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

older men, much less an audience. I shyly confronted Peter and Joe about my trepidation to kiss a pillow onstage, and they listened to my fears and changed the scene so I’d feel more comfortable.
    I learned my entire monologue so fast during rehearsals that Joe and Peter needed other interesting ways to fill our time. We did great acting exercises, similar to the ones I’ve heard that you learn at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. I ran around the room saying my lines as lots of different characters with all kinds of voices. The intention was to loosen me up and help me feel free and comfortable with the words I was saying. I repeated my lines as a baby, as Oscar the Grouch, as Jessica Rabbit … so fun.
    Another clever activity was supposed to get rid of my harsh New York accent. For this, Joe and Peter asked me to repeat the phrase “calling all dog daughters” over and over again for days, until it went from sounding like “cawling awl dawg daaaawters” to the stripped-down, nonregional diction that’s become natural to me ever since. Well, once in a while, I do slip up. Years later, on the set of Clarissa Explains It All, the word “paranoid” always came out as “paranawd,” and on Sabrina, the Teenage Witch , I once said “Santa Claws.” If you catch me after four tequila shots or cut me off on the 405, my inner New Yawker also rears its ugly accent. Then again, my diction is easily malleable. Because I married an Alabama man, I often speak with a Southern lilt. I basically went from Fran Drescher to Delta Burke—with a theatrical respite in between. But no matter how much my husband tries to correct me, a Florida orange will always be a “Flarrada awrange.”
    In the eventual performance, my monologue in The Valerie of Now came across as the very grown-up and humbling text it was, but I couldn’t have done it without the skilled and inspiring support of my industry role models. My monologue was about how I’d gotten my period for the first time and had no idea how to handle it except to “stuff a bunch of tissues up there!” This was a pivotal line in the piece, because after my best Helen Reddy, the play went on to portray my Valerie character all grown-up and married to a blind man with no arms as a way to deal with her father physically and sexually abusing her on her birthday, when she got that first period.
    I was secretly mortified to talk about menstrual blood and abuse implications like this, but I pulled it off with maturity. In fact, Frank Rich wrote in The New York Times , “Melissa Joan Hart delivers a precocious comic monologue with the worldly showbiz verve of a stand-up comedian more than twice her age. If she’s not careful, someone may write her an Annie 3. ” This review, plus word-of-mouth buzz, is one of the things that helped me score my Clarissa Explains It All audition that summer, just a few months later. In fact, Mitchell Kriegman, Clarissa ’s creator, joked that one reason he hired me was because his vet saw The Valerie of Now and named his stray dog after Valerie. I’d like to think that in a few years, when I went on to understudy three roles in The Crucible at the Belasco Theatre on Broadway with Martin Sheen and Michael York, this part played a role in getting that job, too.
    The most surprising thing to me about the people who impact us most, especially during an influential time, is how long their imprint lasts. In 2001, I bumped into Calista at Madison Square Garden, when we were both performing in Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues V-Day fund-raiser to end abuse against women. I’d only seen Calista once since we worked together, when I briefly ran into her as she was walking her dog. But here we were again, backstage for a show, and it felt surreal. We hugged and then bolted into a tiny bathroom to have a smoke. We were both jittery about being on the same stage with Meryl Streep and Glenn Close while reciting lines about orgasms and rape.
    I took in the