Image via Complex Original
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It is said that George Orwell was inspired to write Animal Farm after watching a boy coax a giant workhorse down the road by whipping it. A real life suicide moved Tolstoy to write Anna Karenina. And John Steinbeck's own reporting on migrant workers provided the spark that would become The Grapes of Wrath.
For Mario Lopez, inspiration for his latest work, Just Between Us, came when he gazed upon a map of Griffith Park and noticed a small sticker that said: "YOU ARE HERE." Seriously.
"That's when I felt the proverbial tap on my shoulder," he writes. "If, as the map tells me, I am here, where exactly is that?"
Mario Lopez is a lot of things to a lot of people. But to himself, he can be defined "as a kid in numerous commercials and TV series, as a teen actor who came of age in hundreds of episodes of Saved By the Bell, as both a guest star and leading young man in a bevy of projects made for television and film, as a triple-threat stage performer on Broadway, as both a contestant and a guest judge on Dancing With the Stars, and, of course [Editor's note: OF COURSE!], as the host of Extra and in an array of other hosting roles."
You might want to take a breath because he's also "the host of [his] own nationally syndicated radio show," a "producer with pots simmering on multiple burners," and, naturally, "an entrepreneur."
Given all of his experience, Mario has gleaned many important lessons. Unfortunately, one of those lessons was not "do not release a celebrity memoir on the same day as Lena Dunham."
"Life is not really about arriving at that one spot marked 'You Are Here,'" Mario writes, with the help of his coauthor, who I'm assuming owes money to the Russian mob, or recently went through a costly divorce, or lost his retirement savings in a Ponzi scheme. "It's about all the choices you make in getting there and the consequences of those choices."
Whatever you say, Slater! What else can we learn from Mr. Lopez? Let's dive deep into Just Between Us for ten lessons from Chula Vista's Finest. After all, as Mario himself writes, "I wrote this book for all of us."
Steve Dool is a writer based in New York City. Follow him on Twitter.
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La Bruja Is Always The Answer
Despite much effort from Mario to describe the Lopez men as preternaturally strong, both Mario and his father fell deeply ill at various points in their lives. So ill, in fact, that they were failed by modern medicine and told by medical doctors in California to prepare for death. But a witch doctor in Mexico had a second opinion and that was: "More like prepare for life!" La Bruja cured both Mario and his father of their ailments in one session each. Plus, as Mario notes, it was a relative bargain. "The witch doctor cost six hundred dollars," he says. Your move, Obamacare!
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Not Everyone Is Like You
Growing up in Chula Vista, California, Mario initially thought everyone was Mexican. That is until one day, when he noticed some Filipino kids in his town, some black people, some whites and "even Samoans." Mario didn't explain why he suddenly took notice of people of different ethnic backgrounds in Chula Vista, so I'm going to read between the lines and assume that one day he went outside and opened his eyes. In any case, DIVERSITY: IMPORTANT TO BE AWARE OF.
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Hard Work Can Be Fun
Mario describes how he makes boring tasks more enjoyable. For example, as a child he liked to "vacuum in straight lines so when [he] was done there was a cool pattern left on the rug." Anecdotes like this are important to include in one's memoir.
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Your Reputation Will Always Precede You
When Mario was in high school, he gained a reputation for being a fearsome competitor on his school's wrestling team. He was responsible for breaking other students' collarbones, shoulders, arms and knees in the ring. So, one day when his friend fell out of a tree with no one else around to witness what happened, everyone assumed that Mario had hurt him. It was a harsh dose of reality for someone who had left a trail of injured friends in his wake every other time except this one.
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If You Want People To Like You, Beat Someone Up
Mrs. Lopez enrolled Mario in a dance class to keep him out of trouble. Mario was cool with this, as he mentions 14,000 times throughout, because there were so many girls there. But then someone called him a "fag," so, at his mother's suggestion, he beat the living shit out of him. "Word travels fast," Mario says, "and after that day, everybody was cool with me. That rite of passage was a golden ticket to the future." The future came knocking later when he was dating actress Jaime Pressly, of Joe Dirt fame, and gave someone a knee to the face in a bar in Tijuana. She was into it. The relationship did not last, but they'll always have Tijuana.
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Follow Your Instincts
Once, Mario auditioned for a milk ad. He needed to shoot a basketball over his shoulder and ask a nearby cow, "Hey Mr. Moo, what do you say?" While other kids hammed it up, Mario couldn't shake the feeling that his character was actually a cool, but approachable, Fonzi-esque rebel. He wore a leather jacket to the audition and delivered his line in a nonchalant way. That radical interpretation was a tour de force that resonated with the milk advertisement casting director on an emotional level. The result? Mario's first national ad.
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Don't Be Ahead Of Your Time
In a particularly heart-wrenching passage, Mario talks about how his forward-thinking mentality may have cost him the chance to take part in one of the 1980's biggest dance trends. "I messed around with break dancing and was starting to put a crew together—complete with taking a piece of cardboard to school so I could refine my head spins," he writes, presumably after his coauthor had fallen asleep. "But I was ahead of my time and hip-hop was not the well-respected dance genre that it is today."
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Your Greatest Gift Can Also Be Your Greatest Curse
Growing up, Mario received a lot of positive attention from his family for his dimples. However, the dimples proved to be an absolutely adorable double-edged sword: Sometimes, other kids wouldn't take him seriously when he wanted to fight them. They called him "Pitface" and thought he was just a pretty boy. Later, he learned that "dimples are actually birth defects." But girls like them and if there's one thing Mario likes, it's things that girls like about him.
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Reading Is As Fundamental As Foreskin
Late in his memoir, Mario takes a hardline stance on two hot button issues in today’s society. One of his causes is "encouraging all of us in all communities to read more" because "a book can be an e-ticket." But don't even think about using a book to board a one-way trip to your next bris: "No doctor that '’ve spoken to believes that circumcision is necessary," he writes, I'm guessing after a very informative conversation with La Bruja. Besides, "another secret, if you don't know, is that when an uncircumcised penis becomes erect, it looks the same as every other erect penis."
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If You Decide To Write A Memoir, But Don't Actually Feel Like Writing, Just Direct People To YouTube
When Mario and his friend Juancho attended the 1994 NBA All Star Weekend in Minneapolis, they found themselves invited to a party at Prince's house. Mario went on to describe the party as "amazing" (Juancho agreed). Then, he decided to let the experts do the talking, a great decision that perhaps he realized too late in his memoir writing process. "The best way to get a sense of how surreal that night was is to watch Dave Chappelle's hilarious impression of Prince," he says, before foregoing a thorough description of the party in favor of a description of the sketch. But it's all good because "you can check it out on YouTube" for yourself.