SASSY APRIL  1993

ONE TO WATCH - Jerry O'Connell

A very youthful and sweet actor boy can be so healing on a bilious, jaded morning.  Jerry, whom you may recall as Vern, the persecuted pudgy child in Stand By Me, is a nice change of pace from the excessive hipness one gets mired in.  He's currently in the hokey ABC sitcom Camp Wilder - about a young divorcee living with her newly orphaned younger sibs - and a film with Jason Priestley called Calendar Girl, set in 1960.  "We're driving from Nevada to Los Angeles to find the woman of our dreams, Marilyn Monroe, and on the way a lot of crazy stuff happens."  Jerry, 19, is a film student at New York University, where his dormmates screened Stand By Me and mocked him.  He wants to be a screenwriter eventually, but the day this picture was taken he was up at the crack of dawn filming meat-market workers "Loading and unloading carcasses of meat" for a student film.  He grew up in New York City and graduated from the Professional Children's School.  "My first gig was a commercial for Duncan Hines cookies.  I had to run around in a baseball outfit singing, 'Crispy chewy, crispy chewy!' I had to eat approximately 2,000 cookies over three days, and being that I was overweight as a child, I was very happy."  Jerry is also a certified lifeguard and a member of NYU's fencing team, and he took his SATs twice.  "Use an SAT word in a sentence," I ordered.  "He had a laceration on his left hand," Jerry answered.  And indeed he did - a fencing wound.

-Margie

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