TV's favorite waitress on tipping, spitting and the burden of doing your own laundry Some Hollywood soothsayers predicted that Christina Applegate's career would live and die with the role of teen sexpot Kelly Bundy on the long-running Married With Children. With her NBC hit sitcom Jesse, Applegate has proved her critics wrong. After Married With Children ended an 11-year run, Applegate stepped away from television for a few years, reemerging in such studio films as Mafia!, Wild Bill with Jeff Bridges and Tim Burton's Mars Attacks! Applegate also appeared in the independent productions Nowhere, The Big Hit and Claudine's Return, in which she returned to her sexpot image.

Despite her varied movie roles, the Hollywood native realized she missed television. Applegate and her producer-manager of 20 years, Tami Lynn, joined forces with the successful production team behind Friends and Veronica's Closet and came up with the most watched new show on NBC, Jesse, which Applegate co-produces. Although Married With Children plays worldwide in reruns, Kelly Bundy is dead. Jesse Warner lives. And that's the way Applegate wants it.

Robert Crane caught up with Applegate on the Jesse set.

"Entering Applegate's dressing room is like walking into an ashram--incense burning, aromatic candles lit, music playing and Christina sitting on the floor, Robeks juice in hand. It took a nanosecond to adjust to the fact that, damn it, Applegate is not Kelly Bundy. Her first words to me were to ask if she could smoke. Of course she could. Everything else in the room was smoking."

Q1 Playboy: On Jesse you play a waitress. What is the proper way to treat the waitstaff?

Christina Applegate: Don't say, "Hey." Don't scream across the restaurant, "Can I have the check, please?" Don't raise your finger in the air to summon them. They don't like that. Do listen to them when they recite the specials, because they've been practicing that all day. Poor kids. I've never understood how pubic hair can get into your food. How does that happen? Where does it come from? I don't want to know.

Q2 Playboy: What are the unforgivable sins committed by a waitperson?

Applegate: Spitting in the food. Let me tell you something that happened. My loved one and I went to a drive-in restaurant, and I had finished my drink and he had his sitting there. There was some left in his, and I went to drink some through the straw. It was really thick, and I then realized that he had hocked a load of spit in there. Having had a big gulp of it once, I know it's not delicious.