Relatively Important: When Performers Run in the Family

On a 2004 episode of the CBS legal drama JAG, Petty Officer Jennifer Coates is having a cordial conversation with Rear Admiral A.J. Chegwidden.

Coates: “Well, we are a divided country, sir.”

Chegwidden: “Fortunately, we Americans have one thing in common.”

Coates: “Bad traffic?”

Chegwidden: “Baseball.”

Coates: “Actually, sir, I’m not much of a fan.”

Chegwidden: [sighs] “I’ve fired people for less, Coates.”

In a fictional context, the scene makes sense. After all, the character A.J. Chegwidden was so talented a high-school pitcher that the Cleveland Indians selected him in the draft. The scene also makes sense in a nonfictional context. The character A.J. Chegwidden, you see, is played by actor John M. Jackson, the father of onetime major leaguer Conor Jackson.

Across the history of baseball, no fewer than 234 father-son combinations have donned major league uniforms. Scratch that. In actuality, there have been 249 father-son combos, because 15 big league players have fathered a pair of big league sons. Less numerous are father-child/child-father combos that straddle the realms of sports and entertainment. Here, we don’t refer merely to the fact that Conor Jackson himself, a seven-year big league vet, once appeared in an episode of General Hospital. Instead, we refer to the fact that several major leaguers have had dads or kids who have appeared on the big or small screens or on stage in significant roles.

The father of father-son combos first appeared on stage in 1869. “Stage” might be too highfalutin a word. His initial gigs were in Western mining towns. But soon, the magician known as Professor Zamloch began appearing — and disappearing — in venues from coast to coast.

“His extravaganzas of magic were so swiftly executed and so mysteriously subtle,” wrote the Oakland Tribune after an 1879 performance, “that two centuries ago he could have been richly deserved being burned at the stake as a necromancer of the blackest arts and disciple of his satanic majesty.”

Strong words, but Professor Zamloch made strong magic. He served hot coffee from bits of paper. He made skeletons dance. He made birds inside a birdcage disappear.

Oh, and the magician would also vanish.

His most famed trick was The Spirit-Rapping Table And Goblin Drum. In it,  Zamloch would place a large wooden disc in an aisle within clear view of the audience. Then, “without any visible connections,” the Hawaiian Gazette reported in 1896, “the disc rapped on the table at the call of the professor.” Next, a drum placed in the aisle “was made to beat roll call, marches and knock in answer to questions regarding cards selected by persons in the audience from a pack which the professor held in his hand.”

Following his retirement, the magician boasted that “no performer ever has had my magic table and drum act. That is, nobody except the baby of our family…. He made them talk during the few months he was in Vaudeville.

“He could be a clever magician,” Zamloch added, “if he didn’t prefer baseball.”

Baseball, indeed, was the preferred pursuit of Zamloch’s third and youngest son, Carl. After appearing as a boy in his father’s act, Carl picked up his first paycheck as a ballplayer at age 19, playing left field for a minor league team in California. In 1912, despite a robust .346 batting average, the right-hander moved to the mound and stayed there, pitching to a 3-5 record for the 1913 Providence Grays before his call-up to the parent club, the Detroit Tigers.

With Ty Cobb’s Tigers, Zamloch performed a trick you might call The Abundantly Misleading Win-Loss Record. Despite a 2.47 earned ERA, he pitched to a pitiful 1-6 mark. Zamloch then pulled something of a disappearing act following Detroit’s 7-0 loss to the Athletics on July 15. He had pitched three innings of one-hit ball that day, yielding one run, unearned, to lower his ERA to 2.47, yet it had marked his final major league appearance. Perhaps it was the four walks that sent him packing. Finding the plate can be a difficult trick to master. In any case, Zamloch returned to the minors and remained there for the rest of his playing days.

He never left baseball, though. He became both a minor league coach and a college coach. He also returned to magic, performing the mailbag escape, the Hindu rope trick, Houdini’s needle-and-thread trick, the Egyptian fire trick and other acts for schools, clubs and civic events.

Wrote the Reno Gazette-Journal in 1935: “Zamloch will revert to magician anytime, anyplace. The only time his magic failed him was on the baseball diamond. Joey Becker, the old ‘dese and dose’ umpire, was calling ’em in a Coast League game. Zamloch rushed out to protest a decision. Becker laid a frosty eye on the complainant and ground out, ‘Zamloch, I hold youse in sum punkins at dem card tricks. Now if you can tink up one quick and make yourself vamoose into tin air, maybe I won’t have time to fine youse 25 bucks.’”

***

JAG didn’t stop at the Jacksons.

In a 1998 episode titled “Father’s Day,” a man named Greg Mullavey played a man named Mark Tobey. Two decades hence, the role of Tobey is just one of 150 acting credits to Mullavey’s name.

That said, Mullavey isn’t his name. It’s Mulleavy. Decades back, he changed the spelling at the urging of his agent. The now 79-year-old actor, whose TV credits range from Gomer Pyle: USMC in 1964 to iCarly through 2011, was named for his father, Greg Mulleavy, a onetime middle infielder credited with three seasons in the bigs — though, in truth, two of those seasons lasted one game apiece.

In 1932, two years removed from his career-high 77 games, Mulleavy played in one contest, for the White Sox, going 0-for-3 before being lifted for pinch hitter Bruce Campbell in a game against the Browns. Campbell grounded out to score Luke Appling, a year younger than Mulleavy.

His lone game in 1933 would prove slightly more productive. Having changed his Sox from White to Red, Mulleavy this time entered the game as a pinch-runner in Boston’s season opener against the Yankees. He would score the team’s first run on a Merv Shea single off starter Lefty Gomez.

Touching home plate versus the Yankees of Ruth and Gehrig would mark Mulleavy’s final act as a big league player. It would not, however, mark his final act on a professional ballfield. In 1946, at age 40, Greg the elder became player/manager for the Olean Oilers, the Class D affiliate of the Dodgers. The batboy: Greg the younger.

“Talk about theater,” Mullavey would later write. “Each time I went to pick up the tossed bat, I stepped into the ‘Play’ on the ‘Stage’ in front of thousands of people and I loved every minute of it.”

In the play, too, both make-believe and real, was Barry Zito.

In 2002, with the Athletics, Zito went 23-5 with a 2.75 ERA to win the AL Cy Young Award. A year later, with the Navy, Zito beaned a Marine and was subsequently prosecuted for “assault with intent to cause grievous bodily harm.”

Here’s the backstory: A year after his Cy Young campaign, Zito — like Jackson and Mullavey — appeared on JAG. He played a southpaw who, in an All-Star game between the Navy and the Marines, threw a pitch that hit one of the Few And The Proud in the dome. His future in the brig, or out of it, would hang in the balance of a military courtroom and its functionaries.

Zito’s place in showbiz, though, was hardly the family’s first. His dad, Joseph, was a classical pianist and a composer/arranger for Nat King Cole. Barry’s mother, Roberta, was a member of Cole’s backup singing group, the Merry Young Souls.

What’s more, his uncle Patrick Duffy played Bobby Ewing in Dallas. Uncle Patrick earned notoriety in 1986, when, in the Dallas season finale, his character’s infamous shower scene rendered the entire season a dream. In 2007, having stumbled to an 11-13 record and a 4.53 ERA in his first season in San Francisco after signing a free-agent deal that made him history’s highest-paid pitcher, nephew Barry might’ve wished for a similar cleanse.

***

Navy Lieutenant Stephanie Donato is sitting in the office of Lieutenant Harmon Rabb Jr. at the Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia.

In short, she’s in trouble.

Standing nearby, Rabb reads a list of Department of Defense directives that female personnel must observe in Saudi Arabia — directives she has violated.

“Female personnel must wear an abaya or a Muslim head scarf. They must be accompanied by a male at all times. They may not drive. They must ride in the rear seat of the vehicle.” Looking up from the paper in his hands, Rabb adds, “Congratulations, lieutenant, you went 4-for-4, not even a sacrifice fly.”

“Five-for-five, sir,” Donato replies. “The base commander requires us to wear veils, as well.”

Lana Parrilla, the actress playing Donato (on yet another episode of JAG!), would know the difference between 4-for-4 and 5-for-5. Brooklyn-born and -raised, she’s the daughter of onetime major league outfielder Sam Parrilla.

Having debuted on the 1999 sitcom Grown Ups, the 41-year-old actress is now in her 21st year of check-cashing thespianism. In 2018, she wrapped up an eight-year run as The Evil Queen on the ABC series Once Upon a Time. By contrast, dad Sam played 11 seasons in the minors and, coincidentally, exactly as many games in the majors.

Born in 1943 in Puerto Rico, Parrilla moved as a boy with his family to Brooklyn and there starred in prep football and baseball. At 19, Parrilla signed a contract with the Indians and, in Class A Dubuque, launched his career as an outfielder.

Thus began a baseball odyssey that stretched from coast to coast and ended in Chihuahua, in 1973, where Parrilla finished his career with the Dorados of the Mexican League. Three years earlier, in 1970, the 26-year-old outfielder had at last gotten his shot with the parent-club Phillies after slashing .383/.469/.723 with a career-high 28 homers for Single-A Raleigh-Durham in 1969.

In those 11 big league games, however, Parrilla couldn’t replicate the triple-slash success of his prior season, going just .125/.176/.188 in 17 plate appearances. Prior to his mid-May demotion to Triple A, Parilla had gotten three starts in left field. In them, he’d gone just 1-for-9 — certainly not the 5-for-5 performance his daughter would produce some 33 seasons hence.

***

On the game show The Hollywood Squares, host Peter Marshall could have posed this conundrum to panelists and contestants: “Pete LaCock, the son of a game-show host, is a big league baseball player. Who is that game-show host?”

Answer: Peter Marshall.

Born Ralph Pierre LaCock, Marshall hosted the show from 1966 through 1981. His son, a first-round pick in 1970, played first base and outfield for the Cubs across his first five seasons and for the Royals across his final four.

Another conundrum the host could have posed is this: “True or false: Pete LaCock hit the only grand slam of his career off Bob Gibson in the final appearance of Gibson’s major league career.” The answer, of course, is true.

True, too, is that LaCock’s final big league play was catching the throw from KC shortstop U.L. Washington to complete an inning-ending double play in the bottom of the eighth of Game Two of the 1980 World Series. Host Marshall never posed that puzzle, just as he never challenged contestants as to which player had a one-hit wonder of a sister or which singer had a hard-throwing hurler of an uncle.

Beyond Offspring

Lana Parrilla’s showbiz connections, like those of JAG peer Barry Zito, extend to second-degree relatives. Her aunt Candice Azzara owns nearly 100 acting credits, from a 1969 appearance in N.Y.P.D. to a 2018 appearance in Alex, Inc. In related fashion, some big-time entertainers have had some big-time second-degree kin.

At the onset of a 1986 music video for the heavy-metal band W.A.S.P., the man known as Blackie Lawless comes riding into the frame on a rumblin’ Harley, black hair waving in the wind. What Lawless proceeds to sing is W.A.S.P.’s Wild Child.

In a musical context, the song makes sense.

Sings Lawless: “I’m a wild child, come and love me.”

In a familial context, it makes sense too. Born Steven Edward Duren, the hard-rockin’ Lawless is a nephew of the hard-throwin’ Ryne Duren, who, as a reliever in the 1950s and ’60s, was perhaps the wildest child of them all.

So wild was Rhino, in fact, that the makers of Major League patterned the character Ricky “Wild Thing” Vaughn after him. Bull Durham’s Nuke LaLoosh is also his stylistic heir, owing his cinematic moment of mascot abuse — the beaning of the Bulls bull — to a tactic Duren used throughout his 10-year career. Wearing tinted Coke-bottle glasses and squinting from the mound, Duren would frequently throw his first warm-up pitch against the backstop in an effort to strike terror in opposing batters. Once, with Jimmy Piersall standing on-deck, Duren purposely threw at him and sent him to the ground, thereby adding ammo to his psychological arsenal and supplying a theatrical muse for actor Tim Robbins some three decades later.

Sadly, Duren’s wildness didn’t end with his 100-mph heater. He was deep in the cups, once beating down Pete Rose’s door in a drunken fit, once being arrested for DWI, and once getting jailed in Kentucky following a besotted brawl with locals.

Even aside from those incidents, his booze-fueled belligerence eroded his relationships and performances alike. Still, at his best, Duren was an effective fireman, leading the league in saves in his All-Star season of 1958 and posting a 1.88 ERA in his All-Star season of 1959. He was also an effective showman. Rather than use the bullpen gate to enter the field, Duren would place one hand atop the fence at Yankee Stadium and propel himself over it. His Harley-ridin’ nephew would be heir.

***

At the onset of another music video, drummer Butch Trucks is beating the skins during a performance of Whipping Post with The Allman Brothers Band. In moments, the image blurs to footage of Trucks drumming alone.

“It starts out with a lick in 11,” he says. “It’s 1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2, 1-2.”

What Trucks is doing is this: through the video, he’s teaching novice drummers how to play the percussion part — actually, just one of the percussion parts — for Whipping Post. Indeed, The Allman Brothers Band employed two drummers, who played simultaneously. Trucks was one, Jai Johanny Johanson the other.

The difference between Trucks and Johanson, according to Allman Brothers guitarist Dicky Betts, was that Johanson was more of a “pocket guy,” drumming the subtleties, while Trucks provided the “drive and strength.”

Though employed in different measures, that drive and strength ran in the family. One of Butch’s uncles was none other than Virgil Trucks, who, like Ryne Duren, pumped the sort of fastballs that baseball had rarely witnessed.

According to legend, an Army radar gun once clocked him at 105 mph.

According to a legend, Ted Williams, Trucks was the fastest in the game.

In his first minor league campaign, Trucks set a record for the most strikeouts in a season of organized ball, with 420. Three years later, in 1941, he made his major league debut as a September call-up for Detroit and whiffed three batters in his two innings. The final victim: Luke Appling, 10 years older than Trucks.

Trucks would go on to a 17-year career in which he registered 177 wins, a 3.39 ERA, 42 WAR, and one World Series ring. That ring, with Detroit, came in 1945, a season in which he pitched just one regular season game.

Was it ever a big one.

Trucks had spent all of 1944 and most of 1945 serving in the Navy. Following a knee injury, he was discharged from the military near the end of the baseball season and rejoined the Tigers in St. Louis with just two games remaining. Despite missing nearly two seasons, Trucks got the starting nod for the season finale. A win would secure the pennant. A loss would send the Tigers to a one-game playoff.

Facing the Browns, Trucks pitched 5.1 innings of one-run ball. He didn’t get the win, but the Tigers did, claiming the pennant en route to the ring. That win had forged the kind of story that any old player might tell his young kin.

***

At the onset of yet another music video, a blonde boy steps to an outdoor stage, takes a swig of Coke and proceeds to melt everyone’s face off with a slide-guitar version of the song Layla. Most notable, aside from his precocious genius on the guitar, is his T-shirt, which features an image of Duane Allman, the long-deceased co-founder of the band for which his Uncle Butch played drums, and his baseball cap. That cap features the script-letter A of his favorite team, the Atlanta Braves.

The blonde prodigy was then, and is now, Derek Trucks, a onetime wunderkind whom no less an authority than amateur guitarist and professional baseball writer Peter Gammons has called “the greatest guitarist who ever lived.” Gammons has enjoyed a singular look at the now 39-year-old Trucks. Not only has he jammed onstage with Derek and his musician wife, Susan Tedeschi, he has also explored the blood connection between the Grammy-winning guitarist and his great-uncle Virgil.

In a 2010 article, Gammons writes that, just as nephew Butch once placed a Virgil Trucks baseball card on his drum kit, great-nephew Derek has placed a Virgil Trucks baseball card on the back of his guitar. Gammons writes, too, that Virgil had gotten to meet Derek. “I don’t know where the musical part of the family came from,” Virgil said, “but I’m proud of him.”

In a 2012 interview, Derek seemed equally proud of his great-uncle. “‘What a thrill (it was) to get to sit with a guy who’s in the mid-90s telling stories about running with Satchel Paige and Ted Williams. I mean, to me, Satchel Paige is kind of like Santa Claus or some Greek myth. It’s like, ‘That guy actually lived?’’”

Derek and Butch aren’t Virgil’s only musical kin. Another great-nephew, Derek’s brother Duane, is the drummer for the jam band Widespread Panic.

In a separate interview, Duane discussed Derek’s meeting with Virgil. “(H)e started telling him these incredible stories about Satchel Paige, and how they’d be in a white restaurant and (the restaurant staff) wouldn’t allow Satchel in. Virgil would have to go argue with the (restaurant) manager until he got him to let Satchel come in and eat dinner with the rest of the team. And, then, Satchel would walk in, and everybody would get up and come over and ask Satchel for an autograph. All the other players were like, ‘Man, Satchel comes in and steals all our glory.’”

***

Glory, in the spiritual sense, is what Henry Slaughter sings about in his gospel song My Tribute — To God Be the Glory. And glory, in a secular sense, is what cousin Country received after scoring the winning run for the Cardinals in the 1946 World Series in what history calls The Mad Dash Home. Home, in a separate sense, is what cousins Henry and Enos “Country” Slaughter shared. Both were born on tobacco farms near Roxboro, North Carolina, Enos in 1916 and Henry in 1927.

Slaughter and Slaughter aren’t the only ballplayer/entertainer cousins to have known glory. Country superstar Alan Jackson has received two Grammy Awards and 17 Academy of Country Music Awards. Less decorated, but nonetheless acknowledged by voters, is his cousin Brandon Moss.

After years of struggle, Moss received his first All-Star nod in his age-30 season of 2014, just his second as a starter. In the end, it would be his only Midsummer Classic. Still, he has that eighth-inning strikeout against Craig Kimbrel as proof of his night among the stars. And someday, he can tell his kinfolk that he replaced the game’s best player, Mike Trout, in the AL lineup.

Moss has acknowledged that he and Jackson are “distant cousins.” They’re hardly distant in provenance. Both were born near Atlanta. Georgia-born, too, is actress Holly Hunter. On a May evening in 1999, Hunter threw the ceremonial first pitch at Edison Field in Anaheim. Per reports, the pitch hit the ground and rolled away.

The catcher then threw her another ball, for another attempt.

That catcher was her cousin, Angels outfielder Tim Salmon.

By accounts, Salmon differed from his big-screen cousin in one respect.

“He has never appeared in a movie, or TV show, or a non-baseball commercial,” wrote Bill Plaschke for a piece in the Los Angeles Times.

That brand of humility is alien to some ballplayers, one assumes, but not to actors — even to child actors. See Season 9, Episode 18, of Seinfeld. History calls it “The Frogger.” In the eponymous scene, Jerry and George walk into Mario’s Pizza and notice the Frogger arcade game. Playing it is a kid in a puffy green jacket.

Jerry and George approach. Watching, George says to the kid, “Watch the truck. Double jump! Eat the fly! Eat it!”

At that instant, the kid flubs it. The game ends.

He turns and says sarcastically, “Thanks a lot.”

“Eh,” replies George dismissively, “beat it, punk.”

That “punk” is Drake Bell, cousin of onetime closer Heath Bell.

Drake grew up to star in the Nickelodeon series Drake & Josh. All told, he has appeared in three dozen movies and four dozen TV shows, including an episode of iCarly, starring the son of the infielder whose final major league moment was touching home plate against the Yankees of Ruth of Gehrig.

Likewise, the final major league moment of cousin Heath came against the Yankees — the Yankees of Solarte and Suzuki. Indeed, Yangervis Solarte was filling in for 40-year-old shortstop Derek Jeter that day against Bell’s Tampa team. The night before, Jeter had gone 0-for-6 in a 14-inning game against the Rays and likely needed the rest. Ichiro was also 40 but had merely pinch-hit in that May 2 extra-innings game.

Earning the win: Heath Bell. It would be his last.

His last pitch would come in Tampa’s May 3 game against New York, when Bell retired Brian McCann to end the eighth. Problem was, he had already yielded three runs in the inning, one of them on a line-drive double to old man Ichiro. Bell was designated for assignment the following day and released one week later.

Though his career had ended, Bell could at least look back on the sort of showmanship that Tim Salmon eschewed. Recall his entrance in the 2011 All-Star Game, when he sprinted from the ’pen and took a divot out of the infield.

Less gaudy in entrance, but more distinct in exit, was Curtis Leskanic.

In June 2004, the man they called “Let’s Panic” had brought his 8.04 ERA to Boston when the Sox signed him just days after the Royals gave the reliever his pink slip. Quietly, though, the 36-year-old right-hander had pitched well for Boston, going 3-2 with two saves and a 3.58 ERA across 32 games. He had fared far worse in the playoffs, however, yielding three earned runs in just 0.1 inning in Boston’s 19-8 loss to the Yankees in Game Three of the 2004 ALCS.

The end was nigh, it appeared, for both Leskanic and Boston.

“They are down 3-0,” the Boston Globe’s Bob Ryan wrote after the beatdown, “and in this sport, that is an official death sentence. Soon it will be over, and we will spend another dreary winter lamenting this and lamenting that.”

Just one night removed from the 19-8 loss, Leskanic was summoned from the bullpen with the bases loaded in the top of the 11th and the game tied, 4-4. It almost seemed a formality, this sacrificial lamb brought from the recesses of the Boston bullpen to deliver a fait accompli of a pitch and sustain the Curse of the Bambino.

“Leskanic comes on with the bases loaded, two out, a 4-4 game in the 11th inning, with the Yankees up three games to none,” intoned TV’s Joe Buck as Leskanic threw the last of his warm-up pitches and prepared to face New York’s Bernie Williams, a man who, entering the game, had posted a stellar .282/.384/.486 line in 500 postseason plate appearances.

As if to get the whole thing over with, Leskanic came quickly to the set position and delivered an 0-1 breaking pitch. Next came the crack of the bat.

Game over? Not yet. The fly ball settled into Johnny Damon’s glove.

To begin the 12th, Leskanic yielded a leadoff bloop single to Yankees catcher Jorge Posada. If the Curse couldn’t do them in, bad luck just might. Leskanic, however, retired the next three batters, whiffing Miguel Cairo with Posada in scoring position to end the Yankees 12th. The rest, as you know, is history: the Millar walk; the Roberts steal; the Mueller single; the Papi walkoff.

Five years after the fact, ESPN’s David Schoenfield would write, “Do you remember the winning pitcher in Game 4? I would bet 90 percent of Red Sox fans — even the die-hard ones — would struggle to get the right answer.”

The right answer, of course, is the cousin of Katrina Leskanich, lead singer of Katrina and the Waves. Cousin Curtis was Walking on Sunshine, for sure.

***

Not everybody can go out like Curtis Leskanic.

Take David Aardsma.

Granted, the final pitch of Aardsma’s career, like that of Leskanic’s, did result in a strikeout. But that whiff came against Cubs pitcher Jason Hammel in a meaningless late-August game for the 53-70 Braves of 2015. Aardsma, a ninth-year reliever in his first (and final) season with Atlanta, had begun the inning abysmally, yielding a full-count home run to center field off the bat of Chicago rookie Kris Bryant. Eight days later, in the aftermath of those bookend full-count pitches, Aardsma was gone.

Say this for David Aardsma, though. His exit, pedestrian though it was, meant that he had made an entrance. He had reached the major leagues. Only 10 percent of minor leaguers ever advance to The Show, if only for coffee, and so Aardsma had done what 90 percent of minor leaguers only dream of. You might also say that Aardsma, despite his two seasons as the Seattle closer, never played a significant role. Indeed, he never appeared in postseason play. And in The Show, October is the biggest stage of all.

But not everybody can be Virgil Trucks, or even Curtis Leskanic.

Likewise, not every actress can be Holly Hunter. That’s why she’s Holly Hunter. Not every guitarist can be Derek Trucks. That’s why he’s Derek Trucks. Not every singer can be Katrina, who made a name for herself with one song, just as cousin Curtis maintained a name for himself with 1.1 frame.

The world is full of bit players, role players, those who make the stars stand out. They are necessary, courageous, and worthy of applause. Even if their talent doesn’t match their ambition, even if they can only fantasize about the abilities that come so naturally to the stars, they get to the audition on time.

Amanda Aardsma is the sister of David Aardsma, a guy who, across nine big league seasons, pitched to an ERA+ of 100. That, reader, is exactly average. Were Aardsma to appear in the credits, he would be Man On The Mound.

Amanda, born in 1979, has a handful of acting credits. She appeared in the role of “Sexy Mistress” in a 2007 CSI episode. She appeared as “Palova” in a 2009 movie called Dough Boys, which, to date, has failed to qualify for a Tomatometer rating on the website Rotten Tomatoes. She also played “Rowdy’s Date” in the 2000 movie Table One, which has likewise escaped Tomatometer notice.

Interestingly, a second actress is also listed as Rowdy’s Date. It would appear that Rowdy had two dates, which, if true, would halve the importance of any single date. Still, notwithstanding the relative importance of the role, Amanda had made it to the big screen. Like her brother, she had done the job.

Another job came in 2008. In that cinematic season, Amanda appeared — and still appears — as the “Screaming Girl” in the movie poster for Prom Night. In close-up, she is screaming just as the screaming girl should, her otherwise attractive features obscured by the partially displaced tiara.