Co-stars put the bite on
`Noah' actress
Author: Manuel Mendoz
 Two weeks ago, a water buffalo kicked Erika Page in the
ankle. She was also caged for two hours with teething lion
cubs - she has the scar on her wrist to prove it. "When it was over, I went to the door of the cage and screamed," says the 20-year-old actress, who has a starring role in the new ABC drama Second Noah, debuting Monday night. "Everybody started laughing, and it broke the tension." Except for an episode involving a hurri- cane, when she did her own stunt with a wind-blown trash can, that was as scary as it got for Ms. Page, a Carrollton High School graduate starring in her first TV series. In Second Noah - shot in Tampa, Fla. - she plays 16-year-old Roxanna, one of eight children adopted by a Busch Gardens veterinarian and a basketball coach turned best-selling author. The Becketts also take care of 40 rescued animals on their woodsy compound. Much of the drama revolves around the problems they encounter trying to work, run the animal rescue and raise the kids, some of them troubled by their circumstances and others going through normal growing pains. Ms. Page, who has been modeling and acting professionally for four years, was also adopted. Born in Tulsa, Okla., to a part-Cherokee mother and a Hispanic father, she was adopted by a Methodist minister and a nurse when she was 5 days old. She grew up in Tulsa until she was 12. After her parents divorced, she moved with her mother to Hobbs, N.M., and then to Midland and Carrollton, where she is living again until ABC decides whether to renew Second Noah. In the series' third episode, twins Ranny and Danny (Jeremy and John Torgerson) decide to look for their birth mother. Ranny is tired of being thought of as a bad influence, and he is angry with his adoptive mother, Jesse (Betsy Brantley). "That scene touched me a lot, but I have never wanted to find my biological parents," Ms Page says in an interview at her agent's office in Oak Lawn. "I feel like I have the best parents in the world. But you always wonder. You wonder if you have a brother or sister who looks like you. You wonder about family history, stuff like that. But that's something I'm willing to live with without knowing. "If that's what she {her birth mother} needed to do, then that's fine. I hope she has a good life, and I don't want to go and interrupt anything with her. I kind of have this make-believe picture of what people look like and maybe what they did in life. I've grown up all my life with this make-believe idea of what that family might be like, and I don't want to find out something that would change that." Growing up, Ms. Page thought sports was going to be her calling. Through her early high-school years in Midland, she ran track (the 400-meter sprint and the 800- and 1,600-meter relays) and started on the basketball and volleyball teams. "I was not the regular girl who played with dolls," she says. "I was ready to go out and play with boys and ride bikes and do anything athletically inclined." Then the acting bug struck. Always a lover of the arts, Ms. Page started acting in school plays when she was 13. She became interested in performing after her election as ninth-grade student council president led to a gig reading the morning announcements over closed--circuit TV. At about the same time, she began modeling and later appeared in commercials, industrial films and plays. Her first big break came in 1994, when she was cast in the Jenny Garth TV movie Without Consent. She played the bad-girl leader in a psychiatric ward for drug and alcohol abusers. Then, when the producers of Second Noah decided to replace three members of the cast, Ms. Page got an audition and landed the job. Her character, played by another actress, first appears in the pilot when Jesse Beckett finds Roxanna and her little brother, Luis (Jeffrey Licon), alone at Busch Gardens. Abandoned by their mother, they are living in a car. The sixth episode, called The Good Samaritan and directed by dance choreographer Kenny Ortega, revolves around Ms. Page's character, who is asked to the prom by a hunky jock. It turns out he is just using her to make his ex-girlfriend jealous. But her brother Ricky (James Marsden) comes to the rescue, jumping off the stage where his band is performing and dancing with her. "It ends up being the best night of my life," Ms. Page says. And there wasn't a lion cub in sight |
