You Look Like That Girl: A Child Actor Stops Pretending and Finally Grows Up (12 page)

Once, while navigating the streets of Rome, Roberto avoided some
traffic by hopping our little black Fiat onto the sidewalk and driving along next to the umbrellas of the outdoor cafés. A couple of people leapt out of the way like we were in an action film, except for the fact that no one was chasing us. Roberto seemed thoroughly nonchalant about the maneuver. It was both thrilling and terrifying. When we drove on the sidewalk past a group of police officers, I was convinced we were all going to jail for Roberto’s recklessness. But the
Polizia
just smiled and waved their cigarettes in the air.

“Roberto? Why did they just wave at you?”

“Because we a-passed by.”

“No, I mean, why did you not get in trouble for driving on the sidewalk?”

“Ah, Leeza,” he tisked at me. “You do not know? I am special.”

“You are special?”

“Yes. Special. Special police. Important police. Carabinieri. I am very important man.”

The guy who was driving a twelve-year-old to set each day was part of the military branch of the Italian police force. It seemed like everyone wanted to be in the movie business.

Late that night, there was a protest in the street outside of our hotel. Crazy Sara Man was excited, waving his fairy wand in the air and catapulting his pirouettes even higher. His Sara song got louder as hundreds of angry protesters swarmed into the street.

We saw the protest from the hotel window and Mom started to put on her shoes.

“Let’s go see what’s going on.” She threw me my flip-flops. “Hurry up.”

Never one to miss an adventure, my mom held my hand tight as we made our way into the crowd. People were yelling things I couldn’t understand and holding torches. It reminded me of the townspeople in
Beauty and the Beast
. We didn’t know what the protest was about, but if history has taught us anything, it’s that you want to be on the side with the people carrying the torches. The infamous Italian passion was palpable as people shouted slogans and pumped their fists in the air. The police circled the crowd on horseback, holding the reigns tightly as the horses strained and flared their nostrils at the trailing torch smoke. I wondered if any of them were friends of Roberto’s. We marched with the mob for a while, until Mom decided we were getting too far from the hotel. We turned back, giving one last fist in the air salute to the warriors of whatever cause we were supporting.

I laid in bed that night, electrified by our adventure and still hearing the chants ringing in my head. When I closed my eyes the torches were still swinging and I could feel the stinging smoke. Calculating the time zone math, I noted that back in Canada, my classmates would just be arriving home from school about now. Maybe they were eating Fruit Roll-Ups and watching
Full House
. There wasn’t a judgment attached to that realization; it was not better or worse that I had been avoiding the hooves of the mounted
Polizia
while protesting an unknown cause in the streets of Rome; I merely noted the striking difference. It was an unusual way for a pre-teen Canadian girl to spend a Tuesday night.

But by that point, I needed to sleep. I had a 5 a.m. call time in the morning. In just a few hours I’d be tip toeing around in the dark to find the catering truck. I’d order the Italian version of a breakfast burrito, my standard on-set meal, and eat it while getting my hair done. The hair and makeup trailer was always lively and the hub of all the on-set information and gossip. It was a comforting and exciting way to start each day, getting the scoop on everything. I’d have to ask the Italian makeup artists if they knew what I’d been protesting.

When you are growing up and learning to navigate your heart, you tend to get crushes on the people who have immediate access to. A traditional school setting offers a nice, deep pool of crush-worthy candidates upon which one can hone one’s liking skills. It’s an opportunity to learn if the heart is drawn to the nerds or funny guys or slackers. Do you like the aggressive types or the shy guys who need to be drawn out of their shell? Pretty boys or bad boys? How important is personal hygiene?

Because I wasn’t in school much, my options were drastically limited. I crushed on the boys I met at work. This often meant other actors on my show, or possibly on shows that were filming at the same studio. I once filmed next to the location for the
Mickey Mouse Club
and giggled around one of the perfectly wholesome boys with his Ken-doll hair, piercing blue eyes, and sweet dance moves. In hindsight, he was clearly gay; however, that did not stop me from swooning when he lip-synched his Boyz II Men cover.

Several years later I would have a crush on one of the stunt men on TV movie. The stunt coordinator on the project had said that he was going to be bringing in his son to help out, playing a cop that would chase me down an alley and arrest me. His son turned out to be C. Thomas
Howel, who had played Ponyboy in
The Outsiders.
I had watched that movie at least thirty times and every time Ponyboy recited Frost’s poem, “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” my stomach flipped in a circle.

With C. Thomas Howell.

The director asked me if I wanted to rehearse, and I most certainly did. Tommy (as I was told to call him, which felt totally intimate and sweet) chased me down, half-dragged, half-carried me back through an alley, slammed me face-down on the hood of a police car, put handcuffs on me and threw me in the backseat. Tommy was very kind and made sure I was comfortable with everything he was doing. The rehearsals went well, except for the part when the director yelled:

“Hey Lisa, can you look a little less pleased that the cop is frisking you?”

I’m pretty sure that when you watch
On the Edge of Innocence
, you can see me blushing as Tommy, in his fantasy-worthy police uniform, flings me into the backseat of a cruiser.

My very first kiss was committed to celluloid and carried out with a boy who found me to be quite annoying, in front of sixty crew-members and my mother. This was something I’d get used to, as I did pretty much everything on film before I did it in real life. Some things, I did in movies and then decided that experience was enough and didn’t bother to do it for real:

I did a movie about going to summer camp. It had everything you were supposed to get out of summer camp; there was love, drama, politics and canoe handling skills. I checked that one off the list and never went to a real camp.

I had sex on screen before I did it in real life, playing an 1850s prostitute in the Wild West. That experience was not much like the real deal but I got the gist of it; it demonstrated the bounciness of the whole thing.

I got married on a show before I really got married. When I was seventeen, I got married in a quaint, 18th century Irish village ceremony for a TV movie.

It might seem like real life would be ruined after the movie experience, but it’s not like that at all. Having a test run at everything significant made the real deal a little less nerve-wracking. My real wedding felt a little less stressful, because I’d had that other one, although sadly, my real wedding wasn’t attended by goats and Irish extras in hoopskirts.

When we shot
Matinee
, I was thirteen, and my kissing partner, Simon Fenton, was sixteen. We just never really clicked, and he thought I was a stupid little kid, which was quite true, but we still had to kiss. Originally, the scene was written to include some breast fondling as well. That was a horrifying proposition to read in a script, when my only real physical interaction with boys had been a completely accidental molestation of a blind guy. I gathered my nerves and requested a meeting with Joe Dante, the director. We sat on a curb outside of the soundstage and I told him that I was uncomfortable with the groping, as it was gratuitous and unnecessary. Would he consider changing the scene? I felt very brave and grown up to be talking about something so gross with a man who was technically my boss and about the same age as my father. Joe listened to me kindly, then laughed, punched my arm, and said, “Well, of course I was going to change that. There is nothing to grab, anyway.”