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Authors: Melissa Francis

Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Personal Memoirs, #Entertainment & Performing Arts

Diary of a Stage Mother's Daughter: A Memoir (16 page)

BOOK: Diary of a Stage Mother's Daughter: A Memoir
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Unfortunately, the critics didn’t get it either. Somehow hitting the audience over the head with obvious moral lessons had worked for
Little House
but failed miserably for this show. We were in the midst of shooting the third episode when the first one aired to mostly crickets. It was a blow. Everyone hoped for a miracle, but there are few miracles in TV land. If no one watches, and the critics don’t encourage people to tune in, it’s pretty much hopeless.
They’d hired an acting coach to work with the kids, which I immediately resented. I’d never been coached, never taken a single acting class, and had always won praise on the set. To motivate me, Mom shared that the consensus among the writers was that Leaf was the best actor in the bunch. That certainly irked me.
“I’m going to tell you what Sherry said, but this is meant to make you better,” Mom said. Sherry was the new acting coach. We were in the car, and I kept my eyes on the road. Directors and casting agents had always said my acting was authentic, that I didn’t overact or sing my lines like so many kids who thought they were way up onstage in the school pageant playing to the last row of seats.
“They all think Leaf walks on water of course. Probably because of his older brother. But I have to say, the kid’s a good little actor. Tammy’s a hard worker; she’s always thinking about the scene that came before the one she’s in, where her character is emotionally, sort of where she’s been and where she’s going. But she can overact,” she said, shrugging her shoulders.
Mom had paid keen attention to the comments from the writers and directors over the years. Her on-the-job training had transformed her into a spot-on critic.
“David,” she continued, referring to one of the older boys, “David is hopeless. He’s never worked before and it shows. He’s in way over his head and the episode they did around him is tragic.” She ticked down the list.
“Freddy’s got good potential they say, but he’s hammy. He’s always rolling his eyes. He puts in a bit of a canned performance, like his mom spends all her time telling him exactly how to say each line. He can do a take ten times, and the words will come out the same, every single time. Nothing real about it.”
She paused.
Here it comes, I thought. I could feel my temperature rise, and the backs of my legs start to stick to the leather of the car seat. She glanced at me briefly, but delivered most of her critique to the traffic in front of her.
“And you. Sometimes you’re engaged, and sometimes you throw away your lines. Leaf is focused and every performance is real. He beat the hell out of you in that scene where the two of you were supposed to get in a fistfight, and he was right to do it. I know he hurt you, just like he would have in real life. You and Allison used to do that fake fighting on
Little House
, and I should have stepped in and told you it looked staged and silly. Someone should have pointed it out. I was counting on Michael or someone to say something if it wasn’t right. I thought I knew the least of everyone there, but I should have told you.” She shook her head.
“They say Leaf’s committed, every single time. Do you understand what that means? To commit to the character? You have to get into her shoes and really believe you are her and believe what are you saying. Not thinking about getting back to the schoolroom to finish your math work. Not thinking about what you want for lunch. I’ve always left the acting to you. Just taught you the lines and left the way you said it up to you. That’s worked for fourteen years. But this is what Sherry and the writers are saying. In fact, they told me to talk to you because they don’t think you are taking Sherry seriously.”
I hadn’t moved a muscle during the lecture, hadn’t made a sound. I hated what she was saying, hated what I was hearing, hated what I knew to be true. But that wasn’t slowing her down.
“You are not always disciplined about acting. You are not taking your craft seriously enough. I think you take it for granted. You have to get serious
now
and work harder. If this show doesn’t get picked up, you only have these performances, and every single one is a precious gift. You need to work like every performance could be your last. Because it could be. I am seriously afraid it could be.”
We rode the rest of the way home in silence. The message burned like a block of dry ice I had tried to grab out of an Igloo cooler on the set. It seemed harmless at first, but before I knew what was happening, it was stuck to my hand, searing the skin until I could figure out how to scrape it off.
 
 
The last episode we shot of
Morningstar
was ripped right out of the
Little House
playbook. A fictional family came to visit the orphanage and wanted to adopt my little brother, Fred Savage’s character, but not me. Freddy and I were the only pair who had two shows centered on them in the original seven-episode slate.
I wanted to make the most of this opportunity, since Mom had told me so pointedly that this could be my last shot for a while. But when we rehearsed the scene, my voice came out sounding as if someone else were talking. I tried again, but every line sounded wrong, and I couldn’t imagine what would make them sound right. I was so focused on doing the best I could, I had lost my footing and was floundering. Now I just wanted to get through the scene alive.
Just to make life a little more interesting, Mom had pointed out that the Levi’s they had bought for me to wear in the first episode were now snug. I assumed they’d shrunk, but Mom reminded me that they’d washed the hell out of them before we started shooting since we were all supposed to be orphans with handed-down clothes. She told me I’d made too many trips to the craft services snack table in the afternoon when they put out all the cookies and candies.
“Tammy never eats that junk. Look how disciplined she is. Meanwhile, you’ve packed on the pounds. Look at that rubber tire around your waist! And now those jeans are tight on your thighs too,” Mom pointed out after rehearsal.
Once again, she was right, and my confidence sank yet another notch.
The scene was between me and Kate Reid, an older actress who played the character from the nursing home gang that had been paired with Freddy and me during the story arcs. She was an acclaimed British actress with two Golden Globe nominations and very little affinity for or patience with children. I got the impression she thought we all sucked at acting and our lack of talent might be contagious.
We walked through the rehearsal. I was sitting at a table doing homework; she came in and sat by me, and gently explained that the couple who had visited wanted to adopt Freddy but not me.
Now we were going to do one for real.
“Rolling. Speed? Speed. Marker! Action!”
Kate started on her speech.
“Sarah, I know this is hard to hear. It doesn’t make you any less special. They just want a boy. They want Alan. And only Alan,” she explained.
The script called for me to wait until the end of her speech and then tell her that was fine. They could take Alan, who was Freddy’s character, and I would make the supreme sisterly sacrifice.
But I couldn’t meet her eyes. She told me that they didn’t want me, didn’t like me. I had just heard this speech from Mom in the car the night before. Kate tried to take my hand and my back stiffened. A reluctant messenger, sticking me with pins, delivering the news she was sent to convey, barely comforting me. I was embarrassed by all that I lacked, ashamed that someone had been sent to tell me about it, and then sorry for her discomfort at being forced to do it.
Kate wasn’t halfway through her speech, and without ever looking at her, I just started to cry silently. I tried to stop, but I couldn’t. I cried for my character, and for myself. We were both barely teenagers, and this was just a little too much weight for us. Girls our age were supposed to be learning how to put on lipgloss in a middle school bathroom somewhere. Instead, we were being judged as deficient, and cast aside.
Kate got to the end of her lines, and it was time for me to respond. I couldn’t find my voice. I said something like, “I understand. I’m glad for him. He should go and be happy.” But the words barely came out. I paused and gathered my breath to try to give the last line more volume while wiping away the tears. I was trying to be brave for both of us, but I could barely get the air to speak.
“I’ll be okay. Really. I want him to be happy.” The script didn’t even call for me to cry, but I just couldn’t help it. I was involved in the scene and the larger drama swirling around it. I couldn’t tell which was which.
Kate leaned in and hugged me and started crying herself. And the director just let the scene go. When he finally said cut, the whole crew started clapping.
 
 
As so many of us suspected, when the final show aired, the network pulled the plug. Once again, I was out of work and back at school. When I went riding, my friends’ moms liked to ask if we’d heard if the show was being picked up. The families at the stable all lived in and around the television industry and were pretty savvy about the business. They knew the show was a dud and they wanted to rub it in because Mom had been fairly unbearable when I was cast.
“Did you hear about the show yet? Did they order more episodes?” Shannon’s mom, Megan, asked. She was an oddly shaped woman who always wore light-colored sweatpants that accentuated her enormous hips and butt. Her hair was dark at the roots but orange and red at the tips and she had problem skin. In the solitude of our car, my dad would say Megan looked like a pear with acne, and Tiffany and I would bust up laughing.
“Hi, Meg,” my mom drawled reluctantly. She knew Megan had read the news somewhere and had shown up only to turn the knife.
“Did they order more? I hope, I hope!”
I thought Megan needed Sherry, the acting coach. I slipped into my horse’s stall before Mom answered. I knew she’d come up with something, and I didn’t want my face to reveal that we felt bad about the cancellation of the show.
“Nope. Oh well. The show stank. Can only do so much with bad writing. Just frees Missy up to do something better,” she tried.
 
 
Needless to say, Mom was in a bad mood.
No matter how she spun it, the show’s being canceled was a defeat.
Tiffany and I were back to our normal routines, which included a fair amount of head-butting. After all, we were two teenage girls living under the same roof. Most of the discord emerged from the borrowing or outright stealing of clothes.
Tiffany had adopted a pink and white striped Guess blouse as part of her weekend uniform. She wore it a million different ways, open with a camisole underneath, closed and belted over tight jeans. She’d tease and spike her bangs, put on a knotted hairband ripped right from Madonna’s
Material Girl
album, and look like a million bucks.
It wasn’t long before I started slipping into her room and pillaging the pink and white shirt, and other key items, from her closet. I’d sneak in while she was in the shower, snag something, and hide the item in the part of my closet where the sliding doors overlapped, so you couldn’t find it unless you already knew it was there.
She’d retaliate by coming into my room, trying on something fresh from the cleaners, and then dumping the shirt or dress in a heap in the middle of the floor, leaving it rumpled, even though it hadn’t yet seen the light of day.
I would enter my room, find the heap of fresh clothes, and scream her name at the top of my lungs.
One Friday night Tiffany was getting ready to go out, but she couldn’t find the pink and white shirt. She charged into my room, wearing only a bra and her jeans, and flung the mirrored doors of my closet open with all her might, frantically searching piece by piece through the closet.
Confident my hiding spot would remain undetected, I calmly lay across my bed, watching Don Johnson prance around in a linen blazer on that night’s episode of
Miami Vice
.
Then she found it.
“Ha!” she barked as she gripped the hanger in her fist, her face candy-apple red from the search and agitation.
“That’s mine actually,” I lied coolly, not budging from my position on the bed.
“You’re a liar!” she yelled. And with that she turned and slammed my closet door so hard, it bounced back off the frame with equal force.
“What are you doing!” I yelled, finally jumping to my feet.
“You’re right!” She stopped, breathing heavily, and narrowed her eyes. “Why would I close that? I bet there’s more of my stuff in here!” She turned back to the closet and started rooting through the hangers again.
“This is mine. And this,” she said, plucking out my favorite items, one by one.
I grabbed the shoulder of a dress and we began wrestling over it.
“Stop it! I’m so sick of both of you!” Mom barked behind us.
We both jumped. Neither of us had seen her come in.
She picked up the pink shirt that had started the fight and left the room. Instinctively sensing disaster, we both trailed her down the hall and into her room, where she ducked into her bathroom and then reemerged with a huge pair of scissors that she held up like a sword.
BOOK: Diary of a Stage Mother's Daughter: A Memoir
3.19Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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