I shot the menus for “Evening Harder” yesterday.

Those who recall the “Evening With” menus will remember me coming out, waiting impatiently for the viewer to choose “Play” or whatever. We’re doing that again, though with British and Canadian flavors (i.e. – you’ll see me with hockey stick and gloves in/on hand; on roller blades, no less).

When I ask Rosario about her childhood, she starts at the beginning–right at conception.

“I was conceived on Avenue X in Brooklyn with a prison condom that broke,” she says (a prison condom being a condom they give you when you leave prison, just to clarify). “My mom was ready to get an abortion. She was at the clinic, had an appointment. And then she says she felt me move, and she fell in love with me right then. But I was just a speck, so it wasn’t me moving. It was probably gas.”

Okay, but what about after that? What about her life growing up?

Also not so ordinary. Dawson–a mix of Puerto Rican, Native American, Cuban, African-American, and Irish–grew up in a squat on the Lower East Side. When the family moved in, there was no electricity, no water, a hole in the floor, and a crack house across the street. Her mom was sixteen when Rosario was born and kept her in line with an interesting discipline technique: licking. “She’d lick me right across my cheek like a cougar. And it was just so humiliating.”

You can find the full Rosario article in the April 2006 issue of Esquire.

12. The Girl who ‘Lights up a Room’: Of the dozens (hundreds?) of evaluations that have been conducted over the years be it for Playboy, or the Intern Beauty Pageants this one from 1997 stands out. Judges Kevin Smith, Jason Mewes and AJ Benza had to hand down the bad news to an aspiring actress who thought she lit up a room. Not only did she not light up a room, Howard recommended that she go light up a cigarette.