Melissa in October's "Bikini" magazine

This page is for Melissa's appearance in the October issue of "Bikini" magazine.

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since 8th September 1999

I can now provide all of the pictures of Melissa contained in this magazine, first, the preview pictures: (click on them for the full size picture)


A scan of the cover of the October issue of "Bikini" magazine.
"WOW!" is all I can say, although I don't know if that's positive.


Again, "WOW!", and yet again, I don't know if that's positive..

I suppose I'll grow to tolerate or like these pictures, but my first impression, well, I can't say the exact words, because Melissa's picture is present, and I could never swear in front of Melissa. You will know what I'm talking about if you've seen "Rock'n'Jock Baseball '99". In RnJ99, Melissa says the exact words I said.

These pictures are thanks to Paul, from the publisher of Bikini magazine.

Towards the end of September, there should be more info about the issue here.


Now, the pictures from the magazine:

Cover
Second picture
Third pictures
Fourth picture
Fifth picture
October Calendar spanning three pages

As I started to say on the main page, I've realised over the last couple of days that I'm more a fan of Sabrina than Melissa, and that's why I don't like these pictures, but since realising that fact, it's allowed me to be more open minded, and to tell the truth, I actually don't mind these pictures..


Now, here's the text of the interview in this magazine:

The Evil That Mel Do

Melissa Joan Hart is all grown up and in the mood for a little mischief.

Paul Semel welcomes her to the dark side.

Melissa Joan Hart has a deep, dark secret. Actually, it's not that deep, or dark, and considering how willing she is to admit it, it's probably not much of a secret either.

"I got kicked out of my own party," she says, ripping into a veggie burger at Hollywood's Quality Food & Beverage like she didn't just say something shocking. "We rented out this bar, and I just, I don't know, I did a lot of shots. It was my 21st birthday, so I was trying to match everybody shot for shot, and I did like 18 shots of tequila in two hours with no food in my stomach. I ended up puking three times before I left the bar, and they were like, 'It's close enough to 2 a.m., you gotta get out now."'

Okay, so it's not a confession of murder, espionage, or of having a sadomasochistic threesome with an elected official and his dog, but if all you know of Melissa is what you've seen on TV, or what you've assumed because of the way she looks, you've probably just had a heart attack. Thanks to roles on such goody-goody shows as Clarissa Explains It All and Sabrina The Teenage Witch, as well as her sunny, fresh-scrubbed looks, people think Melissa's just the girl-next-door. And while a lot of guys want to get with the girl-next-door, Melissa's public image guarantees they'll probably ask politely before pecking her cheeks.

But this, Melissa says, is not the real her. Which is not to say you can just walk up to her and cop a feel, but you don't need to treat her like a little kid anymore, either. Like a lot of 23-year-olds, Melissa listens to nine inch nails and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, enjoys an occasional Tanqueray & Tonic, and sports both a tattoo of a cross on the back of her neck and a belly-button ring. "I also thought about piercing my nipple," she says, "and I wanted to do my eyebrow. I mean, obviously, I couldn't do my eyebrow because of my career, but I just thought it was so sexy."

Such admisssions are hardly shocking, especially when so many of Melissa's contemporaries already have arrest records. Even so, to anyone who still thinks Melissa's the innocent kid she plays on Sabrina, it's as if she's admitting that she kicks puppies for fun.

"Her rebelling, I think, is what every normal twenty-something goes through," explains Lindsay Sloane, who is Melissa's best friend both on Sabrina and in real life. "It's just categorized as rebelling because of her image. But she doesn't do anything with rebellion in mind, she's just living her life. She just wants to be young and have fun."

Having lunch with Melissa, it's easy to see why some people mistake her for a member of the Osmond family. Though she's feisty and has a sarcastic sense of humor, she's also huggably cute, bubbly, and unrepentantly sweet. But while that might make you want to don a Darth Vader mask and say, "Melissa - give in to the dark side," the lady says she already has one, she's just not sure how much giving in she wants to do.

"It's hard when you look a certain way," she says somewhat mournfully. "I look really All-American, sweet, girl-next-door, so naturally those are the parts that are going to land on my doorstep. I also get pressure from my audience and my agents to be a 'good girl,' and I'm in the public eye, so if I mess up, it's going to be all over the place. But people are afraid to curse around me. They're like 'Shit - oh, sorry.' I always get that.

"I'm also struggling a little bit right now," she adds, "because I just recently started to feel my age. When I was younger, I always felt like I was 40 because I had so much responsibility, mainly with Clarissa, because I was doing school and the show. But last year, when I was shooting Drive Me Crazy in Utah, and I was there with a bunch of kids my age, I really wanted to go out and party. Here I've got this big movie that I've got to concentrate on, it's a big deal in my career, my first big feature, but I wanted to go out with the rest of the cast and stay up late and play air hockey. I just wanted to have fun."

While Melissa considers her current position a struggle, others, including her mom, actually see it as a good thing. "She was always kind of a serious teenager," notes Paula Hart, who, besides being Mel's mom, is also her manager and the executive producer of Sabrina. "Like her reIationships with guys - they were always much more grown-up than they needed to be. She never let herself just have a good time. But now she's allowing herself to have a lot more fun. It's a good time for her."

Ironically, Lindsay thinks some of Melissa's rebellion comes from her mother. "It's weird, but Melissa goes through stages where she wants to just be her mother, little Susie homemaker sitting at home with the kids," Lindsay says. "But she'll say that in one breath, and then stay out all night. So I think Melissa is torn. I don't think she knows what she should be going through right now."

Lindsay's not the only one who'd credit Ma Hart for inspiring her kid's recent rambunctious behavior. After all, if Melissa's a bad seed, it's all because of her parents, right? Especially since Paula split from Melissa's dad when Mel was just 14. While dad went off to work, mom just went out. "My dad's not really been in my life," Melissa admits. "He works like crazy, and I never really get to see him. But he didn't abandon us, he's just a better friend than he is a father. A lot of my boy problems are all about my dad, I hate to say. And my mom, she became a big club queen in New York, went out at all hours, and I had to stay home with the kids, babysitting. And if she wasn't home the next day, I had to get them up and get them ready for school."

This, Melissa's mom explains, was more the exception than the rule. "Most of the time when I did go out," Paula says, "my kids were not home for the weekend. But we had this idyllic life. We lived in a house by the water. I walked the kids to school and made brownies. But one day I woke up and said, 'This is not what I want to do with my life.' And my children, mainly just Melissa, reacted badly." Despite what a shrink might say, the anger hasn't lingered into Melissa's adulthood. "There were like two or three years in there, between 15 and 17, where I had a lot of responsibility," Melissa recalls. "I was working and going to school, and I was trying to support the family while mom was doing what she had to do. But I never felt anger towards her about it. I just thought it was something I had to do. I did get angry when she divorced my dad, but now, when I look back on it, I realize it was the best thing that ever happened to me." Part of the reason Melissa says that is because, after the divorce, her mom moved the family from the dull suburbs of Long Island to the exciting metropolis of Manhattan. "It took about two weeks to get used to New York," Melissa explains, "and then I just loved it. Suddenly, I've got a subway. I can go to the zoo, I can go to the park, walk the dog, meet boys. I met a lot of my best friends on the street. Basically, we got out of a small town, and I learned a lot about life and cities and about what I want to do. It gave me ambition, it showed me there's a whole world opening. My mom, in a way, showed us that. I thank her for that."

While the rebellion in Melissa's personal life has been greatly exaggerated, the one she's been going through professionally has gone a bit unnoticed. And for good reason. Unlike a lot of former kid stars who grow up and decide they want to act their age, Melissa hasn't gone on a crime spree, developed a drug habit, and/or appeared in a Poison Ivy sequel. Instead, as she's gotten older, so have some of her parts. She recently played a college kid in the TV movie Silencing Mary, and Sabrina has finally amputated the Teenage Witch part from its name. Melissa even got to give in to that dark side in Twisted Desire, another TV flick in which she killed her parents and framed her boyfriend. "People were scared after that movie," Melissa says, almost gleefully. "Even my mother was like, 'I hate you. Don't even look at me right now."'

Not that getting those kinds of roles has been easy. "You always want to have a range," she says, "you always want to show that you can be really diverse in your roles, but it's hard. I kind of have to chase after the other ones. But I'm not trying to change my image or anything. I've got a big audience, and I'm trying to stay true to that audience. I'm not going to all of a sudden say, 'I'm going to play a hooker,' because I know nobody will follow me.

"I also have a lot of little sisters and a brother," she adds, "and I wouldn't want to make any movie that they'd be embarrassed to go see. That's a big thing for me right now, though it's not always going to be that way."

Being such a responsible and thoughtful young lady has never been a problem for Melissa, who says she's always felt a bit mature for her years anyway. "Even when I was doing Clarissa, I wanted to hang out with all the big boys," she explains. "I wanted to be an adult, because all my friends were adults. So I felt like I was already there - I could relate with adults better than I could people my own age.

"I also had crushes on all these older guys on the show," she adds, "all grips, the electricians, but I couldn't get an older guy. I had all these older guys around that wouldn't hit on me."

I tell Melissa that, as an older guy, I find this hard to believe, especially ice she's admitted before to being rather forward with men. "Yeah, but they're usually not older," she says. "Guys my age, I'm really forward with. But usually not older guys. I'm usually intimidated by older guys."

Guys lucky enough to intimidate Melissa could still learn a thing or two from her, though, like how you should always get a lady's name right, a lesson boxer Oscar De La Hoya got the hard way. "I threw water on him cause he called me Sabrina," Melissa says. "We were hanging out, a group of my friends, a group of his friends, and I was pretty drunk. Actually, I think we were all pretty drunk - and his bodyguard had bought me this huge bottle of water. So when Oscar said, 'La-la-la, right Sabrina?' I said 'That's not my name!' and threw this bottle of water in his face. And Oscar actually laughed about it, though I guess later on he wasn't so happy."

Melissa has one last secret for you, one that might give you a heart attack of a different kind. "I like to be as naked as possible. That's why my friends call me Teensy, because of the book, The Divine Secrets Of The Ya-Ya Sisterhood; Teensy's the character that's always naked and running around." While this sounds just a little too good to be true, her best friend says believe it. "Yeah, Melissa likes to be naked," Lindsay sighs, almost as if she's tired of seeing Mel's boobs. "If there's a time when Melissa can be naked, she definitely is. She's such an exhibitionist."

Does that mean, please God, that Melissa Joan Hart might some day grace the pages of Playboy? "If they could promise me it wasn't camera-between-my-knees kind of shots, I would do it," she says with a naughty giggle. "I would do topless. I think it's empowering. Though if my mother had a real big problem with it, I'd have to say no right now. But I don't think she would."

"I wouldn't be happy about it," Paula Hart says when asked about her baby girl posing naked in the pages of Playboy, "though I don't think she would do it anyway."

Which isn't what Lindsay thinks. "Knowing her so well, and knowing how she is such an exhibitionist, it's hard to know where she'll draw the line," she says. "Melissa's very proud of her butt. She'll sit there and talk about it for an hour - how she likes her ass. So I don't know, if push came to shove, maybe she would do Playboy.

"But I think people often resort to nudity when they have nothing else to offer," Lindsay adds, "and Melissa's a strong enough person, and is always going to have something going on, that she won't have to resort to her naked body."

Whether we'll see Melissa's bare butt in Playboy is, well, anyone's guess. Though if it does happen, Melissa will probably be laughing the whole time. "It's flattering," she says, "but I also think it's funny. I like to have fun when I do stuff, and I don't like to take things too seriously. So if I'm going to be naked, I've got to be having fun with it. I'm going to be like a goofy five-year-old. To take a photo shoot like that seriously, it just feels phony to me."

With that thought still lingering, Melissa sets down her veggie burger, almost as if she's just realized something about herself, her much overblown rebellion, and that Vader-esque voice in her head. "Maybe that's why I don't have a dark side," she finally says, "it just feels fake to me. It's just not me."

Mother Superior
If Melissa Joan Hart seems like a first-class party animal, it's because she learned from the best: her mother, Paula. But while Ma Hart concedes, "I don't know if I'll ever grow up," the lady is still a parent when it comes to her kid.

In the last couple of years, Melissa has gotten a tattoo, a belly button ring, and a couple of hangovers. But she says you've always been supportive, no matter what she's done. Is there anything Melissa could do that would freak you out?

No, because I don't think there's anything she could do that I haven't experienced. When I was going out, I wore some very interesting outfits and wigs and boots and I knew all the nightclubs. But I had a great time. I took her to the Limelight [in NYC] when she was 15 to go dancing because I always had such a great time. I'm just glad she's going through it now before she's married for 15 years. So no, I can't think of anything.

Has she ever thrown that back in your face, though?

Yeah, when she was younger and didn't understand anything.

You're both Melissa's manager and the executive producer of her show, but unlike a lot of mother-daughter teams in Hollywood, I've heard nothing but good things about you and your relationship with Melissa. But what would you do if she did decide to strike out on her own?

I would be disappointed, but it would definitely be her choice. I've always given my children free will. I will always give them my opinion, no matter what, because they will always be my children, but I know when to back off. I know when not to interfere. But I don't think we would ever get to the point where she would tell me to get out of her life. We just don't have that kind of relationship.


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