The Mystery of Melissa

INTRODUCTION & DISCLAIMER – As a boy growing up in Brisbane, Australia in the early 1990s, young Nathan Smith loved watching the kids’ show ‘Don’t Sleep In On Saturday’ every week, mainly as he could see his celebrity crush, a pretty and bubbly presenter named Melissa Armstrong, Missy for short. Nathan was most upset when she left the show and vanished into obscurity, never to appear on TV again and leaving no digital footprint.

Years later in 2018, Nathan is a teacher at a Gold Coast high school and most challenged by David, an overweight and disruptive nightmare to teach. When David’s long-suffering mother calls Nathan and arranges a meeting with him, Nathan is in for one of the biggest surprises of his life.

Only characters aged over 18 are in any sexual situations. All characters and events are fictional, with similarity to real persons living or dead coincidental and unintentional. For readers unfamiliar with Australian sexual slang, the expression ‘fanny’ is used for vagina on some occasions.

Please enjoy your trip to beautiful Queensland for ‘The Mystery of Melissa’ and rate and comment.

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Like many kids growing up in Queensland or northern New South Wales in the 1980s and 1990s, every Saturday morning my brother, two sisters and I were always awake by 6 a.m. and in front of the television to watch our favorite television show, ‘Don’t Sleep In On Saturday’. And our classmates, friends and cousins were doing the same things at their own houses.

This kids’ show had four presenters- always two male and two female – and was filmed on the Gold Coast. The quartet of presenters were extremely good looking young men and women, and in between introducing a variety of cartoons and kids’ live action shows they always had a lot of fun interviewing guests and undertaking a variety of activities such as cooking, arts and crafts, a quiz and physical challenges, such as seeing how long they could throw a tennis ball around without dropping it or taking a break. The presenters would also have gone out on assignments during the week, visiting places around Queensland and on occasion interstate, and these would be screened during the three hour program.

Interesting, amusing, fun, educational, engaging and designed to appeal to kids in a wide age group, ‘Don’t Sleep In On Saturday’ was a highly rated show from its debut episode in 1984. As a child I often wished I was a grown up and a presenter on the show, rather than a kid going to school in suburban Brisbane where I lived with my siblings and parents.

Of course, the presenters all changed over time, and the show proved to be a successful launching career for these young people who aspired to careers in the media, many becoming successful journalists, TV presenters and actors over the years. Others however vanished off into obscurity after their tenure on the show came to an end, and this was the fate of the young woman who was my first – and as it turned out only – celebrity crush during childhood.

The date I first saw her was Saturday, 11th April 1992, and at the time I was aged 9, turning 10 later in the year. One of the presenters Jodie, a pretty brunette with a big smile had left the week before as she had taken up a job as a reporter on the network’s Queensland current affairs show. The rest of the cast had had a farewell party for her on her last show, and we were wondering who was going to replace her.

We soon found out the next week when the three presenters Tanya (a tall and pretty young blonde who went on to be a reporter on a travel show in the mid-late 1990s), Gavin (a handsome young man with light brown hair who became a very successful sports journalist) and Chad (a red-haired and very enthusiastic young man who I only realized later was gay and who became an actor on children’s shows) opened the show, and said they had a big surprise for us. At this cue two maintenance men in overalls wheeled a large, brightly colored cardboard box onto the set, and out of the box leaped the new female presenter and for me it was love at first sight. Well, at the time I thought it was love at first sight, but older and wiser I realized that at age 9, it was more likely a case of crush at first sight.

The young newcomer was called Missy, and she was a pretty and petite girl with shoulder-length dark brown hair styled with a modest fringe and big brown eyes. Missy was dressed in a pretty pink baby-doll dress, white sneakers and white ankle sox, which made her look so cute. Despite her young age and inexperience, Missy was a natural in front of the camera and in no way eclipsed by her older and more experienced co-presenters, with all four of them getting along so well.

In the closing credits of the show I found out Missy’s full name – Melissa Armstrong – and a few weeks after this the Sunday newspaper ran in its television guide an article with the bright new star. I found out that Missy was aged 18, was from the Gold Coast, that maths, science and geography were her favorite rus escort subjects in school, she like me had the star sign Libra. She said that she loved keeping fit by running and playing netball, science, maths and geography were her favorite subjects in school, she had a pet cat and she loved both Rugby League and Australian Rules football. I also noted that like me she was one of four kids, two boys and two girls. The TV magazine was put into the recycling bin for the following week of course, but not before I had secretly cut out the article and securely hidden it in my room.

While I had always loved ‘Don’t Sleep In On Saturday’, now I loved it all the more Missy was on the show. I always felt my heart racing and light-headed when she was on-screen, such as one of the segments when Missy went to a wildlife park in Brisbane to do a report on reptiles and amphibians and was holding a snake, then several lizards, a baby crocodile and finally had a frog on her head, the frog very interested in the green scrunchie Missy wore in her hair.

Sometimes the show would have a theme day, for example one Saturday not long after Missy’s arrival they had a ‘back to the 50s’ day where Missy and Tanya were both wearing poodle skirts and bobby socks, the guys dressed in 1950s gear too. It was all so much fun, and I wished now more than ever that I was grown up and working on the show, rather than being a stupid boring kid called Nathan Smith who went to dumb old boring school and lived in a dull suburban Brisbane street where nothing exciting ever happened.

Since Missy’s arrival I had developed the habit of awakening at four in the morning every Saturday, keen to make sure I didn’t miss a second of the show. I would count down the seconds until six and my celebrity crush appeared on the TV screen. I was immensely disappointed one Saturday in June of Missy’s first year when she didn’t appear one morning and her co-presenters said she was sick with flu, and should be back the following Saturday. I spent the week worrying about her and paced around the house before the show started the next week, repeating to myself, ‘Let Missy be better again and be back on the show, let Missy be better again and back on the show …” And I breathed a sigh of when young Missy was back, clearly recovering from influenza by her voice, but back regardless.

Throughout the rest of 1992, 1993 and 1994 I continued to look forward to Missy’s appearance on my TV screen every Saturday morning, and I would spend the week in eager anticipation of the next Saturday morning. I took to secretly writing fan fiction about her, such as me getting to meet her when her car broke down and she came to our house to use our telephone. Another time I wrote a story about Missy and her fellow presenters coming to our school to record a show. Other stories I wrote about her featured me as an adult working on the show with her. It was all harmless kids’ stuff, but I hate to think about how poor quality my fan fiction stories would have seemed had I still had them and read them again as an adult.

In addition to her hosting role of the kids’ show, rising star Missy began to appear in adverts and promotions for the TV station, so I got to see more of her during the week, much to my delight. Although on one occasion in 1993, I happened to look through the social pages of one of Queensland’s Sunday newspapers and saw a picture of Missy and her boyfriend, a handsome and hunky rugby league player at a Gold Coast event. And while laughable now in hindsight, I spent several days in a fit of childish jealousy wishing that I was grown up and Missy’s boyfriend rather than the rugby league player.

While my crush on Missy obviously made me happy, it also brought me stress. I was terrified that other kids – my siblings, my cousins, my friends, and classmates at school – would find out about my secret crush and tease me about this. I had several vivid nightmares about this scenario turning to reality, and would wake up in a cold sweat. And like many people with a crush I was keen to bring Missy into a conversation or wishing other people would mention her so I could talk about her more I would get paranoid afterward that I had said too much and given away my most closely guarded secret. Other times I worried that I talked in my sleep about Missy. But nobody ever said anything about it, so I assumed I had kept my secret safe.

Just before Christmas 1994, ‘Don’t Sleep In On Saturday’ went on its break and Missy was still there when the show returned in January 1995 and of course I still had as big a crush as ever on her and continued to enjoy the show as much as before, although Jenny and I were older now and in high school, me now aged 12 turning 13 in September. We would do our homework in front of the show while our younger sister and brother sat on the couch.

One Saturday early in May 1995 we were all up and about at 6 a.m. as usual. Jenny and I had our homework out, and our younger siblings were in front of the TV. The show’s opening theme started to which I half paid attention, mainly concentrating on a book report I had to write. However, my attention quickly went to the TV – in fact I turned around so quickly I nearly gave myself whiplash – when the four presenters made their usual exuberant entrance then announced that today was a special show. It was Missy’s last show.

I was devastated and shocked by her sudden departure, especially given there was no explanation. When the credits rolled there was a farewell party for Missy, but even though young at the time I caught a glimpse of Missy’s face, and while she seemed to be smiling for the cameras I could see it was forced and an act, and that she was holding back her tears and anything but happy.

The next week a new girl named Claire joined the show as Missy’s replacement. While Claire was very pretty and competent in front of the camera, she was a tad too serious and reserved for a fun kids’ show. This showed with her career after her three year tenure on the show ended, and she became a serious journalist on national television and based down in Melbourne, interviewing politicians and the like about economics, finance, constitutive law and legislative changes.

I consoled myself after Missy left the show that she would soon be back on television on another show, after all many of the young presenters who had left the show in previous years did so as they were working on other shows but my hopes proved forlorn, as I never saw her again either on TV locally or on a program telecast nationally. She was not seen on adverts, nor did she go into radio. It was like she had vanished from the face of the Earth.

Missy’s shock departure and my increasing age dampened my enthusiasm for ‘Don’t Sleep In On Saturday’, and while my younger brother and sister still watched it throughout the 1990s, Missy’s cast mates in the early-mid 1990s were all gone by the end of 1996, but unlike Missy onto bigger and brighter careers in television. Not seeing Missy any more my crush on her faded over time, but I often wondered what had happened to her.

The new presenters of the late 1990s did a pretty good job and the show still rated very well, but for some reason it didn’t seem to translate well into the new millennium, and began to decline in quality and ratings despite the best efforts of the presenters. By this stage I was out of high school and studying a teaching degree in university, so made these observations when watching the show as part of an assignment for one of my units.

In 2003, the show was given a big makeover, becoming all whiz-bang, hi-tech stuff designed to appeal to more modern kids. Unfortunately, it was one of those situations where it seemed adults had made decisions without consulting with actual children. The young presenters tried their best, but the results were beyond cringe-worthy. ‘Don’t Sleep In On Saturday’ struggled through its final two years, before the inevitable axe fell at the end of 2004, after 20 years on air.

Upon hearing of the last episode and that some past presenters would be making guest appearances, I actually tuned in to watch, feeling a sense of nostalgia for my childhood and keen to see what had become of my crush in the nine years since her departure. I was disappointed. Missy did not make an appearance aside from archive footage of her from back in the 1990s, and that was that.

Years passed, I was now a high school teacher and lived and worked on the Gold Coast and obviously most of the time did not think of my obscure childhood crush, but at times the mystery of what had become of her entered my thoughts. The internet seemed a pretty good chance of solving the mystery, but even though Missy might have married and changed her surname, something should have come up. Apart from sites about ‘Don’t Sleep In On Saturday’ a search on her name revealed nothing, and these sites gave no indication of what had happened to her.

On one social media site I belonged to there was a message board, and to my delight one morning there was a new thread asking site members who was their celebrity crush from childhood. I immediately replied, stating that mine was Melissa ‘Missy’ Armstrong, a presenter on ‘Don’t Sleep In On Saturday’ from 1992-1995, saying that she had vanished into obscurity and asking if anyone knew what had become of her. I got two replies, one poster saying he had had a crush on her too but didn’t know what had become of her. A second poster said he was thinking that he might have dreamed her so completely had she vanished from the public domain, and obviously he didn’t know either.

This wasn’t the first time I had confessed my secret crush on Missy from years earlier. At Christmas one year, with my sisters, brother and I now adults, I admitted that I had had a crush on Missy from our favorite TV show as kids. Jenny had laughed and said that everyone knew that but nobody had said anything as they didn’t want to embarrass me. I was most dismayed that I wasn’t as good at hiding my feelings as I had thought and that my deeply guarded secret was anything but.

Then in 2014 I thought my wait of some 19 years to find out what had happened to Missy was over. Logging onto the internet, there was an article about ‘Don’t Sleep In On Saturday’, to mark 10 years had passed since it went off the air, and 30 years since airing its debut episode in 1984.

I clicked on the article and read through it. In the article there was a slideshow, which read ‘Who were your favorite Don’t Sleep In On Saturday Presenters? What are they doing now? Find out here’. My heart raced as I clicked through each slide for each presenter, these running in chronological order from 1984-2004. A sweat formed on my brow as I reached the early 1990s presenters. The mystery was nearly over. The slide came up for Melissa ‘Missy’ Armstrong. There was a photograph of her from 1994, the petite and pretty young woman dressed in a white tee-shirt with kittens on the front, patched jeans and walking barefoot along Surfer’s Paradise beach, the towering high rises behind her. Missy’s clothes and the fact that the Gold Coast skyline had significantly changed since then dated the photo to the early 1990s. I read the text at the bottom of her picture. The first line read ‘Melissa ‘Missy’ Armstrong was a presenter from 11th April 1992, with her last show on Saturday 6th May 1995′ My heart sank as I read the next line. ‘Her current whereabouts are unknown’.

So that was it. Missy had vanished off into the big wide world, leaving no digital footprint and I had about much hope of finding out what had happened to her as I did of finding out what happened to Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt. Obviously being female she may have married in the following years and changed her surname, but it seemed very strange that of all the presenters in the 20 year history of the show, she was the only one who couldn’t be found, and this by a media outlet. While some presenters continued to be on television in various roles, even the obscure ones no longer in the media had some mention of what they were doing now. For example one of the girls from the late 1990s was listed as mother of three living in Sydney and running a catering business, and one of the younger guys from the show’s later years was running a landscape gardening business in Brisbane.

I did think – although I hoped not – that maybe Missy might no longer be with us, but of the people who were presenters on the show two had passed on in the following years. One I knew of – Holly, a bubbly blonde who was on the show from 1999-2001 had died in the 2011 Queensland floods while saving the lives of another woman’s two children from rising waters in Toowoomba, but losing her own life in the process. There had been a big story about it at the time, with Holly awarded a posthumous bravery award. And Tony, a presenter from 1986-1989 had died of a heart attack in 2002 at the age of just 36. Tony had also vanished into obscurity after leaving the show, but his fate was still known. If Missy had also died, then surely this would have been known.

So where was Missy? Had she moved to another Australian city such as Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, Adelaide, Perth or Darwin? Had she married and moved overseas, to a country such as New Zealand, England, America or Canada? Given how completely she had disappeared, maybe she had moved to somewhere more obscure like Antarctica, Greenland, a country in West Africa, Latin America or one of the Baltic States in Eastern Europe. I could only hope that wherever on the Planet Earth Missy was now, that she was healthy and happy.

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The whereabouts of my childhood crush were not at the forefront of my mind early in 2018. The new school year commenced at the Gold Coast high school, and as soon as I returned I quickly became acquainted with possibly the worst student I had ever encountered in all my years as a teacher, in the fat and unlikable form of 16-year-old David Robertson.

David had transferred to the school for the start of 2018. It was not because his family had moved into a new locality, but because it was his third high school. His departures from the other schools were acrimonious and necessary because things hadn’t worked out there, and now the problems had followed him to his new school.

Surly, unintelligent and lazy, David was a nightmare to teach. He wasn’t disruptive like some ADHD kids I had taught over the years, his response was usually one of passive aggression, but his mere presence seemed to cause disruption among the other kids. Absolutely everything in life seemed to bring David immense personal sufferance and his heavy sighs and sulky expression showed this. With most problem kids it was possible to identify a skill, interest or talent and work with this to their benefit, but with David there was no talent or interest readily identifiable. He was definitely not academic, at sport he was a hindrance rather than a help, he wasn’t musical, artistic or into community activities. While I hated to say it, he was pretty much useless.