HotmailBaseball fan Alyssa Milano is ‘Safe at Home’
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On one of these walks, we ended up at an audition for a pilot called “You’re the Boss.” I didn’t know what a pilot was, or much of anything special about this pilot other than that the cute guy from “Taxi” was going to be in it and that I was auditioning to play his Italian daughter from Brooklyn. Needless to say, that wasn’t much of a stretch for me.
A week after the audition that didn’t mean any more than any other audition we got a phone call that changed our lives forever. It was a phone call from my agent informing my parents that ABC wanted to fly me to Los Angeles to audition for the network and with Tony Danza (who will forever be the cute guy from “Taxi” in my eyes). It was a callback for “You’re the Boss.”
Had I known at the time what was riding on that audition, I probably would not have been as calm as I was when I got in there. It truly is amazing how resilient children are. I was ten years old, testing for a big television series, and I didn’t feel an ounce of the pressure that should come along with such a daunting process. Actually, it wasn’t even that exciting for me. What was exciting for me was to be in Los Angeles with my dad and taking the back-lot tour of Universal Studios. Now that was exciting.
Well, as you probably know, I got that pilot. We shot it in Los Angeles and after what seemed like an eternity and a one-word title change to “Who’s the Boss?” we got our pickup for the fall 1983 season.
This was good news, right? Well, yes and no. It was good news for all the obvious reasons, and bad news because it meant that my family had to relocate from the East Coast to the West Coast. My brother was a year old at the time, and my mother had worked her way up as a fashion designer and owned her own store on Eighty-sixth Street. My mother wasn’t ready to put her life on hold and fully commit to the move for a gig that was as uncertain as a television show. What if it didn’t find an audience and got canceled after the first year? What then? Would we move back to New York? It was a difficult decision, but after a big family meeting, my parents decided that it would be best for my mother and brother to stay in New York until we got some idea of the show’s potential. In the meantime, my dad and I would go to Los Angeles.
It’s not easy being a kid in Hollywood. (Actually, it’s not easy being an adult in Hollywood either, but that’s a different story.) But being a child actress out in L.A. is even harder when you have to leave behind one of your parents in order to do it. It was just my dad and me for the first year of the show’s eventual eight-season run, and during that time I did everything I could to bond with my father. Neither one of us was accustomed to such a different lifestyle. He was really lost without my mother, and I tried to take care of him. I would cook pastina for him, and no matter how gross it was (and let me tell you, it was gross) he would eat it all up so that I wouldn’t feel bad for trying to poison him. On the weekends, we would go to the park, where I would watch him play softball on the “Who’s the Boss?” softball team. Tony was the pitcher and my dad was the first baseman. Don Mattingly had nothing on my father.
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And then one afternoon, out of the clear blue sky and with no warning, it happened. Bam! Just like that.
I was in my bedroom in our tiny apartment in Studio City listening to the sound track of “Footloose” on my Walkman. Other than the many pictures of my beautiful mommy and brother, there wasn’t really much left of the New York life I once reveled in. I missed them. I missed the way she smelled and I missed his little face. As a kid you don’t always have a great idea of the sacrifices your parents make for you, but I knew pretty well what my parents were giving up to let me pursue acting. My Walkman clicked and it was time to change sides.
(God, remember that? When you had to flip the tape over? Insert old-lady joke here.) Anyway, while my headphones were off I heard a noise from the living room. It was a very familiar sound. I walked into the living room and there was my dad, on the couch watching baseball on TV. It was 1984. There was no satellite TV with the baseball package at the time. There was no Internet simulcast or online radio play-by- play. It wasn’t the Yankees he was watching. He was watching the Los Angeles Dodgers, and he was loving it.
I casually came up beside him and sat down on the couch. I knew it wasn’t the Yankees, but all at once, I saw a look on his face that made me feel like we were back in Staten Island again with the vacuum cleaner running in the other room. I sat down next to him and he began to point things out, telling me how the sound of a wooden bat connecting with a ball could make me feel safe at home when I was three thousand miles away. Other than this occasional game commentary, we didn’t speak much while watching the game — we didn’t have to, really. All we had to do was watch. Together we comfortably shared the quiet spaces between pitches and the desire for the boys in blue to win.
And so it began. A father and daughter found common ground that day. And even now, baseball connects us. Despite the life experience and time that could have come between us as I grew up and became a woman, despite sometimes not having anything to say, we can always talk about baseball.
On that day back in the early 1980s, baseball and the Dodgers gave me new ways to connect with my father. It wasn’t the same as watching the Yankees back in our living room in Staten Island, but it was as close as we were going to get. It was something that we shared as a father and a daughter, something that tied us to home, like the pastina I tried to make, only better because you can’t overcook baseball and make it inedible.
When “Who’s the Boss?” finally premiered on prime-time television, it was a hit. “Happy Days” was our lead-in — that’s how long ago this was (insert old-lady joke here, too). Because of the success of the first season, ABC picked us up for a second season. Once we got that pickup, Mom and Cory moved out to L.A., as did my Nanny Connie, and Aunt Sissy and her son, my cousin Jesse, and then my uncle Mitch, and oh yeah, my mom’s friend Janice moved out as well. Everyone took apartments in the same building in Studio City. Once again we were all together.
It’s been twenty-four years since then. My immediate family still lives in Los Angeles. My brother and I live together, splitting our time between our condo in Hollywood and our ranch forty miles outside of the craziness. I like to call the ranch the “paparazzi-free zone.” Cory is now twenty-six and still needs noise to fall asleep. Thanks to the Dodgers of the eighties having their most successful decade in the club’s history, my father is a full-fledged Dodgers fan once more. We’ve been season ticket holders since 2003, and our seats are right behind the Dodgers dugout. We go to games, watch them on TV, or listen to them on the radio. If we aren’t all together we will call, text, or e-mail when something unfathomable happens. Even now, baseball is the one thing that can connect us no matter how far apart we are.
And during the quieter moments of every game — as the batter walks to the plate or when the pitcher is shaking off the catcher — suddenly I’m back on my father’s lap, watching the Yankees of the late seventies and hearing stories about the Dodgers of the fifties. Playing my part in a generational loop that goes back a few grandparents, probably all the way back to the day Abner Doubleday threw out a ball.
As baseball has changed and grown over the years, I have, too. I’ve come a long way from Bensonhurst to Hollywood. And yet, oddly, I am pretty much the same. I’m still the eight-year-old on that itchy couch in Staten Island, listening to my dad’s tales of the greedy villain O’Malley. All of which is my way of saying that I come by my nostalgia honestly. I love my family. I love baseball. And ... I am still looking for my happily ever after.
This excerpt was reprinted with permission from “Safe at Home: Confessions of a Baseball Fanatic” by Alyssa Milano (William Morrow). Check out Milano’s blog on MLB.com here.
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