At this point in my life, I didn't know that much about school, but I knew that I liked acting better. I was around adults all the time, I was getting attention (see above, re Tupac), and I got to wear fancy clothes and do silly things that would have gotten me in trouble had I tried to do them at home.

After The Royal Family was canceled and I wasn't going to an on-set tutor anymore, my parents enrolled me in the local public elementary school. At night, after I finished my homework, my mom would make me get my lines for whatever audition I had coming up and go into her room. When I was super little, Mom would just repeat everything over and over, and have me repeat it back to her. Even once I could read, though, she still made me go off book every time I went into a casting. This meant I couldn't walk in a room and read my lines from a piece of paper, even if that's what everyone else was doing; I had to memorize them. To this day, I can still learn my lines super fast, and can recall conversations I had months ago nearly verbatim (my poor husband, right?).

For the first sixteen years of my life, my mom was the only acting coach I had. She was damn good at it too. She'd give me pointers on delivery and body language, like, "Okay, but next time put your hand on your hip when you say that word," or she'd demonstrate the facial expressions to make when I was supposed to get people to laugh, or when I was supposed to look mad or unhappy.

In a lot of ways, my mom and I had a very adult relationship, but at the core I was still a kid. Sometimes our nightly sessions of running lines would end in a screaming match, with me crying because I just wanted to play, or frustrated because I didn't think she was listening to me. I also hated some auditions, especially those kid cattle calls for commercials that involved several hours of standing in line.

Eventually I got savvy enough to bargain when I knew that an audition would be particularly annoying, which was how I ended up with an all-white bunny named Duchess. Ah, Duchess—I was super into her for, like, the first two days, then totally forgot about her. Eventually her tiny bunny water bottle proved to be no match for a summer day in Valencia, and she succumbed to heatstroke. After Duchess, Mom wised up, and my rewards were only of the inanimate variety.

The first thing I booked after The Royal Family was a guest spot on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. While I hated commercial auditions, I took television auditions very seriously. I remember that I was barely out of that casting when I burst into tears. I was convinced that I'd done a horrible job and wasn't going to get it.

Then we got a page from Arletta, and I went from midmeltdown to screaming with joy into a pay phone. The role I landed was only for one episode, and one scene, which wasn't even with Will Smith, but I was on set long enough for him to call me cute.

My mom and I were sitting on some stairs, rehearsing my lines, and were (unintentionally!!) blocking the entrance to his dressing room. He came by and asked us to move but also introduced himself and called me pretty.

I beamed. "Wow, Mom! That's the Fresh Prince!"

So yeah—Tupac and Will Smith? I was totally slaying in the early nineties.

After this, I booked a recurring role on Family Matters. I have to be honest—I think this was when I reached my prime in terms of my physical appearance. I played Gwendolyn, who was the seven-year-old love interest of Little Richie, and the costume department really knew what it was doing. Gwendolyn had the best hair and the best outfits! Her hair was always half-up/half-down and full of scrunchies. Each of her outfits was made up of at least seventeen articles of clothing—it was all about the layers. She'd be in leggings under a skirt with a long-sleeved shirt under a short-sleeved shirt with a bandanna around her neck, and then they'd top it all off with something like a pair of little yellow socks and red Chuck Taylors.

On a Valentine's Day episode, they paired a red dress with a leopard-print coat and a big red flower in my hair—the look beats any red-carpet ensemble I've worn to this day. Another highlight was when I got to drive a battery-powered Barbie Jeep. This made a huge impression on me. I thought it was the coolest thing ever, and I loved it so much that it (unfortunately) influenced my taste in real cars when I finally got my driver's license more than ten years later.

Richie wasn't just my on-screen love; offscreen I was convinced I was going to marry him. He could dance and he had the best Jheri curl on TV—what more could a girl want?

I thought he looked like Michael Jackson, and I was obsessed. I'd call his house to talk to him, and Richie and I would tie up the phone lines for hours. As to what our conversations were actually about? Beats me. The pinnacle of our romance was the Family Matters wrap party. As all the adults were getting drunk, and the older kids were being cool, Richie and I burned up the dance floor until we were sweaty—him with his Michael Jackson moves and me with the running man, which I had mastered so well that it should've been in the special-skills section of my résumé.

Alas—sometimes young love is just not meant to last, and I have no idea where Richie is these days. Nor, if I'm being honest, can I even remember his real name.

My on-screen roles definitely led to some offscreen perks. Michael Jackson's niece was also an actor, and we were on several auditions together. Over time, our moms became friends, enough so that I was invited to her birthday party at Neverland Ranch. I was still too young to really understand what was so special about it, but my mom was freaking out—even though she wasn't allowed to come with me (the girl's mom assured us that there were chaperones, and that Michael was not one of them).

The day of the party, we all met at a central location, where we would be taken to the ranch. Everyone else on the bus was like twelve or thirteen, but I was a freaking baby—small enough that I was still wearing white tights! Nicole Richie was one of the other kids on the bus, and when she saw a five-year-old climb on board by herself, Nicole and her friend took me under their wing and let me sit with them. The bus ride was so long that I got sleepy and laid down and took a nap in Nicole's lap. When I woke up, I saw that I'd drooled all over her leg.

Once we were at Neverland, we rode the rides and watched a movie in a full-size theater. I remember walking up to a concession stand that was filled with popcorn and candy. I had planned on just drooling at the snacks from behind the glass because I didn't have any money, but then the guy working the counter said, "Do you want anything? Everything is free here." If this had been a movie, we would have cut to a trippy echo sequence at that moment: "Everything is free . . . Everything is free . . ." I'd never heard anything so glorious in my brief little life. I gobbled up Sour Patch Kids and Raisinets and Twizzlers, and then stayed awake for the entire bus ride home, all hopped up on sugar.