You Deserve a Drink: Boozy Misadventures and Tales of Debauchery by Mamrie Hart

child of head shots and the ’80s prime-time soap
Dallas
. Real cosmetologists (more than likely beauty school dropouts) would style your hair and apply your makeup and deck you out in lavish costume jewelry and clothing. If that wasn’t heaven enough, then you’d be placed in front of a crushed-velvet backdrop as the photographer snapped pics and said stuff like:
    Beautiful! You are a natural. Just like Linda Evangelista! I haven’t worked with anyone so talented since the JCPenney summer-sale shoot!
    To ten-year-old Mamrie, the idea of Glamour Shots was a dream—my one-way ticket to Tinseltown. I had been begging to get an agent since the time I could talk; I’m almost positive that my first words were “lower commission.” In my scheming brain, I could get my fancy Glamour Shots and mail them out to agents all across the US. Soon enough, a bidding war would erupt, and before you knew it, I would be replacing Topanga on
Boy Meets World
and changing the title to
Rider Strong Meets Mamrie
, because let’s face it, Ben Savage might’ve had adorable curls and a charismatic old-Jewish-man vibe to him . . . but Rider was the babe.
    I had been trying to punch my ticket out of Boonville since I was knee-high to a grasshopper, but there weren’t a lot of agents scouting my area. * The only audition I went on as a kid was a cattle call for a lead in a made-for-TV movie. I wore my most adorable shorts overalls and my favorite Limited Too floral shirt. I even had my hair pulled back in a ponytail with a teeny-tiny stuffed animal bunny on the elastic. What could be cuter? We went to a hotel banquet hall filled with other decent adorable ten-year-olds and waited for twohours. Even though I felt like I charmed the casting directors and killed a Julia Sugarbaker sassy monologue from
Designing Women
, * I didn’t get the part. In fact, they had thousands of little hopefuls like me come audition and then ended up giving the role to Anna Paquin. Anna Paquin—who had already
won an Oscar
when she was eleven. To this day, I can’t watch
True Blood
. The fact that they chose her gap teeth over mine is too much to bear.
    But I wasn’t going to let one TV movie crush my dream. I figured I just had to change my approach. Forget overalls and bunny hair ties—I needed sultry backdrops and possibly a boa, the type of enhancements that only Glamour Shots could provide. But Glamour Shots weren’t cheap, and before I could cruise on to bigger and better things, I had to convince my mom to shell out the dough. My first attempt was asked in what I thought was a very mature and reasonable manner, but she wasn’t having it. I went back to the drawing board and came back with a rock-solid proposal.
    “Mooooooom. PLEASE. For my birthday! I don’t want a party, just Glamour Shots!”
    “Mamrie, Glamour Shots make preteens look forty years old. If you want some pictures taken I can do it myself, here in the house.”
    But something told me it wouldn’t be the same to just put on my mom’s old eye shadow and stand in front of her flannel sheets. I had to go for a more severe tactic.
    “First you and Dad get divorced. Then I lose the role I was born to play. And now I can’t get Glamour Shots?!”
    “Mamrie Lillian Hart . . .”
    Uh-oh. The last time she used my full name was when she caught my friends and me prank calling our neighbor by asking if Mike Hunt was home. If I was going to get what I wanted, I had to go big.
    “I can’t get Glamour Shots. I can’t get an agent. I can’t get an in-ground pool. Should I just write down all my dreams so you can set it on fire in front of me, or would you rather watch my pluck and optimism slowly disintegrate over the years?”
    (Or something along those lines.)
    Thanks to the massive guilt trip I laid, Mom agreed. In lieu of a birthday party that year, I would sacrifice my friends’ good times and instead selfishly get pictures taken of myself. It was on!
    Now, to help you fully