Free Prairie Tale by Melissa Gilbert Page B

walk.”
    Then he went over the scene with me until I learned it.
    “Better now?” he asked.
    “Yes,” I said.
    “Good.”
    Feeling like the storm cloud had passed, I got up and began to walk away. Suddenly Mike grabbed my arm, spun me around, and stared daggers straight into my eyes.
    “That’s never happening again, is it?” he said.
    I bit my lip, trying to hold off another downpour.
    “No,” I said.
    Now, nearly three and a half decades later, I can say that I’ve never gone into a scene on any project unprepared. Mike would’ve expected as much from me. He taught me not to settle for anything less than my best, especially if I demanded it of others.
    In the ensuing years, I’ve also realized his influence on me extended way beyond the set. As a kid, I didn’t know he sipped vodka from his coffee mug every day almost as frequently as he pulled me into his sweat-soaked torso for a giant bear hug, but I’m sure he’s one of the primary reasons why as a young woman, I almost always picked men who smelled like alcohol.
    Likewise, I’m sure Mike was responsible for my preference for physical men with a sense of humor. Here’s a perfect example: we shot exteriors on a Simi Valley ranch about ninety minutes north of Paramount, and if the sun was out, Mike would, by late morning, strip off his shirt and work in just his pants, boots, and suspenders. (In all fairness, it could be hellaciously hot in Simi Valley.) Well, women came out in droves to watch him work and to swoon, and he loved playing a certain prank on them.
    He would send me to catch a frog from the pond (I can still hear his surreptitious whisper, “Half Pint, go find me a little one”), then pop whatever I brought back in his mouth, walk over to where the women stood, say hello, and let the poor freaked-out frog jump out at them. As they gasped and shrieked, he flashed a naughty, self-satisfied grin that made him even more lovable.
    It would be years before I opened my eyes to Mike’s shortcomings; and until then I thought he was perfect. His daughter Leslie was one of my best friends. I was also close to Mike Jr., who was a year younger than Leslie and me. I slept at their house and they at mine, often enough that they felt like my weekend family, and I thought Mike and Lynn were the most glamorous, loving couple.
    As we went through the season, work seemed more like play. Various episodes required me to go fishing; fly a kite with a cute boy I kind of liked on-and offscreen (fellow child actor Eric Shea, who attended my school); do scenes with guest star Richard Basehart, a giant in my eyes for having starred as Admiral Nelson in Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea ; and pretend to fight with Alison, who, though cast as my on-screen nemesis, was one of my best friends in real life.
    When we had slumber parties at Alison’s house, we got to stay up and watch Saturday Night Live . At my house, the lights went out much earlier and my TV intake was carefully monitored for age appropriateness. My mom had a long list of rules that were impossible to explain to my friends. Among others, she didn’t believe girls should wear black or get their ears pierced until they were eighteen. I still haven’t figured that one out, though I lived by it, and when I turned eighteen I did what any girl in my position would: I pierced my right ear once and my left three times.
    I had no idea how she would’ve reacted to my first crush because I didn’t tell her that my heart went pitter-pat whenever I thought about Craig Botkin. Nor, at the end of the school year, did I let her see my sixth-grade yearbook, where friends wrote they were sure I’d marry Craig and they’d see me at the wedding.
    But that was the least of what went unspoken. In February, I was home from school with a bad cold when my mom came in with my brother and said she had to tell us something. The key words in that sentence were “had to,” because my mom wouldn’t have told us something if it