Normally, This Would Be Cause for Concern

by Danielle Fishel

  ME: Oh. Well, that was for television. I’m not Topanga in real life, you know? My name is Danielle.

  I have never seen a more confused look on a person’s face in my life. He had no idea what I was talking about. TV? Characters? Actor? What’s that? All he knew was that I was Topanga, Topanga was apparently a cheating tramp, and this loser I was with should have been Cory. Visibly upset, the guy stormed off.

  Shortly after that, my boyfriend and I broke up. Not that shocking, considering that my longest relationship in high school lasted about six months. Unlike Topanga, I didn’t have a Cory I knew I wanted to spend an eternity with. I could barely find a guy I wanted to share more than a burger with (shouts to Red Robin, my favorite restaurant for the majority of my life). Don’t get me wrong. I was a little boy-crazy. I had crushes on new boys weekly and had visions of getting married someday and having a gaggle of kids. I just didn’t want anything super-serious in high school. But I was super-serious about school dances. Man, did I love them.

  I think every school has a dance where the whole point is that the girls are supposed to ask the guys instead of the other way around. It’s actually a completely outdated concept and rather sexist to imply that the only time it’s acceptable for a girl to ask a guy out is when it’s the dance’s shtick. Anyway, in my high school, that dance was called the vice-versa dance. Not going wasn’t even an option, but I was boyfriend-less. I decided the absolute best person to bring would be Ben Savage.

  Ben and I have always been close. I couldn’t be more thankful for that, because I truly can’t imagine a much worse work environment than being forced to act like soul mates with someone you actually despise. It probably wouldn’t work. If Ben and I hadn’t been such good friends, the Cory and Topanga relationship wouldn’t have seemed real. It wouldn’t have been believable to anyone, because that kind of intense chemistry can’t be forced. I adored Ben, and no one made me laugh harder during the seven seasons we worked together. He was fun, willing to dance, and one of my best friends. He still is.

  Ben came to my house to pick me up before the dance. He looked so handsome in his black suit, and we took a few pictures together. The plan for the evening was that we were going to go to the dance, immediately take the professionally staged photos, and then dance like fools for the rest of the night. I had my mini-purse with me, and inside was a lip gloss, some face powder, and a check to pay for the previously mentioned professional photos. The dance was a blast. Ben was the hit of the party and made quite a few friends. We both had an awesome time, and at the end of the night, we were some of the last people to leave. On our drive home, we talked about how hungry we were and decided to stop at Denny’s for a late-night meal.

  I don’t remember what Ben ordered, but I can guarantee that I ordered eggs and toast, because that was, and still is, a staple of my diet. If it’s on the menu, it’s probably what I’m going to order if it’s before five P.M. Or after nine P.M. Unless it’s my birthday or my mom’s birthday, because then we take each other out for pancakes. I guess you really don’t care about what my restaurant orders are, huh? OK. Anyway, at the end of the meal, Ben grabbed at his pants pockets.

  “Uh, Danielle? I left my wallet at your parents’ house,” he said.

  “That’s OK,” I said as I reached for my mini-purse.

  My mini-purse that didn’t hold a wallet. My mini-purse that currently only had my license, a lip gloss, and a makeup compact in it.

  “Ben. This is bad,” I whispered. “I didn’t bring any money, either! I just had the check for the professional pictures and some makeup!”

  Ben and I sat in silence, staring into each other’s eyes, over plates of scraps that barely passed as food.

  After a few minutes, I said, “Is this gonna be the night that you and I have to wash Denny’s dishes because we can’t pay a twelve-dollar check?”

  Ben thought that was reasonably funny, and his laugh broke the tension and slight panic we were both feeling. Then it hit me.

  We went up to the front counter and asked the hostess if we could speak with the manager. Before she went to get him, she asked if she could take a picture with us, because she said she was a big fan. Ben and I looked at each other. “Sure,” we said in unison as we both had flashes of how humiliating it was going to be to have to explain our situation to the manager.

  The manager came out and asked what he could do for us.

  I leaned in and very quietly said, “Hi. This is really embarrassing, but we both forgot our wallets at home. I live, like, five miles away. I promise that if you let us leave right now, we will come back in less than fifteen minutes to pay this bill. You can keep my mini-purse for collateral.”

  Yes, I offered my mini-purse, filled with nothing but makeup, as collateral to the Denny’s manager. And it worked. The manager held on to my purse. Ben and I drove back to my house, grabbed our money, and went back and paid. We left our waitress a massive tip and thanked the entire staff profusely for trusting us. So that’s how two famous and fairly wealthy teenagers found themselves broke at Denny’s. Thank goodness TMZ didn’t exist back then.

  Not all stories about being recognized are as weird or embarrassing, but because I’ve been called Topanga for so long, sometimes I think I know what people are going to say before they say it. I’m not always right.

  PERSON: Hi. Um, are you . . . are you . . . ?

  ME: Yes, I am. Nice to meet you!

  PERSON: Oh, my gosh! That’s so cool. Where’s your sister?

  ME: Sister? Huh? I don’t have a sister.

  PERSON: Sorry, I mean your twin sister.

  ME: Oh. You think I’m an Olsen twin, don’t you?

  PERSON: Yes?

  ME: Sorry. Wrong person.

  (totally awkward silence)

  ME: OK, ’bye.

  Then, sometimes, people don’t know if you are the type of person who can be trusted.

  PERSON: Excuse me, are you the girl who played Topanga?

  ME: Yes, I am.

  PERSON: No you’re not!

  ME: Yes, I am. Hi.

  PERSON: No, you are not!!

  ME: OK, fine. I’m not.

  PERSON: Yes, you are!

  ME: Yep. That’s what I tried to tell you.

  PERSON: No way. Are you really?

  And occasionally, you meet people who have the absolute best intentions with what they’re saying, but it just comes out wrong.

  SCENARIO ONE

  PERSON: Topanga?

  ME: Yep. Hi.

  PERSON: You’re so much shorter in person. Did they put you on stilts for that show? Damn, you are short!

  ME: Yes, I am. Have a good day.

  SCENARIO TWO

  PERSON: Are you the girl from Boy Meets World ?

  ME: Yeah. Hi. Nice to meet you.

  PERSON: Jeez, you are so much smaller in person. On TV, you look so much fatter!

  ME: Yay! OK, ’bye.

  Generally, I love, truly love, when people come up and say hi to me. I am usually very nice and couldn’t be more appreciative of those of you who have encouraged and supported my career for all these years. I am lucky to have you, and I am grateful that you even care to say hi, or take a picture, or shake my hand at all.

  I’ve said no to pictures with people on two occasions, one was when I was leaving a funeral for someone very close to me. Aside from the fact that I had been sobbing for a few hours and had mascara running down my cheeks, I didn’t feel the timing was appropriate, and it would have been disrespectful to the family. The other time I turned down taking a picture with someone was completely void of anything righteous and was strictly because I’m a vain jerk face. It was five thirty A.M., and I had just completed an hour-long boot-camp class that completely exhausted me. My face was bright red, I had zero makeup on, and my workout clothes looked like I had stolen them from a homeless woman around the corner. So, yeah. I said no that time, too. But, with that said, here’s an open invitation. If you ever see me and you’d like a
picture together, please come ask. I don’t bite, and you will absolutely not be bothering me.

  What does bother me, to the point of possibly biting someone’s head off (wait, I thought I said I don’t bite . . .), is when someone tries to take a picture of me without me knowing it. I am a nice person, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have a bitchy side. Trust me, I have one. If you ever want to see my bitchy side, see me out in public and try to take a picture of me without asking with your cell phone . . . preferably while I’m eating wings.

  I don’t know why people don’t realize that everyone knows cell phones have cameras or why people don’t think I can tell when they are awkwardly holding their phones in my direction, but they do. In my opinion, there are few things more rude than trying to take a picture of someone without his or her knowledge. Especially when they are eating!

  A couple years ago I went to a restaurant/bar with my husband, Tim, and we ordered delicious, sauce-covered, disastrous-to-eat wings. I love wings. I love food. I love to not have people judging me while I’m eating food, because I am a human being and no one likes that. Just as I was fully investing myself in those deliciously messy wings and had sauce all over my face and fingers, the guy sitting in front of us held up his cell-phone camera. He was trying to take a picture of himself with my sauce-covered face behind him by using his phone’s reverse camera view. I noticed it and quickly ducked behind Tim so I could use a napkin to clean the chicken sauce off my face, but that didn’t deter the guy. He was waving his camera around like a madman, trying to find my face. And I could see this all happening twelve feet in front of me.

  When I had successfully cleaned off my wing-sauce-stained face, I went over to him and said, “Would you like to take a picture? I’d rather we do it now so that you can stop trying to take my picture while I’m eating.”

  His response? “No. I didn’t want to take your picture. I just wanted to know if it was you but didn’t want to be rude and keep turning around to look.”

  Riiiiiiiiiight. I don’t know about you, but I call BS on that story.

  Anyway, his friend chirped up and said, “Man, if you’re offering, I definitely want a picture!”

  Mr. Curious with the reverse-angle camera was the one who took it. He got up and left a few minutes later, probably planning to tell everyone he’d ever met that he met me once and I was a total witch. Sorry, dude, but who wants to have her picture taken looking like a slob with meat in her teeth and red sauce all over her face? Not a good look for anyone.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 4

  * * *

  SOMETIMES THEY WISH I WAS ADOPTED

  My parents have had it pretty easy with me: I love and respect them and have managed to be a well-adjusted contributing member of society—most of the time. Not too shabby, right? But despite my good intentions, I can’t seem to avoid being the occasional disgrace to their gene pool.

  For example, take my skills behind the wheel. As is true for many sixteen-year-olds, when I first learned to drive, I left some room for improvement. I gripped the steering wheel too tightly, I drove too fast, I tailgated, and I hugged the right side of the road. Shortly after I started driving myself to work, I got into a terrible car accident on the freeway. It had been raining very heavily, and even though I was not speeding, I shouldn’t have been in the fast lane. My beloved Toyota 4Runner hydroplaned, and I lost control, smashing into the center divider and spinning around three times, hitting the center divider yet again with every turn. My air bag had gone off, and I wasn’t injured—but I was stuck in the fast lane of a major freeway during a complete downpour. I needed immediate assistance, so I did what any normal person would do. I called my mom.

  MOM: Hello?

  ME: Mom?

  MOM: Yes?

  ME: Hi, it’s Danielle.

  MOM: I only have one daughter, Danielle.

  ME: Oh, right. Anyway, I was just in a really bad car accident on the freeway. I’m fine, though.

  MOM: Oh, my God! Danielle, are you OK? Are the police on their way?

  ME: I don’t know.

  MOM: Did you call them?

  ME: No, I called you first.

  MOM: Danielle Christine, hang up this phone right now and call nine-one-one! Why would you call me first?

  I know it sounds silly, but I can’t help it—when disaster strikes, my first instinct is always to call my mom. One time, a man was yelling and screaming at me while approaching my car with a steel baseball bat. I immediately called my mom, and not because she’s Liam Neeson in Taken or anything. She’s just my mom, and I’m (maybe) a little overly dependent.

  Anyway, back to the freeway. I called the police, but in the meantime, I was stuck like a sitting duck in moving traffic. The visibility was incredibly low, and I was terrified that someone would rear-end me at high speed and I’d go soaring across all five lanes of the freeway. Only one person stopped to make sure I was OK: Jared Leto. (Yes, in LA, Academy Award winners just show up in times of need. Not really, but can you imagine?) I had never met Jared, but he noticed my destroyed car and pulled up next to me, gesturing for me to roll down my window.

  JARED LETO: Hey. Pretty bad accident, huh? Are you OK?

  ME: Yeah, it was pretty scary. Yes, I’m OK.

  JARED: Do you want me to call the police for you?

  ME: I already did, but thank you for asking.

  JARED: OK, I hope your day gets better.

  Then he rolled up his window and drove away. Jared Leto made me a forever fan that day. Who am I kidding? After falling in love with him as Jordan Catalano, I was already a forever fan, but it was still a very nice thing to do.

  After my car had been towed, my mom had come to pick me up so I could make it to the Boy Meets World set for work, and Rider Strong drove me home from work. That night, over dinner with my family, we discussed what we were going to do since I was going to be without a car for a few weeks. I wasn’t old enough to rent a car, so my dad generously offered to let me borrow his brand-new car, and he would drive a rental. The next day, my dad handed me his keys and told me to be careful. I made it to work without incident.

  After work was a different story. I decided to stop at a local clothing store on my way home. The underground parking garage was steep and had a lot of turns. Thanks to my lack of skill and my desire to hug the right side of the road, I scraped the entire right side of his car across one of the curved garage walls. In an attempt to remove myself from the situation, I put the car in reverse—more scraping. I put the car in drive and inched forward—even more scraping. In a complete panic, I parked the car and jumped out, screaming for help. A man who was working in valet came over to help me. He was a much more experienced driver and somehow got my dad’s car off the garage wall without any more damage. I thanked him profusely and drove back to my parents’ house.

  The whole way home, I contemplated how I was going to tell them. OK, honestly, I was trying to figure out a way I could avoid telling them, but there was none. I parked the car along the right side of the garage and hoped no one would notice before I could explain what happened. I came clean about the fiasco at dinner, and to their credit, neither my mom nor my dad murdered me. My dad put his head down with his fingers on the bridge of his nose, and my mom just looked at me and shook her head. The next day, my dad brought his car into the body shop, and my mom drove me to work. They removed me from their car insurance, and I was never allowed to drive one of their cars again. Gosh, they are such jerks, right? Just kidding. Don’t ever let me borrow your car.

  Unfortunately for my parents, I started making their lives difficult long before I learned to drive. When I was a little girl in the neon-hued mid-’80s, one of my favorite things to do was to help my mom get ready for an evening out. My parents didn’t go out alone very often, choosing instead to spend time with my brother and me as a family, but when they did, I was her personal stylist. Usually, she would direct me to her closet and point out which fabulous dress—resplendent with shoulde
r pads, no doubt—she had decided to wear, and then I was responsible for selecting the appropriately matching panty hose (a must in the ’80s), purse, jewelry, and shoes she should wear with it. This meant that if she was wearing a pink dress, I would find her pink panty hose (oh, yes, those actually existed), her pink purse, her gold jewelry, and her pink shoes. The ’80s took its matching seriously. Playing the part of stylist was incredibly fun, because aside from feeling like I was really contributing to her look for the evening, I also got to play dress-up with all of my favorite clothes and accessories that my mom owned (like her pair of black snakeskin stilettos that dipped low around the toes and showcased excellent toe cleavage—I still dream about those shoes).

  One day, my mom came home with a brand-new dress for a party she was attending with my dad. It was gorgeous, and I so badly wanted to try it on—which was ridiculous, because I was no more than four years old, and there wasn’t a chance in the world that this dress was going to even remotely fit me. But the heart wants what the hearts wants, and I wanted to put that dress on my little body and dance around like a grown-up. My mom had always let me play in her closet, so I didn’t see any reason this time would be any different—but it was.

  My mom didn’t shop for herself very often, and this particular dress was fresh from the store and still wore its price tag. She wasn’t set to wear the dress for another couple of weeks and certainly didn’t want her sticky-fingered child to play in it before she had even had a chance to wear it. Obviously, this all makes sense to me now, but at the time, none of it made sense. In my eyes, my mom had turned into a child-hating ogre and clearly wanted to torture me by bringing home a gorgeous dress that was off limits to me. I begged and begged to put the dress on, and she kept saying no. After a few fruitless minutes of begging, I exploded into a tantrum and demanded that she let me try on her dress through a stream of never-ending tears.

  She lost her patience and yelled, “No, Danielle. How many times do I have to tell you no?”