Melissa Francis - Lessons from the Prairie: The Surprising Secrets to Happiness, Success, and (Sometimes Just) Survival I Learned on Americas Favorite Show

T he red digital clock just beneath the camera lens hits the top of the hour, and I kick off my four-inch, red stilettos faster than you can say hideous bunions. Before I even stand up from the curvy white couch, I slide on my homely (heavenly) orthopedic sneakers and sigh. Im sure the tourists on the other side of our glass studio windows at Fox News are horrified, but also secretly reveling in the pure humanity that is my ugly, ugly feet. Oh well. Sharing such secrets is the price I pay for working, quite literally, on display.

Like all the big networks these days, Fox has built a street-level studio behind big picture windows that allows fans and tourists to look in on our workspace during the live show and wave manically while we fight about hot topics in bright dresses and fake eyelashes. Most days I feel like a goldfish in a shiny fishbowl. A goldfish who sincerely appreciates that viewers find the spectacle compelling enough to stop by and tap on the glass. Without their interest, I wouldnt have a job!

Thank you.

I usually pass unnoticed as I make my way from the studio, through the breezeway, and back to my office, but on this day Im stopped by two smiling ladies bundled against the cold, holding out comically oversized pens. They look like the writing instruments my kids hand to Mickey Mouse to get his signature at Disney.

Would you sign this for me? the pink-coated lady asks, pressing a piece of paper into my hands.

Id be happy to, I say. But I think youll be disappointed when you read my name. The ladies coming right behind me are a lot more famous. You should wait for one of them.

Oh, no. We know who you are. Youre Melissa Francis, the second lady says, handing me her own pen and paper. Youre the Little House on the Prairie one! I grew up with you.

The Little House on the Prairie one

I never think of myself as the Little House on the Prairie one, and Im still taken aback when people remember me from that time. Decades later (please dont stop to do the mathI cant take it), most people recognize me as a television journalist, but I grew up in Hollywood, smiling for the camera before my first birthday. From sudsing my hair in an infant tub to sell Johnson & Johnson Baby Shampoo, to hawking (cold, painted) hamburgers for McDonalds, to more serious turns in dramas, I worked pretty steadily from the time I was a baby though my teenage years. I was probably best known as Cassandra Cooper Ingalls, Michael Landons adopted daughter on Little House on the Prairie. Pa adopted my TV brother, Jason Bateman, and me after a violent covered-wagon accident pulverized our natural parents right before our very eyes.

For those of you too young to rememberor others who are unfamiliar with the concept of television or People magazineLittle House on the Prairie was a wholesome family drama broadcast during the late seventies and early eighties that was set a hundred years earlier in the small prairie town of Walnut Grove, Minnesota. We rode around in wagons pulled by horses, mostly grew our own food, and lived in a tiny wooden house that lacked plumbing.

Just as a side note, after I showed my sons the show and pointed to myself as the child on the screen with a bonnet and long brown braids sitting in the back of the wagon, they naturally assumed I grew up in a time before cars were invented and continued to carry that idea with them and share the notion with friends despite my protests to the contrary. Which is not terribly flattering in my business, where age really counts. They also asked at what age their hair would turn spontaneously blonde like mine obviously had.