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Where Do I Know You From? The ‘Facts’ About Julie Piekarski Julie Probst has a gold card, but it's not the kind most people carry. Hers is the Taco Bell Personal Gold Card signed by former Taco Bell President John E. Martin. The 44-year-old ex-Mouseketeer and television star has free tacos for life. She was the restaurant's spokesperson in the early eighties and they granted her the standing for increasing their sales by 60 percent. She said it's confusing for the young people who now work the drive-thrus and counters of the Americanized Mexican restaurants— kids who never new Julie Piekarski, Sue Ann Weaver on the 1970's preteen hit “Facts of Life,” kids who never knew about the return of Walt Disney's New Mickey Mouse Club, kids who never contemplated whether they were a “Pepper” or whether you wanted to be one too. Now Julie Probst, wife of dentist John Probst and mother of three teenagers, Julie is still touching the outskirts of Hollywood as her children sing, dance and perform at the Muny Opera House in St. Louis. Today she lives her life in her hometown of St. Louis and helps out her alma mater, the school her children also attended, Academy of the Sacred Heart in St. Charles. Julie's own memories of stardom and the magic of Walt Disney are still vivid in her mind. “They put me in charge of Mickey,” Julie said about her first experiences as one of the new Mouseketeers at Walt Disneyland in California. Dancing and singing since the age of three, Julie had been chosen in 1975 from more than 20,000 young hopefuls. After her audition in Chicago, Julie was sent back to St. Louis to do a video test with Walt
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Disney's local affiliate. She said the producer wanted to test her to see if she could pretend an object was there when it really wasn't, since on the show the kids would have cartoon characters superimposed onto the screen with them. The producer tried to be tricky and didn't let Julie in on his little secret. “He said, 'I'm going to give you a banana,' and he just held out his hand. I didn't know what to do so I pretended to take the banana and began peeling it. And then I asked, 'Is this Chiquita or Dole?' He was amazed.” At Disney, the person wearing the Mickey Mouse costume carried both the burdens of not being able to see well under the costume and also that the head of the costume itself at the time was worth more than $7,000, making protection of the equipment quite necessary. The new Mouseketeers, along with Julie, were memorialized on lunch boxes, coloring books, albums and more before the show’s untimely cancellation the following year. Julie said the cast believed at the time that Disney's new movie “The Black Hole” took all of the money that would have been used for the next season. Julie grew up in Cool Valley, Florissant and Creve Coeur before becoming a Mouseketeer, but she said it was her education at the Academy of the Sacred Heart in St. Charles that molded both her talents and values. “It was my family and this school that made all the difference in my life,” she said. “The headmistress Sister Steppe was so loving. She said, 'Go do this'. But she still had a little rope on me to let me know that, 'I'm letting you go, but remember your values and what
you represent'.” Julie said she felt she represented her school and Sister Steppe as she stepped out into the world of show business. She always said, 'What you are is God's gift to you. What you make of yourself is your gift to God'.” Confidence and humility would come in handy in the glittering city of Los Angeles where stars abound and self esteem often gets trampled. Julie would go on to be asked out by the likes of Tom Cruise, flirted with by Rob Lowe, and neck-in-neck for roles with Melissa Gilbert, Helen Hunt and Molly Ringwald. Julie did pilots with Nicholas Cage, “before he was Nicholas Cage,” she said. She did stints on Three's Company and Quincy and even read for Michael Landon for Little House on the Prairie. She did the Dr. Pepper commercial with David Naughton of “An American Werewolf in London” and became the spokesperson for Taco Bell in New York. She said she finds it difficult to watch television shows about childhood stars and their complaints about how hard the life was for them. “We got to sing and dance every day in the Disney studio. We got to walk through the animation department and watch the men draw the animation boards. We got to ride the rides when the park was closed. What a life. I think, 'You were lucky. You were privileged. What are you talking about?'” she said. “I would have done it for free. I truly looked at it as an honor.” Julie was 13 when the New Mickey Mouse Club ended. Shortly after that she and former Mouseketeer co-star Lisa Welchel began new careers on “The Facts of Life”. Welchel was Blair Warner. The experience would last three