You Look Like That Girl: A Child Actor Stops Pretending and Finally Grows Up (3 page)

My family could be the prototype for nice, normal Canadian people. I’m an only child, and my parents and I thought of ourselves as the Three Musketeers. My mom’s curly hair was always unruly, and she had worn a size zero wedding dress when she married my father, a week after her nineteenth birthday. At age fourteen she had seen him across the high school gym and announced that she’d marry him. Mom usually got what she wanted.

Dad is the son of tobacco farmers who moved to Canada from Slovakia in the 1940s. My grandparents clung to the old country. They lived in a tightly-knit Slovak community, with people who all spoke the same language and made the same poppy seed rolls. Even though he was born in Canada, my father didn’t speak any English when he started school at age five, but he soon learned his way around the educational system and was attending law school when I was born. Law books cluttered up my parent’s tiny apartment and Dad would stay up all night studying for the bar exam, while simultaneously trying to rock me back to sleep. My father enjoyed the sport of curling and a couple Labatt Blues after the game with other kind-hearted, bearded Canadian men.

My parents loved home renovation projects and so we lived in a state of perpetual chaos. We moved constantly, because Mom said that packing up and starting over was easier than cleaning. Our kitchen boasted a half-taken-down-wall, exposing the ancient horsehair and mud plaster construction of our 1880s fixer upper. The cashiers at the donut place around the corner got used to us running in as soon as they flipped the open sign in the morning; their facilities were indispensable when our
plumbing system was under repair again. Mom would step over a dusty sledgehammer to feed the dog. The cats would drop their toys into the basement through the hole in the living room floor that we never got around to patching.

I seemed to have come pre-programmed with a high tolerance for chaos, and never minded living in the pandemonium of various construction sites. Wherever we lived, the living room always swayed with Carol King’s
Tapestry
record playing on our old Victrola while the three of us sat on the floor and played Hungry Hungry Hippos. We were a regular little family who watched TV, not the ostentatious types who longed to be on it. We could not have been further from showy Hollywood; Mom got embarrassed when they called her name out loud in the doctor’s office waiting room.

But when my parents told their friends about the man at the market, they said they
had
to call and find out the details.

“You know, a pervert can’t really do anything to you over the phone,” they reasoned.

Peer pressure prevailed and my mom called the phone number on the card. As it turned out, the guy was legit and was casting for several commercials. When they asked if I was interested in auditioning, I immediately agreed. I’m not sure if I had any idea what I was agreeing to, but much like a dog, I always got excited about a ride in the car. So, we made the big trip from suburbia into Toronto and went to an audition the production company was holding. There, the casting director realized a few things:

My eyes were disproportionally large for my face and evolutionary instincts dictate that big eyes equal “cuteness” to the human brain.

“Cuteness” sells stuff.

I could read. Therefore, I could memorize lines.

The casting director sent me to a talent agent, the agent sent me on more auditions and I ended up with a career. It all just snowballed, much
in the way that you might only plan to go out to dinner with friends, but then someone mentions wanting to see a movie and then you find yourself still out at a bar at 2 a.m.

They say that your earliest memory speaks volumes about who you are as a person. My earliest memory is being on set for a Cottonelle toilet paper commercial. I was dressed in a frilly white dress and a man was on top of a ladder dumping out a cardboard box full of cotton balls on my head. The commercial was going to be in slow motion; me with my huge eyes, joyously attempting to catch the fluffy cotton balls that rained down on me. It seemed strange that this grown man’s job was to dump cotton balls on my head. My job was also ridiculous, catching aforementioned cotton balls, but I had just turned four. I reasoned that it was more acceptable to have a silly job at age four.

I went on to hawk everything imaginable, from floor cleaner to Kmart to the hippest fashion trends of 1983 in a mall runway show. I was the model for a coloring book that was given away by Kmart; bored kids waiting outside changing rooms could color a black and white version of me while I watered plastic flowers and jumped rope. (They gave me stack of these books to keep and for years after, I would color myself instead of cartoon zoo animals.) I was featured in one of those giant wallpaper books you find at a home design store, playing in a brightly papered bedroom with no ceiling and only three walls. I was on a KFC billboard holding a greasy bucket and grinning like it was my birthday. By the time of that shoot, I had been a vegetarian for a year but apparently the fear of being a sell-out isn’t prominent for a preschooler.

I did a commercial for Barbie’s McDonald’s Restaurant playhouse and assisted her in flipping brown, choke hazard mini-patties. I was a hand model for the Egg Board of Canada. My job was to hold a hard-boiled egg steady within inches of the camera lens, because no one can resist eating an egg if it is very close up. I ate cold, uncooked Chef Boyardee and dry heaved into the provided spit bucket at the end of each take, keeping my eyes closed tight so I didn’t have to look at the chewed
up remains of mini ravioli from my previous takes.

PHOTO: KMART

By the time I was seven, Mom and I were quite used to running from auditions to wardrobe fittings to commercial shoots. It wasn’t the life that anyone else at my school was leading, but it felt natural to me. I saw them juggling piano lessions, basketball camp and math tutoring, so it seemed reasonable to assume it was kind of the same.

Me, in the middle, acting really excited about pasta in a can.

I attended school when it fit into my schedule, but that became an increasingly uncommon occurrence. Unlike most extra-curricular activities, my job was not only during after-school hours. Even if a commercial audition happened to be at 4 p.m., memorizing the lines, getting dressed, commuting an hour into Toronto and finding the casting office, all in the days before GPS, took much of the afternoon. In my mother’s small faux-leather day reminder from 1983, her all caps, excited handwriting reveals, “SCHOOL STARTS!” on September 6
^th
. At some point, that got scratched and replaced with an equally enthusiastic “12:30 COMMERCIAL SHOOT FOR FLORIDA ORANGE GROWER’S ASSOCIATION!”

It’s easy to assume that all children have a childhood. It’s right there in the name. At the time, I assumed that what I was doing
was
childhood. What else could it be when you are eight years old? Mine just seemed to be a childhood in which I worked for a living, read through contracts, and was rarely around other kids. But childhood is supposed to be full of freedom, exploration, and silliness. I had those things to some extent, but there was also an enormous amount of responsibility. It was a different kind of responsibility than the one that dictated that you should put on clean underwear and never poke the dog in the eye. It was a responsibility to an entire production company. There was no room for being a moody little kid who wanted to throw a temper tantrum and not show up for work one day—I would have been sued for breach of contract.

The money issue also complicated the whole childhood categorization. My family never focused on the money but I was aware that there was a financial exchange involved. I suspected money was a big deal because my family didn’t have a ton of it. When I was nine, my parents talked to me about investments, and asked if it was okay to use some of my commercial income to help buy our modest house. After we moved in, I asked my mother which part of the house I had paid for. She quickly
changed the subject and suggested that I go play in my room. I asked for clarification—was my room the part that I had bought? The look on my mother’s face told me that this was not a good line of questioning. We didn’t talk about money much after that, which seemed to make everyone more comfortable.

By the way, none of this is in the spirit of
Oh, poor me.
A regular childhood doesn’t sound all that great, either. There is bullying in school, peer-pressure, and competition. That all sounds like total shit, too. My particular brand of shit was not any worse than that; it’s just that childhood kind of sucks. You have so little influence in your own life; you can’t drive or pick out your own clothes and everyone is way taller than you. Did I have a childhood? Not really. Did I want one? Not really.

At a thrift store, my mother fished through a wicker basket of buttons and found me a pin for the collar of my faded jean jacket that read, “Why be normal?” I adopted it as my mantra and adjusted to the strangeness of spending the majority of my time with grown-ups. There were surely some kid things I missed. For example, I can’t come up with a single nursery rhyme and I have no clue how to play jacks. Instead, I learned different types of games.