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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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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