of my downtime, take in the sights, and share this privilege with my family as often as I can.

  Being on set again made me realize how incomplete I felt without working for the year I stayed home with Mason. This was confusing to me, since I always thought motherhood would be an entirely satisfying job that would trump all others. But I realized in Calgary that my own need-to-be-needed feelings seem to be more fulfilled on set than at home, and the smell of newly painted props and a collaborative creative process were much more satisfying to me than Gymboree and backyard picnics. Don’t get me wrong—there’s nothing I love more than spending time with my children, but I like to feel useful and satisfied in more creative and immediately gratifying ways. The last time I checked, I was also good at what I did, and I didn’t want to ignore how satisfied I felt after I completed a job well done. From then on, I decided I had to work but I’d take my family with me as often as I could, because they were also my world. I’d do my best to “have it all”—work long days, be there for my kids, and still find the energy to get it on with my husband at night, as often as I could see him. Career and family always intersected in my own mom’s life, and she seemed to handle it just fine. I could do the same! When the ratings for Holiday in Handcuffs came out, they told me my instincts were guiding me in the right direction. The movie was, and still is, the most watched telecast in ABC Family history.

  That said, Mark and I also wanted to have a second child, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to get back on set right away after that little one was born. So in the spring of 2007, I was anxious to knock a goal off my professional bucket list: to guest star on Mark’s and my favorite show, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. Nearly every talented actor I knew had done this, and I was desperate to join the club. I met with the casting director and asked my agents to annoy the hell out of them, but we didn’t hear anything for months. Then, as luck would have it, Kellie Martin and I went to a charity tea in Beverly Hills and Mariska Hargitay was there (that’s Detective Olivia Benson to you). Kellie knew Mariska, since she’d been a guest star on the show already, and introduced me with the side note that it was one of my dreams to be on her show. Shortly after, my agent called and said I’d been offered a role. Mark, Mason, and I
were going to New York.

  Shooting SVU wasn’t the joyride I’d hoped it would be. No, it was intense for me. I was out of practice with dramatic acting, and I didn’t know the set or crew. I was nervous all the time and felt out of my element, but I tried to channel this discomfort into my performance. My character was a schoolteacher accused of rape by a young boy, though the whole time she swears that he raped her. Every day, the director called for more overwrought emotion than the day before, so I did everything I could to muster a raw performance. I wrote suicide letters in my dressing room, listened to songs that upset me, and watched the rape scene from The Accused on a loop. Even still, I came off as emotionally timid and the director was unimpressed. It didn’t help that I’ve never been a great “crier” on camera, or off, for that matter. I can never produce the pretty, single tear down my cheek the way Claire Danes and Demi Moore do. They seem to just turn on a tiny faucet the second the director calls action. I, however, get a red, blotchy face and build up a lot of snot before my ducts give way. I’ve had sound guys remove my microphone, because my heart beats too loud to hear the dialogue. Even at my own wedding, Mark was the one who needed the vintage hanky I’d shoved in my cleavage, not me.

  For two weeks, I tried everything to give a poignant performance. I took the opposite approach of being a downer and kept my spirits light, I worked my way into character an hour before my scenes … nothing worked. I was lost. Having given up for the most part, I decided on the last day to pop into character as the camera rolled with help from the makeup girls blowing menthol crystals into my eyeballs, which is a trick used to help actors cry. After a little vapor action with no real emotion from me, I finally shed the tears they wanted. The director and crew effusively congratulated me on “really getting there.” I’ll never kill myself over making real tears again, especially when there’s help nearby (unless Jerry Bruckheimer or Martin Scorsese insists).

  Don’t get me wrong, I got a lot out of shooting SVU. I became close to the brilliant and hilarious Diane Neal, who played Assistant DA Casey Novak, and had the honor of working with the vivacious Annie Potts. My agents also liked that I now had a weighty piece of tape on my demo reel. But during those two weeks in the city, I almost rethought the career that I couldn’t wait to supposedly balance with being a mom. It was so hard on me that I didn’t work for a while, until I was pregnant with my second son, Brady. Maybe morning sickness got me back on track.

  Soon after I got knocked up a second time, I was offered the lead in Lifetime’s Whispers and Lies, a horror flick about two cousins who visit a seemingly perfect island with dark secrets—a place where nobody seems to die (dun dun DUN). Though I swore up and down that I’d never do a scary movie when I left Sabrina, the genre was a profitable one, and as a working mom, who was I to pooh-pooh that? I was also about five months pregnant, but I failed to mention my growing bump for fear that producers would discriminate against me. I took the part, and once the directors saw me in Vancouver, they realized camera angles and wardrobe would need to be carefully thought out. Though my growing uterus popped while shooting toward the end of my second trimester, I had a lot of energy and maintained an average weight, and I did everything they needed. Okay, so maybe I ran a little slower when the zombies began to hoof it, but the movie was a bust anyway, and I’m fairly confident that it had nothing to do with the bun in my oven.

  My son Braydon Hart Wilkerson was born on March 12, 2008. With my second child, I felt more confident and relaxed as a mother, so I went back to work sooner than I did with Mason—only this time, I took the whole family with me, since Mark had just finished touring. When Brady was about four months old, Mark, the kids, and I flew down to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to shoot Hartbreak’s first feature film, called Nine Dead. This movie was my mom’s passion project after years of busting her hump and trying every avenue to make the flick happen. It was yet another thriller, but we used a special RED digital camera. At the time, this was a newfangled technology that let us keep the scene rolling without worrying about having to cut with every actor’s tiniest stutter. We also didn’t need to wait hours for the camera to reload film or rehearse like crazy to perfect a scene because we were putting it on expensive film. We could essentially “rehearse” while the cameras were rolling, or play around with the dialogue and blocking because the machine caught every bit, and we could play it back. It felt like we were filming a play, because we shot the script from beginning to end in real time, with only a few retakes here and there. Usually a movie or TV show is shot out of order—sometimes with the biggest scenes first, like a make-out scene or important climax (probably to get it out of the way before the actors feel burned out or get on each other’s nerves and the chemistry is unfixable). But with the RED, we shot the whole thing, start to finish, in twenty-one days.

  As a new mom, working on Nine Dead was a dream come true. I was surrounded by supportive family, so I had my pick of childcare if I wanted it. There was only one major wardrobe change, which meant I could spend more time breast-feeding and playing with my boys, instead of running between scenes to my trailer for hair, makeup, and clothing tweaks. Finally, my character was handcuffed to a pole in a small room, so I didn’t need to coordinate blocking with our director, our rhythm was never interrupted with prop and set changes, and I could really focus on my performance. Oh, if I could only be handcuffed to a pole in all my projects.

  * * *

  Mark and I had a lot of friends in California, but we always knew we’d eventually want to be part of a community that’s close-knit, safe, and entertaining for kids. In L.A., locals drive like erratic pricks, even if you’re pushing a stroller down a street that doesn’t have sidewalks. We rarely met our neighbors, which meant never waving at friendly faces or borrowing that proverbial cup of sugar. Public schools are underfunded and private schools are ridiculously expensive. Then there’s the traffic, which is a time-suck at all hours of the day. Mark and I made a pact that before Mason began kindergarten, we’d find somewhere else to raise our family. Since we were both East Coasters at heart, we began to brainstorm spots on the East Coast to lay down some roots.

  In the summer following Nine Dead, I auditioned for the role of the murderess Roxie Hart in the Broadway production of Chicago. I know I’d sworn off musicals, but a few nonprofessional singers had starred in this role, so I thought I could too. I didn’t get the part, but it put us in a good place to start our house hunt out east. We began by listing all the areas we wanted to see, then called the local realtors and asked family and friends in those areas to join us. We brought our new nanny with us, and leaned on family for babysitting.

  Our exhaustive search would have bankrupted HGTV. We started in Nashville, which was Mark’s first choice, since he’s from the South and so many music execs live and work there. We had fun at a Titans game, but when we toured those oversize homes, they were spread too far apart to shout to a neighbor during an emergency. I also couldn’t walk to a store or Starbucks, which felt isolating. We moved on to my old stomping grounds on Long Island—albeit the more upscale sections of the North and South Shores that my family could never afford when I was a kid. But like Nashville, the best homes were far from town and inconvenient for errand running and play dates. By the time we reached Connecticut, which was next on our list, we felt defeated. We thought we’d hit a few places in Fairfield County, and if that turned out to be a bust, we’d consider North Carolina and Atlanta. Nonetheless, I cried all the way to the Constitution State. I wasn’t hopeful.

  We explored three towns in Connecticut, just outside Manhattan. The first was Stamford, but the people we met all felt a little older than us, and we needed our contemporaries. Next up was Darien, which has a pretty center of town, good restaurants, and beautiful homes, but none of the houses really fit our needs. Finally, we drove up the coast to Westport, which had an old Americana feel but with newer businesses and younger energy. It boasted a great school system, a private beach, a bustling downtown, and amazing
farm-to-table restaurants—not to mention a regional country playhouse whose co-artistic director, until recently, was talented actress Joanne Woodward, Paul Newman’s widow. I was impressed that this theater transferred a lot of hit shows to Broadway. We had family in New York and even our good friends and Mason’s godparents, Michele and David, who worked with me on Clarissa, nearby. When I saw a group of kids pile off a school bus and run into the arms of their fit and fashionable moms, I knew we’d found our town.

  Mark and I visited a handful of houses, and we found one new-construction home that I thought about every day after we returned to L.A. from our search. It was surrounded by woods, which made it feel very private, and we even saw some wild turkeys crossing the road, which was quaint. The backyard hill was sloped perfectly for sledding, and the nearby Long Island Sound smelled like my childhood. But we didn’t make a move, because the housing market was in free fall, and we wanted to unload our place first. I prayed every night that our L.A. home would sell before that house in Westport did.

  The best way I could think to get my head out of housing woes was—you guessed it—to get another job. In October 2008, I took Mark, the kids, and our nanny to Atlanta while I shot My Fake Fiancé. Mom and I were given a rom-com script that we loved about two strangers in dire financial straits who stage a fake engagement and wedding, just to collect the gifts. We optioned the story for Hartbreak and sold it to ABC Family, since they’d already shown us so much love already with our wedding show, Tying the Knot, our movie Holiday in Handcuffs, and years of Sabrina reruns.

  My old pal Joey Lawrence and I costarred in it, which was a good time since we usually only saw each other in passing at events. Joey had just killed it on ABC’s Dancing with the Stars, so the network was on board with our suggestion—that is, until Joey arrived in Atlanta with a shaved head, which they feared wouldn’t go over well with their young audience. Just as they were about to ring my old on-screen flame James Van Der Beek to replace him, Mom put her foot down and insisted that Joey and I would have terrific on-screen chemistry. ABC Family conceded, the movie premiered with big numbers, and it led to a pseudo-spinoff, our current sitcom, Melissa & Joey.