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

I was thirteen years old, Mom got my day started with chipper and instruction-packed drills: “Get up, buttercup! Wear the clothes on your bed, brush your teeth, and eat the Shredded Wheat on the table!” But down in the Sunshine State, I had to set an alarm at night and make grown-up choices, like what shampoo to use (Aveda) and which skincare products would keep me from breaking out (Clinique). I had to look like the competent pro everyone wanted me to be.
    Since I shot Clarissa in Florida for three weeks and then spent two weeks in New York on break, Mom hired a series of guardians to look out for me in Orlando. When I first got the part, she and Dad had four other kids to take care of, and Mom had to go with my sister Liz on a three-month job where she sang Broadway tunes on a Caribbean cruise ship. So I spent a lot of time with a rotating door of parental stand-ins. I had a new one every season. Mom and I can’t remember the order of my guardians, but I had some influential memories with each one.
    There was Marissa, who my mom found through a friend. For one season of the show, we lived together in a studio-owned condo, with two bedrooms and two bathrooms. This was the first time in my life that I had my own room, let alone my own toilet. I was also stoked to have a roommate who wasn’t a relative. Marissa and I had a ton of fun together, and since the apartment wasn’t ours, it felt like I was crashing at an older cousin’s new pad, away from the chaos of home.
    We mostly spent time together at night, after I finished shooting for the day. Neither Marissa nor I knew how to make a proper meal, so most dinners were like a science experiment in our attempts to make something edible. We ate English muffin pizzas and fried zucchini, which counted as a vegetable. We also watched a lot of TV like The Cosby Show, A Different World, and Golden Girls, and she helped me “run lines” for work the next day—i.e., memorize my dialogue. Some nights, I’d take a dunk in our hot tub with whoever else I could rope into going, usually one of the writers or cast members like Jason. He and I lived in the same apartment complex and spent a lot of platonic time in the tub. Marissa didn’t worry. She knew we were never up to any shenanigans.
    Then there was Vicky, who also worked at Nick in the PR department. I got to know her when she and her team shot the Clarissa ads on the iconic itchy orange couch, which was used for promo pieces. I spent a lot of time hanging out in her cube when we weren’t shooting, so I begged Mom to let her be my guardian. She was probably ten years older than me, and about five years older than Marissa was, but we got along like peers—this time in a different fully furnished condo. (They moved me every season, though I’m not sure why.)
    As an adult, Vicky talked to me like an adult. She told me terrible date stories, like the night she went out with a tampon salesman who opened his trunk to offer her boxes of free samples. She came home with handfuls of the cotton plugs. Treating me like a peer, though, didn’t mean her decisions were always mature or responsible. We ate cookie dough for dinner while watching Beverly Hills, 90210 and Melrose Place . And once I convinced her to let me see Basic Instinct on opening night at the Pleasure Island Disney World movie theater. When the ticket guy wouldn’t sell her a ticket for me because I was underage, she dropped her voice a few octaves and whipped out the signed document that my mom had left her. It said she had full guardianship over me.
    “So you’re telling me that I can give permission for her to have open-heart surgery, but I can’t say that she can see this stupid movie ?” she asked.
    Her argument got me into the film, though Vicky regretted the decision when we both crossed our legs tight during the scene in which Sharon Stone opens hers wide. Shortly thereafter, and unrelated to this incident as far as I know, Nickelodeon execs decided it