PatriciaRichardson

I do stay in touch with Zach and Jonathan who in fact have written a really wonderful pilot that is sort of R rated and are shopping it around town. Jonathan also directs Last Man Standing and I got to see him there. Of course I've seen Tim. There are no plans to do a reunion show at this point. Usually those things don't work very well. Of course we're missing Earl and that would make us all sad. It would be hard to imagine someone writing us a good script. It was always funny and crazy. And when I think of the funny and crazy things I think of the early years. Jon Pasquin or our second director Andy Cadiss were great. Pasquin would have the kids on roller skates, skating through the set. We had this idea of Tim walking into the fridge, we had a snake on the set and the snake crawled out of the wall and through Tim's shirt. We were all hysterical. And we had stupid stuff that most people didn't notice. Like there was this one drawer that was called the junk drawer and it held EVERYTHING. It held more than I ever would have thought those 8 years of the show. It became a joke. And there were little things like hiding cookies from the kids. It'd get really elaborate like one time we put them in the heating vent. And the one episode we did the snow episode we did it in a separate building. There was powder everywhere and at one point Tim's leg caught on fire which was a little dicey. We always different special effects people all the time because things were going wrong and Tim would always get hurt.

This is a little dirty story from the set: We had a live horse on the set for Tool Time. Well, they had this horse backstage and we couldn't get it on the scene because we couldn't stop it from having an erection (it was ENORMOUS) The guy who was supposed to be the wrangler for the horse kept hitting his erection with a brush. And everyone on set was yelling "Ah, don't do that." No one knew how to fix it so they could do the scene. There was a woman that had her period backstage and coincidentally when we moved her away from the horse it fixed the problem. We were all on the floor laughing. And it made the wrangler stop abusing the horse.

What was not fun was when the boys didn't have a place to play which happened in the first year or two. The boys would be throwing the football on set and guess who's head kept getting hit? Me. They were little so they weren't very good at throwing it so I get hit a couple of times.

I was the only person still there during the 7th season that didn't have a contract for the 8th season. Johnathan also didn't hav a contract for the 8th season but he decided to leave so we knew he wouldn't be there. I told everyone I would stay on for the next season. It was very difficult for my lawyer to negotiate that contract because Disney would not hear no to the 9th season. They wanted to attach it to 8th season's contract. I kept saying "not enough money in the world did they not understand?" It took my lawyer the entire 7th season to the work out the contract. The show was getting tired. We were all getting tired but we thought we could all squeak out one more year. Mostly I just missed having a life and my kids. I felt like I hadn't seen my family in years.

I think that it was very fortunate that Jonathan is so smart and well balanced. Jonathan knew that pitfalls of the situation that he was in. When he left the show he ended up going back to school and got a really good education and thought a lot about what he wanted to do with his life. When he was on the show at one point he said to me he was interested in being a politician. And I thought that was great as he's so honorable as well as being smart. How lucky would we be if Jonathan would be a politician but he's not on that track. He wants to write, direct and produce and I know he'll be good at all of those things. I can't speak for Jonathan if he was uncomfortable with fame like I was but we both coincidentally withdrew from the industry right after the show. I was trying to find a way to be just an actor instead of big celebrity as well as I wasn't a fan of doing press, red carpets, etc.

That's a hard one. I'd chose the one I directed. Not because I'd direct it differently. It was the one where Wilson and Tim fight. The idea of them fighting was my idea. I went into story meetings with Tim after every read through and before every season and worked with the writers on many of the stories. That was one of my favorite parts of doing the show. It was extremely collaborative. My idea for the episode was it would be over Wilson constantly giving the boys advice and it would obviously be a problem at some point with Tim. However the writers decided it was about Wilson getting some money from a hockey game where he sat in Tim's seat and won $10,000 and built a greenhouse. It was a difficult episode because I had to hide Wilson's face in so many different sets. I wish I had started directing earlier, I loved working with the writers. I had Pete Filsinger who helped me with the camera work which was great. I would love to do it again now that I have more directing experience.

I would say don't do it. Don't. Because the casting people can't find real faces and can't move. If you have a face that is real you will get so much more work. Nowadays they are having a lot of troubling finding that.