by Ian Harding
He’s the healthiest dog I’ve ever met, and he now eats substantially better than I do: a blend of lean pork, quinoa, kale, Fuji apples, carrots, and various omega fatty acids not derived from fish.
Mochi eats dog food.
HOW TO LOOK SEXY ON CAMERA
The first time Lucy and I ever kissed on-screen was in a bar in Vancouver. We were shooting the pilot, and there’s a scene where we’re making out in a bathroom.
I flossed at least three times before that scene. I had a bottle of mouthwash with me on set, and I gargled between every take. At dinner that night with the cast, everything tasted minty fresh, and the next day my mouth was numb.
The whole time I was shooting the pilot, I tried to keep in mind a piece of advice a model once gave me. She told me that if you ever want to look sexy on camera, you just have to pretend you’re slightly confused about something. Not too confused, she said. You don’t want to actually appear befuddled. Just a bit dazed.
That advice seemed to help, but there are a few other hurdles to looking sexy—and most of those hurdles for me involve hair.
I have a lot of stubble, no matter how often my face is shaved. The makeup team on Pretty Little Liars has to constantly reapply Lucy’s makeup whenever we kiss because my cheeks always belt-sand it off.
Shaving has some consequences. Once, Lucy and I were filming a sex scene, and I had an ingrown hair on my neck from shaving. It was a big red bump—too big for makeup to completely hide. The DP tried different camera angles, but we were romping around in bed in the scene, so he couldn’t get a bump-free view.
At one point, someone suggested putting a dab of green paint on it—the same color as a green screen—so that it could be edited out in post. Needless to say, having a crew of twenty-plus people obsessing over a blemish on my neck was a humbling experience.
Whenever I have a shirtless scene, I have to shave off all my chest hair. The network requires all the men on the show to have smooth, porpoise-y chests.
I tried waxing it once. Never again.
The week after I shave my chest, I’m always in agony. Itchy, itchy agony. I’ve tried everything to help cope with the pain: baby oil, coconut oil—even olive oil, but that just made me hungry. The only remedy that makes any difference whatsoever is Advil, two fingers of scotch, and patience.
If we’re shooting a scene where I’m wearing a low-cut shirt or a Henley, Cindy from hair and makeup will use a vibrating mini razor called “the peanut”—I promise it’s not a sex toy—and shave a deep “V” around the shirt line in my chest hair.
Strangely enough though, arm hair is always okay on Pretty Little Liars. That’s how they want the guys to look: smooth in the middle, hairy at the edges. It’s a strange formula.
So, I guess what I’m saying here is that, if you want to look sexy on camera, shave your chest and remember to look confused. Just not too confused.
THE BIRDS AND THE BEES
My sister Sarah entered the world in San Diego, California. I was born three days and three years later a continent away, in Germany. Our parents were in the military, which is why we were stationed overseas. My mom was a nurse with the navy, and my dad was a journalist and editor at Soldiers magazine.
Sarah was two when they moved to Europe, so she remembers a lot more about Germany than I do. She’s told me about the parks we used to go to, the bakeries and the shops near our home. I don’t remember much of it. At the time I was primarily focused on crying and learning to walk.
On days when he didn’t have work, my dad would take Sarah and me to the local Tiergarten—which translates, literally, to “animal garden.” It was a zoo. I was too young to remember, but my dad says I was always drawn to the exotic birds. He says I used to run up and stick my fingers through the chain link of their cages to try to pet their wildly colored feathers. Perhaps the bird-loving die was cast before I even had a choice in the matter.
When I was three, my parents were called back stateside. We moved to Virginia, and my mom started working at a naval hospital in DC, and my dad started his next magazine gig. With both of my parents out of the house, my sister and I spent a lot of time with babysitters—I’ve mentioned before that I scared many of them off.
During this time, Sarah and I became inseparable. My mom used to joke that I was my big sister’s shadow. Anywhere she went, I followed.
Sarah and I would play pretend for hours, lost in worlds of our own creation, and speaking languages nobody else could understand. Sarah would often set the rules of the world, and I would play the part she assigned to me.
We didn’t have a dog, and we both really wanted one, so sometimes Sarah would have me run around on all fours and bark at cats. We had to stop that game though after I got carried away and chased a neighborhood boy back to his home.
A lot of our make-believe involved evil nuns. I’m not sure why. Maybe it had something to do with Sarah’s love of everything British—and often stories involving British children would also feature a domineering lady of the cloth. Neither of us had ever seen a nun in real life, but we would spend hours pretending to fight them.
When one of us had to play a dreaded nun, Sarah always assigned the part to me.
At the time, my dad was reading Jane Goodall’s books, and he would read to us from them. Goodall wrote extensively about chimpanzees and poaching in Africa, and we became obsessed with the settings of her stories. When we played outdoors, we would pretend that we were lost in tropical lands filled with wild tribes of cannibalistic nuns—all played by me.
When I was four, Virginia was hit by a terrible blizzard. Both of my parents stayed home from work for a week. That was the first time my mom and dad ever got to witness the full extent of our marathon make-believe sessions. During the storm, my dad helped Sarah and me turn a couch on its side. We covered it in sheets and created a fort in the living room. When my dad asked us what it was for, Sarah told him that we were defending our keep from a horde of Blessed Sisters.
My parents looked at each other, and my dad suggested, as diplomatically as possible, that perhaps we might want to try fighting something other than the Catholic Church. The idea had never occurred to us.
* * *
One day that spring, Sarah and I were spending the day at a babysitter’s house, and we decided to run off into the backyard to play “Jane Goodall.” We knew that there were poacher nuns everywhere—and rural Virginia was no exception.
In our search for poachers, we came across a large beehive in the trunk of a tree. Naturally, we whacked it with our nun-chucks.
This turned out to be a terrible idea.
The hive exploded on the ground, unleashing a cloud of irate bees, hell-bent on revenge. As the first wave descended upon us, our babysitter grabbed her own baby—she was a mother—and ran inside, locking herself and her five-month-old in the bathroom.
Sarah and I ran into the house screaming after her and banged on the bathroom door, shouting to be let in.
“I’m so sorry,” she cried from the other side of the door. “I can’t. You’ll let the bees in.”
Just then, another bee stung me. On the eyelid. We had run inside without closing the back door.
The entire swarm had chased us into the house, and they weren’t letting up. This was it. The bees had us exactly where they wanted us.
I asked Sarah if we were going to die.
“No!” she said. “I have an idea.” Sarah was always coming up with clever solutions to impossible situations.
“Take your clothes off,” she said, ripping off her shoes. “The bees won’t recognize us if we’re naked. They’ll just keep attacking our clothes thinking it’s us.”
My God, she was brilliant. I immediately started taking off my pants. They got caught around my ankles, and I tripped on them and went down. Sarah pulled me up by my shoulders and helped me un-Velcro my shoes.
We hastily laid out our clothes on the floor like flattened scarecrows for the bees to find. What a great idea thi
s was. Surely now, those dumb bees would stop stinging us and attack our clothes instead.
They didn’t.
We ran around the babysitter’s house naked, screaming, and crying as bees continued to sting us.
Mercifully, my dad came to pick us up early. As he walked up the driveway, he was greeted by the sight of his two children, naked and screaming, pressed up against the bay windows. Our babysitter was still locked in the bathroom.
This might have been one of the only moments I can recall seeing my dad’s military training in action. He took one look at us, ran to the front door, and kicked it in. I don’t know if he even tried to turn the knob first.
He rushed to my sister and me, scooped us up in his arms, and sprinted to the car.
He took us home, gave us both oatmeal baths, and put antihistamine cream over all of our welts. We didn’t go to the hospital, since my mom was a nurse, but I was still bedridden, waiting for the end to come.
I asked my father for a piece of paper.
“For what?” he asked.
“I want to write my will.”
“Who are you going to give all your stuff to?”
“Sarah. For her bravery. And for saving my life.”
* * *
When I was six, Sarah started taking voice lessons. She would come home every week with sheet music and new songs to learn. She’d lock herself in her room and practice scales for hours. It was the first time that my big sister had gone off to do something that I wasn’t allowed to join.
I persuaded my parents to let me take voice lessons, too. I didn’t really care about singing, but my sister was doing it, so I had to do it, too. I ended up developing a bit of a crush on my voice teacher, so I kept taking lessons as long as I could get my parents to let me.
Soon after I started taking voice lessons, Sarah and I started going to see local plays. Our aunt Jules worked at a nearby high school called Georgetown Prep—her first and only job: she’s been there since 1970. Whenever they would put on a show, Sarah and I would get to see it.
Aunt Jules introduced us to the head of the school’s drama department. We told him how much we liked his plays, and he asked us if we ever wanted to be a part of them. Often, the plays would have big ensemble scenes—villagers going about their days, workers in a factory, that kind of thing—and they didn’t have enough actors to fill the stage. So my sister and I started acting in the big ensemble scenes of the shows.
Our first big scene was as tavern boys in the play 1776. We wiped down tables and carried around empty beer mugs in the background of the big musical numbers. We were in awe, completely starstruck by the teenage actors dancing and singing around us. Sarah’s hair was short then, too, so we both played boys. It wasn’t really a big deal for us—when we played pretend in the living room, Sarah and I switched genders constantly depending on the story we were telling.
The first time we acted in a play together, I almost backed out. Sarah calmed me down. She took my hand in hers and said, “It’s okay, Ian. I’ll be here. If you get scared just hug me and it’ll be okay.” She was right. Everything was okay. Everything was always okay when my big sister was nearby, and we ended up doing several plays together at the high school.
As is often the case with siblings, things changed when Sarah started middle school. I was still a little kid, but she was suddenly a teenager. She didn’t want to play make-believe anymore.
We started to fight—all the time. For the first time in my life, my sister and I didn’t get along. Our status quo became conflict.
Once, when Sarah was babysitting me, I decided to hold her hostage and force her to be my friend again. I snuck up behind her while she was doing the dishes, and I pulled a butter knife on her.
“Freeze,” I said, pointing the dull blade at her knees.
Sarah calmly reached into the dishwasher and pulled out a large kitchen knife. I burst into tears and ran to my room.
Over the next few years, Sarah and I grew more and more distant. Sarah was busy with her friends and her writing. I was busy losing the Geography Bee to Danny fucking Gordon.
I moved from elementary school to middle school. Sarah moved up to high school. All along, we were still bickering. By the time I started high school, we were barely on speaking terms.
I was going through adolescence. My body started to grow into my voice. I began going on dates. At school we learned sex ed—awkwardly enough, my sex-ed teacher was my aunt Jules.
* * *
In the winter of my freshman year of high school, Sarah asked me if we could go somewhere to talk.
There weren’t a lot of restaurants or coffee shops near us when we were growing up. In fact, if you lived in Herndon and you needed to have a heart-to-heart with somebody, there was really only one place you could go. So we headed down to the Dairy Queen on Lynn Street.
Sitting across from Sarah on the red plastic bench in the Dairy Queen, I found myself unable to maintain eye contact. It was cold outside, but I’d ordered a Blizzard—out of habit, I guess, or defiance. I was pretending to be interested in my ice cream so that I didn’t have to look at my sister. I kept turning the cup upside down to see if anything would fall out of it.
Sarah spoke first.
“So, you like mint with Oreos?” she asked.
I was quiet. At first I acted like I hadn’t heard her.
“Yeah, I always have,” I finally said.
“You’re right. I remember you, uh … yeah, you love mint.”
Our conversation, if you could even call it that, had stalled. Again.
“You doing okay, though?”
I nodded. “Yeah, I’m fine.”
She sighed, and covered her eyes with her hands.
“Look, the reason I wanted to talk to you is…”
She trailed off. The door swung open and a gorgeous woman in running clothes walked in. She passed by our table and I, being a fifteen-year-old boy, checked her out. I followed her to the counter with my eyes, then caught myself, felt guilty, and turned back to Sarah.
Sarah’s eyes were locked on the woman, too. She might have been checking her out even harder than I was. After a moment, she laughed at herself, and turned back to me.
I could practically hear the lightbulb click on in my head.
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. I’m a lesbian, Ian.”
My mouth fell open. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t look away either.
Sarah and I sat like that for about a minute, just looking at one another in silence.
“I’m going to tell Mom and Dad tomorrow, and I just wanted to come out to you first. It’s not a big deal. Just, you know, say something, yeah?”
I sat there for a moment, thinking about what I could possibly say to her.
Then it dawned on me. Sarah had just told me something that she must have been holding on to for years. It couldn’t have been easy to share that with me, her bratty little brother, sitting on this cold bench in this small-town Dairy Queen. My sister was incredibly brave. Braver than anyone else I knew in my life at the time.
And I had something of my own that I’d been too proud—or too scared—to admit. When I opened my mouth, it was the only thing my body would let me say.
“I’ve really missed you, Sarah,” I said, trying not to cry. “Thanks for letting me know.”
Sarah smiled, and she settled back in her seat. We finished our ice cream, checked out the sexy jogger together one last time, then drove home.
FIFTY SHADES OF THANKSGIVING
It was Wednesday afternoon. I stood in my backyard, hovering over a raw turkey. This was, in fact, a practice turkey. The next day, my dad, stepmom Mari, sister Sarah, and stepsister Erika would be coming over to spend Thanksgiving with me. Sarah lives in LA, but the rest had traveled across the country for the holiday.
I needed tomorrow’s turkey to be perfect. I’d never hosted family before, and this was a chance for me to prove to them just how grown-up and competent I’d becom
e since college. I’d thoroughly cleaned the house, even scrubbing the grout between the tiles in the shower. I wanted to make sure nothing was vulnerable to judgment.
The only obstacle that remained was the bird.
I’d never cooked a Thanksgiving turkey before. Or a non-Thanksgiving turkey, for that matter. I’m not exactly an expert in the kitchen. I was on an episode of my castmate Shay’s YouTube cooking show once, and I accidentally brought cucumbers instead of zucchinis for the dish.
Shay, who happens to be Canadian, had a lot of advice about this traditional American meal. She said I should make a smoked turkey—that it would seal in the juices better than roasting it in the oven, and that I could ignore the turkey for a few hours while it smoked so I could tend to the rest of the meal.
I spent a few days looking up recipes online, falling deeper and deeper into a wormhole of culinary message boards. All the information on smoking turkeys was overwhelming, and often conflicting—so I kept reading.
There were websites where commenters made sweeping generalizations about how their way to smoke a turkey was the “right” way, going after anyone who disagreed. One guy got mocked because he only brined his turkey for ten hours. Another guy told him that if he didn’t want to listen to Alton Brown, who advocated for a two-day brine, he was a fool. Self-proclaimed experts were throwing around advice for weeklong brines and five-day thaws in the fridge. It got to the point where, to have a bird ready by late November, you needed to start planning in April.
I was intimidated—but I was also intrigued. After cross-referencing a number of recipes and YouTube videos, I finally decided on a foolproof plan.
It was time to find out if all that research was going to pay off. I checked the temperature on the grill to see if it was ready to put the bird on. It was nearly there.
When I first moved into my house on the east side of town, Sophia’s dad gave me a Big Green Egg as a housewarming gift. The Big Green Egg is the Rolls-Royce of grill-smoker combos. It’s substantially fancier than any grill ever needs to be—and it sent an unspoken message to all my friends that I was a substantially better chef than I actually am.
