Copyright © 2014 by Neil Patrick Harris
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Archetype,
an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group,
a division of Random House LLC,
a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
Crown Archetype with design is a registered trademark of Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN 978-0-385-34699-3
eBook ISBN 978-0-385-34700-6
Illustrations by Antony Hare, P.I.
Cover design by Michael Nagin
Cover illustration by John Defreest
Photograph and source credits appear here.
v3.1
My very first job was working in a bookstore. It was there that I discovered the Choose Your Own Adventure books. I’d spend hours lost in those novels—I loved the idea that I could write my own story, or at least try to figure out which path was the winning one. When it came time to write my memoir, I couldn’t think of a better way to depict my twisty-turny life, so I decided to adapt the Choose Your Own Adventure concept (albeit as a relative parody). If you’re familiar with the series, then welcome; make yourself at home. If not, by all means rush to your nearest bookshoperie, seek out Choose Your Own Adventure books, and enjoy. They are awesome.
To David: I couldn’t be happier that my many paths and choices have traveled to you.
To Gideon and Harper: May your lives have countless chapters, and may those chapters be filled with laughter, adventure, and great good times.
Contents
Introduction
Start
Photo Insert
Credits
Thanks for purchasing the latest in our three-name-choose-your-own-autobiography series!
1. GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
2. BILLY BOB THORNTON
3. SALT ’N’ PEPA
4. MARY ELIZABETH MASTRANTONIO
5. DAVID HYDE PIERCE
6. DAVID AFTER DENTIST
7. CEDRIC THE ENTERTAINER
8. JOHN WILKES BOOTH
9. NEIL PATRICK HARRIS
You, Neil Patrick Harris, are born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on June 15, 1973, at what you’re pretty sure is St. Joseph’s Hospital, although it’s hard to be certain as the whole experience leaves you a little blurry.
The first person you encounter is, not surprisingly, your mother, Sheila Scott Harris. As the years go by you will come to learn she is a truly remarkable woman filled with love, kindness, fragility, selflessness, intelligence, wisdom, and humor. The kind of mom who will talk to you like a person and treat you with respect from the age of two. The kind of mom who will hold you in her lap for an entire four-hour car ride, lightly scratching your back. The kind of mom who teaches you the rules of Twenty Questions and then lets you guess the “right” answer even though it wasn’t what she was thinking, but does it subtly enough to keep you from realizing that’s what she’s doing. The kind of mom traditional enough to sing in the Episcopal church choir every week but hip enough to improvise a horrific death for a character in the bedtime story she’s reading you just to make sure you’re paying attention. The kind of mom who sews your Halloween costumes and plays the flute and loves to laugh and encourages you to pursue your passions and at one point trains to become a Jazzercise instructor and at another decides to go back to law school in her thirties and commute four hours each way every weekend for three solid years to make sure she spends enough time with you.
Yeah, you luck out, mom-wise. But at this particular moment she isn’t any of those things so much as a grunting, sweating, shrieking woman in pain.
As she reaches over to hold you for the first time, you notice a man clutching her hand and smiling at you. This is your father, Ronald Gene Harris. As the years go by you will come to learn he is strong, stoic, and wise, an amazing husband, lawyer, logical thinker, and fixer of problems. The kind of dad who sometimes trades his legal services for old furniture, which he then spends months refinishing to its pristine, antique glory. The kind of dad who helps you craft winning Soap Box Derby cars while he builds his dream house in the mountains. The kind of dad who, claiming “emergency law work,” begs off a weekend trip to Albuquerque to celebrate your seventh birthday, causing you great disappointment … until you get home to realize he’s actually spent the entire time building you a tree house, complete with a sandbox, rope ladder, secret trapdoor, and zip line. The kind of dad who plays folk songs on the guitar, teaches himself the banjo, and shows you how to sing. And, perhaps most important, the kind of dad who’s funny. Not “Dad funny” (i.e., not funny) but actually funny. He looks like a serious conservative thinker, but he is blessed with a dry and untiring sense of humor. He owns every Smothers Brothers and Kingston Trio and Brothers Four LP and plays them constantly. And he is the master of repetition comedy. From the time you are fifteen years old, whenever he is handed the phone to talk to you he will stage-whisper, “No, I don’t want to talk to him, I don’t want to … oh, HI, Neil! How are YOU??” Every time. And you will do the same. Every time. And then the two of you will cackle about how funny you are. Every time.
But again, none of these things are immediately apparent to you right now, seeing as how you’re crying, covered in viscous afterbirth, and zero years old.
· · ·
You come in weighing a very average, very sexy seven pounds, seven ounces. As it happens, that is also the exact weight of an Emmy Award. Coincidence? Yes … but true fact? No.
After your cord is cut for your convenience, you’re immediately whisked away for tests, measurements, and the embedding of the electronic neural microchip secretly implanted in all American babies born after 1953. Exhausted from your nine-month ordeal, you ask for and receive permission to spend the night in a comfy bed in the hospital’s maternity ward. You request a single instead of a twin, because you are not a twin.
The next morning you deem yourself ready to go home.
Upon arriving at your new ex utero digs you meet the third member of your immediate family. Your brother, Brian Christopher Harris, is three years older than you at the time of your birth and, as it turns out, will remain so throughout your life. He is the kind of brother who is brilliant and imaginative, a rebel who will spend much of your childhood insisting to you and your parents that he is a Russian prince who somehow ended up in this family under mysterious circumstances he is not at liberty to discuss. The kind of brother who is the family’s designated boundary-tester and who prides himself on being smart and wily enough to survive on wit. The kind of brother who will often confide in you about his secret trips to the numerous abandoned mine shafts dotting the New Mexico landscape whose perpetual status on the brink of sudden collapse is a terror for you but an exhilaration for him—“Neil, I’m going into a mine. If I don’t come back, here’s my location. Don’t tell Mom and Dad unless I’m really truly missing. Bye.” The kind of brother who is paradoxically both an outsider and very popular, who runs for elementary school student-body president with posters reading “SEX!!! … Now that I’ve got your attention, vote Brian Harris for Student Body President.” The kind of brother who will throw parties when your parents are out of town and be kind enough to include you, and to whom you will owe your first beer, your first wine cooler, and your first (and only) make-out session with two girls at the same time.
He will be your hero.
* * *
If you would like to experience a happy childhood, go HERE.
If you would prefer to experience a miserable childhood that later in life you can claim to have heroically overcome, go HERE.
You,
Neil Patrick Harris, are born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on June 15, 1973. You’re pretty sure it’s in the backseat of a taxicab, but you can’t be certain because maggots have eaten the upholstery.
Your mother, Cruella Bathory Harris, is the kind of mom who drinks alcohol and smokes crack a lot because she is an alcoholic crack addict. The kind of mom who slaps you for waking up, punches you for brushing your teeth, and smacks you with a brand-new belt “to weatherize the leather.” The kind of mom who gives you and your siblings nicknames based on the diseases she hopes you come down with later in life. (Your nickname is “Emphysema.” Your youngest sister’s is “Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma.”) The kind of mom it takes multiple lifetimes to overcome.
As for your father, he is the kind of dad who could have been any one of the five starting players for the 1973 University of New Mexico basketball team. (They’re called the Lobos, and for good reason.)
But your childhood has one saving grace: Grandmapa. Grandmapa is one of your mom’s parents, although due to his/her appearance you never figure out which one. But it doesn’t matter. Grandmapa is there to comfort and inspire you. S/he believes in you. S/he also believes in goblins and banshees and that the Martians killed Kennedy, but that’s not the point.
One particularly brutal evening, after a day spent hosing out the abandoned coal car you call your home, you find yourself alone and crying deep in the mine shaft you call your community. It’s pitch-black. Below, you hear the flapping of bats’ wings. Above, you hear the screech of the 8:05 freight train bringing yet another shipment of fresh bats. Suddenly you hear Grandmapa’s familiar clopping gait.
“What’s the matter, Neil?”
“Oh, Grandmapa, life is hopeless. I’m unloved, I have webbed feet, and I just don’t think I’ll ever amount to anything in this lousy world.”
That’s when Grandmapa slaps you hard across the face and says, “Don’t you ever talk that way, young lady!”
“Actually, I’m a b—”
“Now you listen here, girl. You are going to rise from this muck because you are destined for great things. You are destined for fame and fortune. You are destined to be a Broadway star. You are destined to have not one, but two long-term television roles. You are destined to host numerous awards shows. You are destined to have a fairly impressive film career, although you will still be looking for that one great dramatic role that will put you in the elite echelon of, say, future Brad Pitt. You are destined to be president of the Magic Castle. You are destined to have a bizarre encounter with celebrity son Scott Caan outside an LA nightclub. You are destined to have a long inner journey of sexual self-discovery culminating in a lifetime partnership with the man of your dreams. And above all, Nell—”
“Neil.”
“—you are destined to tell your heartbreaking, coal-miner’s-daughtery, but ultimately triumphant tale of overcoming adversity to the world, so that others can draw strength from your superhuman resilience and determination!”
And that’s when the bats get her/him.
* * *
If you would like to experience a more wholesome childhood, go HERE.
If you are eager to meet your own children, skip ahead thirty years and go HERE.
Your parents live in Ruidoso, a beautiful mountain town of around five thousand people perched over a mile up in the Sierra Blanca range of south-central New Mexico. It looks like an idyllic place to spend a childhood, so after careful consideration you choose to grow up there.
You’re a normal, happy, outgoing kid. You worship your big brother and think there’s nothing cooler than when he lets you hang out with him and his friends, or when he treats you as his confidant and partner on their various adventures. You dig out little tunnels and caves in the dirt by your driveway and play army with the little soldiers you bought at Ben Franklin’s (the local version of Walmart), making them swim across enormous “rivers” trickling from garden hoses. You occasionally take firecrackers and blow up Star Wars action figures, which your parents disapprove of, although not as much as Brian likes to imagine they do. Sometimes after school the bus drops you both off downtown at your dad’s office. A half block away there’s an unfinished building with an exposed basement. You and Brian call it “the Dungeon,” and you love going there and exploring its depths, playing pretend war games and rescuing princesses from phantom dragons.
From early boyhood you are drawn to musical theater. Your parents sometimes play LPs of Broadway cast recordings, and you come to know every note of Annie and The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, which is not nearly as R-rated as the name suggests. When you’re eight they take you to Albuquerque to see a touring company of Annie, and you love it so much you teach your brother and all your friends the choreography to “It’s the Hard-Knock Life” and act it out with brooms and show it to parents and neighbors. Admission is free, and worth every penny.
Your first-ever stage role comes in 1983, when thirteen-year-old Brian and his friends audition to be Munchkins in Tularosa High School’s production of The Wizard of Oz. You tag along, and when they see you they ask if you’re interested in playing the role of Toto, the dog.
“Bark!” you respond.
You love it. Love, love, love it. Everything about it. The makeup, for example: you love watching your transfiguration in the mirror, enthralled by the way a few skillfully applied dabs of gelatinous, alchemical-like substances can transform you from human to canine. You love removing it too, with the Noxzema cold cream and its bracing menthol smell, rubbing it sensuously on your skin and watching that carefully painted dog face falling apart and the colors bleeding into each other until you end up looking like a clown from the 1880s.
For the first time, the glorious illusion of performance, the way the experience is simultaneously real and fake, exerts its primal pull on you. It thrills your soul. It also engages your mind. It raises all kinds of existential dilemmas. Why is it, for instance, that when you’re onstage as Toto you’re on all fours, but when you’re making your way down the yellow brick road, which winds its way through the rows of the audience, you’re on your “hind legs”? The director feels there’s no other practical choice, so it’s okay. You don’t. You consider it a gross inconsistency that besmirches the meticulous realism of the rest of the high school production of The Wizard of Oz.
From that moment on, you never have to be persuaded to do anything that might result in a bunch of strangers applauding you. You quickly build up an impressive résumé in roles at both elementary and middle school and the Cree Meadows Country Club, the home of Ruidoso’s Little Theater, a haven for that group of locals who were—you will realize in hindsight many years later—if not closeted, at the very least not big football fans. You play Amahl in Amahl and the Night Visitors. You play John Darling in Peter Pan. You play Winthrop (“Gary, Indiana”) Paroo in The Music Man.
Then in middle school you’re lucky enough to come under the wing of a wonderful drama teacher named Churchill Cook who, sensing your talent and enthusiasm, begins delegating to you a lot of the musical arrangement and direction of the school plays and musicals. He helps create the highlight of your prepubescent thespian career: your work as narrator and quasi-director of How the West Was Really Won. (How? Hint: it involves hacky puns and box-step choreography.) It’s a comedy revue about the Old West narrated by an old guy with a corncob pipe. You play the role of Old Guy with a Corncob Pipe. Man, do you ham it up. You put on fake old-man wrinkles using the Tom Savini book on proper makeup application, but it’s your own idea to put baby powder in the pipe so that when you pretend to smoke, a little puff of powder comes out. Neil Patrick Harris, you are a genius!
You seek out other avenues for performance. You sing in choirs. You even join the public-speaking circuit. At the age of thirteen you enter a contest sponsored by the Optimist Club, a huge international organization with a positive attitude when it comes to semifilled glasses of liquid. Their assignment: deliver a speech on the subject of optimism. You and your m
other (a/k/a Optimom) conceive and write the speech together. At the competition you deliver it with the masterly studied casualness of a young man who spent waaaay too many hours practicing it in the bathroom mirror. You win the regional finals and its prize … a $1,000 college scholarship.
You will never get to use it.
* * *
If you want to begin exploring the world of theater, go HERE.
If you want to start learning magic, go HERE.
If you want to spend waaaaay too many hours practicing the Optimist Club speech in front of a bathroom mirror, go to the bathroom, press HERE and start reciting.
Optimism: A Way of Life An Award-Winning Speech by Neil Patrick Harris, Age 13
“Oh great, another optimism speech. I hate optimism, it’s so happy and energetic … eh, at least I don’t have to give one.”
Those words came out of the mouth of Scott Jensen. Scott was a thirteen-year-old pessimist. Well, he wasn’t really a pessimist, he just definitely wasn’t an optimist. His appearance was okay, but the main thing that made him a pessimist was his attitude. He was always too bored. He looked down on things. He looked down on life.
The child who was speaking sat down, and Mr. Maddox, Scott’s teacher, grabbed a piece of chalk and went to the blackboard. Now there, he drew a square with a cross in the middle. Scott shook his head and laid it back down on the desk thinking, Now, what does that have to do with optimism? Mr. Maddox quickly turned to him and said, “I know what you’re thinking, what does that have to do with optimism? Well, that is a window which represents optimism. You can open that window and have a gateway to a happier life. If you are in a room that’s dismal and lonely, you could sit and feel sorry for yourself, or you can go to a window, open it up, stick your head out, and smell the fresh air. You can look in the distance and see a rainbow.”