Alyssa Milano Remembers Her Totally Awesome '80s Workout Video 'Teen Steam'

When I was a little girl, I probably would have shaved my head if Alyssa Milano had done so. The Who's the Boss? star was my favorite actress, and I alway looked for stories about her in the latest issue of Bop. Well, you know, after I devoured any news about New Kids on the Block.

She made it easy then for me — a chubby pre-teen growing up in Shreveport, Louisiana — to go about losing weight when she released her exercise video, Teen Steam, in 1988. I played my VHS tape every day for the entire summer that I was 12. Between my daily meeting with Alyssa and strict calorie counting, I lost 15 pounds by the time I started seventh grade. In my mind, she and I had become BFFs by Labor Day, which is why — all these years later — I jumped at the chance to interview one of my teen idols.

Alyssa, of course, has continued to act — most recently on the first two seasons of ABC's Mistresses — but she's also embarked on many other projects. There's the Touch line of apparel she designed for female sports fans, because she wanted something to wear at L.A. Dodgers games other than a pink T-shirt with a logo. For more than a decade, she's made time to serve as a UNICEF ambassador and visit children in Angola, Kosovo, and elsewhere. Then there's the comic book, Hacktivist, that she created last year after she became interested in Internet freedoms (she's huge on Twitter). Her most surprising endeavor, though, has to be her latest: Milano has teamed with Viva to design nine styles of paper towels. (Yes, you read that right.)

"My inspiration is to allow moms to not only have an easier time, but also to make the things around them more beautiful and functional," said Alyssa, who is herself now the mother of daughter Elizabella, 1, and 4-year-old son, Milo, her kids with agent husband David Bugliari. With her many side gigs, my lunch dates with the actress aren't as frequent as I'd like, which is to say never, but hey, we're both busy women. She did, however, find time to talk with me about Teen Steam as the video marks its 27th anniversary this week.

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"It was during the time when they started to pull all funding out of schools for [physical education], so there was a need for it," she explained of how the video came to be. "And it was also the time when Jane Fonda had her workout videos." Turns out, I'm not the only one who knows Teen Steam embarrassingly well. "To hear stories about how kids would do it and it helped them to feel good about themselves, it's great," she said while thanking me for telling her one more story about her video's impact.

"Just to look back on those '80s moments is always fun for me," she continued. One particular sign-of-the-times moment in the vid is when, just as the opening credits are ending, the camera zooms in on a set that's supposed to look like Milano's bedroom. On her nightstand, next to her touch-tone phone, is a framed photo of Corey Haim. The Corey Haim. The teen heartthrob who had just starred in License to Drive and The Lost Boys and whom Alyssa also happened to date back in the day.

"He was my first boyfriend, when I was very little," she shared. "Obviously, because we were so young, we weren't real boyfriend and girlfriend. I had the hugest crush on him and we were friends. We were friends with crushes on each other. And he was like the s--t at that time."