My Shot With Alyssa Milano

When I was about 13 years old, Alyssa Milano was a **big fucking deal**.

She was starring on *Who’s the Boss?*, she was all over those Teen Beat-type magazines, and for a bunch of teenage boys at the time, she was pretty much the definition of a celebrity crush.

One day at school, one of the boys had brought in a magazine with Alyssa Milano in it. A few of us were sitting around looking at it and doing what 13-year-old boys do—talking complete bullshit about how each one of us somehow had a shot with this famous, beautiful woman we’d never met.

One kid was basically like, “Man, if I dated her, I’d…” whatever.

The next guy insisted *he* would be the one she’d like.

Just stupid little-boy fantasy shit.

Eventually it got to me.

I said something along the lines of, “I’d love to date her. She’s beautiful.”

And that’s when one of the boys grabbed me by the wrist.

He took my arm and physically laid it across the magazine next to Alyssa Milano’s face.

My brown skin next to her white skin.

That was his entire argument.

He didn’t need to explain it. The message was obvious:

**Look at you. Look at her. You don’t get to have this fantasy.**

Basically: *She’s white. You’re Black. What the fuck are you even thinking?*

And I wish this story had a cool ending.

I wish I could tell you that 13-year-old me immediately understood exactly what had happened, stood up, delivered some devastating comeback and humiliated the racist little fuck in front of everybody.

I didn’t.

I just kind of sat there.

I was stunned.

And, if I’m being completely truthful, I was hurt.

That’s it.

There’s no heroic ending to this story.

Alyssa Milano didn’t suddenly walk into the classroom, take me by the hand and say, “Come on, Don,” while we drove away in a convertible and threw a milkshake on the kid’s head.

Although that would have made a pretty great ’80s movie.

Instead, life just continued.

And somehow that stupid little moment came with me.

I recently turned 48 years old. This happened when I was around 13. That’s roughly **35 years** of this completely insignificant, incredibly significant little moment occupying a corner of my brain.

It’s strange what stays with you.

I’ve forgotten teachers’ names. I’ve forgotten entire classes. I’ve forgotten people I probably spent hundreds of hours sitting next to.

But I remember that fucking arm.

I remember him grabbing my wrist.

I remember my skin against that photograph.

Because what that kid was really doing wasn’t simply telling me that Alyssa Milano wasn’t going to date me—which, for the record, was probably a fairly safe prediction.

He was telling me that there were things I wasn’t even **allowed to imagine for myself** because I was Black.

That’s the part that stuck.

And that’s what this piece is about.

Interestingly, Alyssa Milano doesn’t actually appear in the artwork.

Because when I really thought about it, she wasn’t the important person in the memory.

The giant white figure is the boy.

I drew him exaggerated, almost grotesque—smiling, laughing, completely comfortable with what he’s doing. His expression is huge and ridiculous, almost gleeful. He’s not just part of the memory; he’s the ugliness that suddenly intruded upon it.

Beside him, a white hand reaches over and grabs at the purple arm, plucking and pulling at it, manipulating it into position.

That’s the moment I remember.

His hand on my wrist.

My arm being moved toward the photograph like it was some kind of visual evidence.

*See?*

That was the argument.

And there’s something important to me about the way that arm exists in the artwork now.

It’s huge.

It dominates the left side of the piece.

In the actual moment, my arm was something somebody else grabbed and used against me. He took control of it for a few seconds and turned my own skin into the punchline.

But in the artwork, **I put the arm there.**

I made it enormous.

I made it purple.

And I stamped **MILANO** right across it.

Around everything are little hearts and wandering dotted lines—the remnants of the silly teenage crush that started the whole conversation in the first place.

Because that’s what makes the memory so bizarre to me.

Before that kid grabbed my arm, there was nothing serious happening.

We were just a bunch of boys talking shit about a celebrity we thought was beautiful.

Every other kid was allowed to participate in the fantasy without anybody stopping to examine whether it was realistic. Nobody was pulling out charts. Nobody was checking compatibility. Nobody was explaining the statistical likelihood of a 13-year-old boy eventually dating Alyssa Milano.

It was a fucking fantasy.

And then, when it got to me, suddenly somebody decided there were rules.

In about two seconds, this kid took a harmless little-boy crush and turned my own body into a lesson about where he thought I belonged.

So Alyssa isn’t really the subject of the artwork.

The subject is the hand.

The arm.

The boy.

And the moment somebody decided to reach into a harmless fantasy and draw a racial boundary around it.

Maybe that’s why this memory has lasted so long.

There are moments in your life that don’t necessarily *define* you—I don’t want to give this kid that much fucking credit—but they stay with you.

They lodge themselves somewhere in your brain.

And every once in a while, for reasons you don’t completely understand, they come wandering back out.

Thirty-five years later, I’m still able to see that magazine.

Still able to remember that hand.

Still able to remember how it felt to have somebody communicate, without even really saying anything, that there were places where someone who looked like me simply wasn’t supposed to imagine himself.

For years, this memory has apparently been living in my head rent-free.

So maybe making this piece is my attempt to finally charge the motherfucker rent.

Or better yet, evict it.

I don’t know if there’s a profound moral here.

Sometimes people are just ignorant.

Sometimes they’re small-minded.

And sometimes they become so convinced that their tiny view of the world is reality that they feel entitled to force that view onto somebody else.

There was no great comeback that day.

There was no revenge.

There was no milkshake dumped on the bully’s head.

There was just a 13-year-old kid sitting there, stunned and hurt.

And 35 years later, there was an artist who finally got to respond.

Maybe that’s enough.

And if there is a moral buried somewhere in all of this, maybe it’s simply this:

**Nobody gets to tell you what you’re allowed to imagine for yourself.**

Not even some racist little fuck with a Teen Beat magazine.

 

Artist Don Dixon is on a path to becoming one of the greats, creating meaningful, impactful work that makes a statement on society and the human condition