Melissa Explains It All: Tales From My Abnormally Normal Life by Melissa Joan Hart Read Free Book Online Page A

my locker to let me know that my black tulle skirt with red felt polka dots clashed with my black-and-red-striped shirt. She was so sure that dots and stripes were a bad mix, but I was so secure in my NYC-inspired outfit that I wore it again the very next day.
    Of course, this faux pas was nothing compared to the ridicule I faced for wearing a pin on my jean jacket that said “Latent Thespian” among all the Hard Rock Café and George Michael buttons that covered its pockets. A theater friend gave it to me as a joke, but my dumb schoolmates didn’t know what a “thespian” was and assumed I was coming out of the closet. The truth is, I wanted to go completely goth or punk, but it always seemed like too much work to wear so many layers, all that makeup, dread my hair … so I settled for a leather coat, tight jeans, and a big, heavy, black men’s watch that I scored during a reading of For Esmé—with Love and Squalor for Broadway’s Circle in the Square. It was a prop, but the director let me keep it as a memento.
    Yet despite my notice-me looks, most of my classmates were clueless about my second life, minus a small handful of friends. Once when I was miserably failing French class, I tried to translate, from English to French, “Jacques fell off the windsurfing board,” and this kid named Karl, who’d been a friend until middle school, decided to pick on me. After I did my best “Jacques est tombe de la planche a voile,” he called me out in front of everyone as being terrible at French and then tacked on the line “… besides, you’re a has-been. I haven’t seen you in a commercial in years!” Karl was right that I no longer did commercials, but I was also the youngest honorary member of the Circle Rep Company, so I didn’t feel like a has-been until he said this. It was a weird moment for me, because while I enjoyed spending time with adults who gave me respect and made me feel like a princess, I was still a tween, so I also wanted to impress the hormonal dipshits. Karl’s comment stuck with me for many years after, as I continued to be a sweaty, blubbering mess around people my own age.
    It was always adults, especially creative ones, who had my back. They didn’t care if I wore men’s shirts, combat boots, and a scarf at the same time—in fact, they encouraged it, because they valued self-expression and being a good person. I’m so grateful that I didn’t feel the need to give in to every bit of peer pressure at school, because I had other role models to show me who I could become. It frightens me a little to think who I’d have turned into without them.
    During middle school, theater gigs happened at breakneck speed: The Valerie of Now lab was in the spring of 1989 and Beside Herself began that fall. In the winter of 1990, my monologue from Peter and Joe’s The Valerie of Now became a thirty-minute intro for the Off-Broadway play Imagining Brad at the Players Theatre on MacDougal Street. Our “pilot” was picked up!
    Rehearsals for The Valerie of Now monologue were much more relaxed and enjoyable than those for Beside Herself. And what an incredible acting exercise for a thirteen-year-old. Since a monologue by definition is one actor on stage performing solo, I spent most days in a room with just Peter and Joe—and we had a really good time. For this performance, I’d moved from the bike during our lab to a sofa now, explaining what was about to happen in the play by pretending to talk to myself and to friends on the phone. They cut all the songs except “I Am Woman,” probably because they weren’t impressed with my vocal skills. Here, I burst into Helen Reddy while jumping up and down on the sofa as the lights faded. (I made couch-jumping a thing, before Tom Cruise did it on Oprah. ) This ending was different from what the guys had originally written, which was me making out with a pillow as if it were a boy. But as a kid myself, I was too embarrassed to perform this in front of two