Melissa Explains It All: Tales from My Abnormally Normal Life

by Melissa Joan Hart

  By my final season on Clarissa, the only person I wanted to live with was my best friend from the set—a girl named Michele, who’d been my dresser for all four seasons of the show. Nickelodeon didn’t object to the arrangement, since I was so close to my eighteenth birthday, and Mom said I was practically an adult. Michele’s job was to bring my clothes to my dressing room, make sure they fit well, and then just before we’d shoot, pick and pull and tape me into fashion perfection. Most actors have a very close and intimate relationship with their dressers, since they’re the ones who see you buck naked numerous times a day, and know how to camouflage every big and small flaw on your body.

  Michele was tall, gorgeous, and wise—a clean-cut, carefree, all-American sorority-girl type. She knew how to have fun but stay out of trouble. When we weren’t attempting to cook dinner or Rollerblade, we’d hang out with our friend Bruce, the stylist on our show and a movie buff well versed in black-and-white films like His Girl Friday and All About Eve. As a child, I had considered Shirley Temple and Judy Garland charming actresses, but I had no idea Audrey Hepburn and Bette Davis could be so enchanting, too. Since I spent a lot of time stressing about my SATs and filling out college applications while we lived together, Michele took me to her old sorority house for pledge week—just to show me that college could also be fun. The atmosphere was so congenial, supportive, and inclusive—unlike any girl group dynamic I’d encountered so far—that I made the mistake of pledging a sorority at NYU the following year, only to quickly learn that on city campuses, nobody does this. I guess Manhattan coeds don’t need to wear Greek letters to get them drunk or laid, since the city’s bars and clubs offer this without asking for dues.

  Michele was, and still is, like a dear sister to me, one who knew how to look out for my safety but let me act like a free-spirited teenager. She showed me through her own example how to have an adventurous life, while also being a responsible, good-hearted person. She taught me that happiness comes from the people you choose to be around—a lesson she stood behind when she got engaged to her longtime boyfriend, David, who was the assistant to Clarissa’s creator, Mitchell Kriegman. Back then, David and Michele cheered me on for everything from my first sushi (California rolls), to my first taste of hard-earned luxury (a first-class trip from New York to Orlando), to my first Philharmonic performance (in Central Park). And let’s not forget that first tequila shot! I admire their marriage so much that when my husband Mark and I were looking for a town in which to raise our family years later, we chose one thirty minutes from Michele and David. I thought this would be a sure-fire way to have a life as wonderful as hers. I also made her and David godparents of our first son, Mason.

  * * *

  When I wasn’t on set, my teen years weren’t all girl talk and movie nights. In the summer of 1991, the first year I shot Clarissa, my mom spent a few months on a cruise ship (yes, the same one where she met the Babe) with my sister Liz and baby Emily. She met so many people with crazy lifestyles—a juggler, a singer, a Broadway showgirl—that being a Long Island housewife suddenly paled in comparison. She was also already by herself so much that she decided she’d had enough, should divorce Dad, and then reinvent her life as we all knew it.

  Here’s how it went down.

  After a few weeks of being at sea with just Liz and Emily, Mom wanted the rest of the family to join them on a weeklong jaunt around the Bahamas. But with all the kids gathered on the dock, my parents got into a humongous fight about the T-shirt my dad decided to wear for his first visit to see his wife since she left for Liz’s gig. The shirt had a bull on it, with tiny poop droppings spilling out of its rear, inside a red circle with a line through it. The unsubtle message? “No bullshit.”

  Dad thought it was hilarious, but Mom was horrified that this was the man she was about to introduce to her fabulous new cruise friends. She flipped out. It didn’t take long for us kids to realize their marriage was over, but we were also stuck on a big boat with them and forced to watch it play out until they announced they were splitting up. They argued and slept in separate rooms, which made me feel so helpless. To get our minds off the drama, my sister Trisha and I hit the disco to learn new dance moves from other teens on board. Lucky for me, when the trip was over I went back to Orlando to tape our last six episodes of the season. I didn’t have to witness the mess that ensued once the Harts hit shore. I’ve never been back on a cruise ship since. I have such vivid memories of feeling trapped.

  During the wrap party for that first season of Clarissa, when everyone said their good-byes, I really absorbed the magnitude of what was about to go down at home when our designer, Lisa, gave me a tight hug and whispered in my ear, “I don’t envy what you have to return to.” I felt sick about leaving my Clarissa family to encounter a shit storm with my biological one, on top of the harassment I thought I’d get from the local Long Island kids for my dual life.

  Each time I went back to New York, Nickelodeon paid for a town car to drive me from the airport to Long Island. It was always an hour late and I’d constantly have to drag my bags to the curb, and then around the airport, and eventually to a pay phone to call the dispatch a few dozen times before my car would find me. At fourteen years old, this really pissed me off, but since I didn’t know that I could make a formal complaint, it never failed to happen the same way, month after month. On that trip home after we wrapped, the car picked me up after an hour, as usual—but before I could notice we were headed west instead of east on the LIE, I was taken to Sixth Avenue and Eleventh Street in the city, across from the famous Ray’s Pizza in Greenwich Village.

  My mom was waiting for me outside a beautiful town house. She told me she’d truly left the ’burbs, and my dad, and that I’d be living with her. She never asked me if I wanted to. I knew they were getting a divorce, but I didn’t know how the specifics would play out. Mom helped me inside with my bags, up a tall set of stairs, and into an empty high-ceilinged living room with a tiny white kitchenette. She told me the furniture, my sisters, and my brother would arrive the next day. Oh, and by the way, she met a gay Broadway singer on the cruise ship, and he’d be our roommate to help with the rent. For two weeks, the divorce and move made me really blue. I moped around the apartment, trying to make sense of it all. I also didn’t want to live in the city. It was nice to visit, but that’s all I thought I could take. It was dirty, smelly, loud, and now I had to call it home.

  As if my life weren’t already splintered from living in Florida and New York, I was now asked to spend hiatus weekends on Long Island with Dad and weekdays in New York City. But it actually sounded more annoying than it was. Children of divorce usually have a hard time with their parents’ separation, but after those two initial weeks of ennui, I got over the sad part and did my best to work through the anger that came with having a severed family. I’m not sure if I could compartmentalize these feelings because I was old enough to talk about what had happened with my siblings, or because I could see how unhappy my parents really were on that cruise ship. I’d noticed that their fights were becoming more regular and heated—there’s a fork mark still in my father’s kitchen cabinets from when Mom threw one at him in a huff—but we never knew it would end in divorce.

  City living wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. I loved discovering new bookstores and boutiques; and the A/C/E train was the ticket to getting out of my head. Our town house grew on me, too, especially the attic room I shared with my sister Trisha. It was hidden behind closet doors on the third floor and had skylights instead of windows, though it was also the only room without a window AC unit. I spent long, hot summer days covering my walls with my original paintings, mostly inspired by the Keith Haring and Andy Warhol art for sale that I walked past on the streets. On one wall of my room, I painted a giant Earth as the center of an even bigger sunflower. I asked guests who visited to add their favorite quotes to the nine-foot staircase wall, until it was covered in many colors, handwritings, and inspirational sayings. My favorite line was, �
�What’s a weekend, if you ain’t knockin’ boots?”—a lyric by A Tribe Called Quest. It was scrawled by a Sayville buddy named Joe, who’d become a closer friend now that I lived in Manhattan. On the security bars that covered my skylight, I hung long necklaces that had made their way into my suitcase from the Clarissa set. I collected combat boots from Eighth Street and knickknacks from St. Mark’s, and displayed both for all to see.

  Trisha’s side, on the other hand, was extremely girly, with a floral Laura Ashley bedspread and wallpaper on her half of the room only. This was funny to me, since she looked more Salt-n-Pepa than Rachel Ashwell (though she’d tell you she drew her inspiration from the Wu Tang Clan). Influenced by her classmates in the Bronx, Trisha wore men’s Polo shirts, Hilfiger oversize jeans with boys’ boxers sticking out the back, and Nike sneakers or Timberlands. The cherry on top was a slick ponytail and giant gold “door-knocker” earrings. Maybe the best comparison of all would be Jennifer Lopez, when she was still “Jenny from the Block.” I can’t blame Trisha, though, for embracing the anonymity and “anything goes” style that comes with living in Manhattan. I could be anyone I wanted to be here, too. And even though my sister and I had very different looks and interests, we helped each other out when the divorce got to us. Trisha and I have always been close, even when we couldn’t stand each other, because beyond our carefree childhood, we had the experience of sharing those tough years and that wild room together. I always say that the best part of having such a big family is all those built-in friends, and Trisha was no exception.

  * * *

  Moving to the city also meant changing my New York–based school. The bummer was that I took my studies so seriously and was doing really well until I was forced to move around so much. So far, I’d worked with Florida tutors while attending public school in ninth grade and then private school in tenth, and then for the last two years of school, Mom and I decided that I’d simply work with tutors to get me through the curriculum as fast and easily as I could. It was the most difficult to balance school and work on set, though, because I worked on one or two subjects a day, for four to six hours—on top of rehearsals, wardrobe fittings, learning lines, and whatever else I needed to do for that week’s episode. It’s not easy to learn calculus for 320 uninterrupted minutes, once a week, and retain it. When I wasn’t in a scene, I worked in the school trailer with Jason and Sean. “Recess” was running around the Universal Studios lot and jumping on the Back to the Future ride whenever possible.

  One of the few major benefits to my DIY schooling happened in ninth grade. I was on a huge soundstage, surrounded by capable, creative people, and they were always willing to help with projects for my Long Island classes. I owed my English teacher a model of England’s famous Globe Theatre, though I had no clue how to turn wood and nails into a diorama. But my friend David, our set designer who built Clarissa’s weekly sets in short periods of time, had years of experience making models. In just twenty-four hours, he made me a to-scale cardboard Globe, which I then surrounded with pieces of green strawberry baskets to represent the theater’s balcony rails.

  Because of my wonky schedule, enrolling in Professional Children’s School, or PCS, in tenth grade was a no-brainer. PCS is a private school for students simultaneously pursuing artistic careers, which was helpful and necessary when I was shooting Clarissa. (Trisha went to the esteemed Bronx High School of Science, while Liz, Brian, and Emily attended public schools in the area.) Located on the Upper West Side, PCS was like a skinny converted apartment building, only the apartments were classrooms, and the halls with our lockers doubled as a break area. There was also a tiny outdoor yard where we’d occasionally shoot hoops, but it was nothing like the giant grassy fields, tennis courts, or Olympic-size pool I’d known in Sayville. Not that physical education was important to PCS kids. We were just there to get our diplomas, so we could pursue our creative dreams or get into a decent college; we were also too young to know our life experiences and résumé would get us into any school before straight As did. Unlike my Sayville classmates, who seemed uninterested in my acting, what made PCS students special were their jobs. My classmates included ballerinas, stand-up comics, and actors like me, including some famous names like Sarah Michelle Gellar, Jerry O’Connell, the Culkin brothers (Macaulay, Kieran, and Shane), Dash Mihok, Donald “Shun” Faison, and my best friend while I was there—Tara Reid.

  Even though some of us were in different grades or classes, PCS was so small that I mingled a lot with these kids in the halls or on the really steep stairwells between floors. (Who needs PE when you have to walk a dozen flights up to get to trig?) And even though the acting kids all did the same thing, we never talked about our work, which was refreshing to me.

  Compared to the teens I knew from Long Island, my PCS classmates were also more self-confident, and significantly less judgmental. This also could’ve just been city kids maturing faster than the rest of the country, especially since we were around adults so much at work.

  Though it was a specialized school, a lot of typical high school stereotypes and superlatives played out at PCS. Macaulay Culkin was most popular, since it was well known that he was a mega-million-dollar movie star and probably the most recognizable student for being Kevin in Home Alone. His brother Shane was in my grade and became a good friend for a minute, but Mac and his brother Kieran were wild, arrogant boys who seemed spoiled by too much attention from fans. They got away with wearing two different color shoes at the same time, Kris Kross style—who does that? As for Shun, Dash, and Jerry, they were the “hot” seniors. I still run into Dash, who went on to do supporting roles in The Perfect Storm and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, and Shun, maybe best known as Dr. Christopher Turk on Scrubs, on studio lots or at occasional Hollywood parties. Or we keep up with each other on Twitter.

  Sarah Michelle Gellar might as well have been known as “most likely to be my professional doppleganger.” She was a year younger than me and though we always got along at auditions and commercial shoots, I wouldn’t say we were super close. We began our careers at around the same time, and hung out during commercial auditions, but rarely crossed paths at PCS. Our lives went on to mimic each other’s and still do. When I shot Clarissa, she dazzled on All My Children as Susan Lucci’s daughter. I used to randomly turn it on and feel proud that I knew her. Then about six months after Sabrina first aired, Sarah began slaying vampires as Buffy, and a decade later when I began shooting my third sitcom, Melissa & Joey, her third show launched, too. The tabloids have kept me posted on similarities in our personal lives as well. We got our first tattoos around the same time, got married a year apart, and seem to have timed a few of our pregnancies simultaneously. Isn’t that strange? Whenever I hear something new about my cosmic twin, I stop to wonder if I’ve had, or will have, similar experiences in my own life.

  Then there’s Tara Reid. She was a lively and naughty friend. Unlike the skin, bones, and boobs she is now, Tara was a plump young thing in high school. And the wild side that’s made her infamous? You could say she honed her rebellious skills at PCS. Any trouble I got into in tenth grade can pretty much be traced back to Tara, though I rarely did anything wrong. One time, we both got scolded for her copying off my test (my teacher thought we were in cahoots), and when she smoked cigarettes on the church steps near our school and I went with her, we both got in trouble for it, even though I hadn’t lit a cancer stick. One of my favorite memories of Tara was when we both quit an acting class after just one improv skit. We could both be outgoing, yet neither of us had the nerve to invent a workable scene on a whim. It was too much pressure to be funny without a script and not embarrass ourselves, especially in an artsy school.

  Like most teenagers, I began to really collect and covet my friendships during my teen years, though I didn’t form many long-term relationships from PCS, since I felt so invested in the time and energy I spent working on Clarissa for most of the year. That said, fans always want to know if I stay close with past costars after wrapping a sho
w or movie. I rarely do. Most actors’ lives are a traveling circus that isn’t conducive to regular coffee dates. I’ve worked everywhere from Surfers Paradise in Australia, to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to Provo, Utah, and up into Calgary, Canada, for weeks to months at a time. Actors also live in really close quarters, sometimes six days a week, so it doesn’t take long for us to get a little tired of each other. We see each other in the makeup and hair room, at the craft services table, and on set. But our top priority is to work. I know this may be disappointing to hear, but when you see actors getting along in a scene, don’t assume that they’re best friends in real life—more often than not, they’re just acting. They’ve probably had some nice chats between takes, or maybe gone to lunch, but they’re not talking late into the night about their hopes and dreams (or at least, I’m not). I’ve simply grown to trust that some people just come into your life for a lifetime, a reason, or a TV season, and I’m grateful for every experience.

  I did become very tight with a lot of people from the Clarissa crew during my high school years, and I think this is because of my background. I’ve always had more in common (at least I think I do) with the grips, camera department, makeup, hair, and wardrobe people, boom operator, sound guys—the technical folks who get their hands dirty. In the business, people like to say there’s an imaginary line that separates those who influence the creative direction of a film’s story from those who perform duties related to its physical production (this line is used for matters related to the show’s budget). “Above the line” people are those who guide creative direction, including your screenwriters, producer, director, casting director, and actors. The crew is said to be “below the line,” since they perform the physical production of a film. The first group was always more interested in who I knew, what I could do for them, and what car I was driving, but the second group reminded me of my family. They wanted to work hard and then head home to what was really important. They never had time to chitchat or feed my ego when they had recitals, graduations, and basketball games to get to. In fact, I always thought befriending the crew was much harder, but more gratifying, than trying to win over a network exec, producer, or actor who was always too quick to compliment a day’s work. To me, there’s no better feeling than having a dolly grip run into me at the craft service table and say, “That scene was hilarious!” I appreciate that the crew is the first to arrive and the last to leave; they’re the ones who do the grunt work for no credit and little pay. And they don’t care who you are or what you have done, because they’ve worked with The Best, and this is just another paycheck to feed their families. They also know your every tantrum, mentally record every minute you’re late to set or delayed from lunch, and are well aware of sex- or drug-related antics, since they empty your garbage at night. So if they love you in spite of all that, that’s saying a whole lot.