"Can't your driver move that car?" moans 17-year-old Allison Smith.  The CBS limousine shines conspicuously at the curb in front of her mother's small suburban New Jersey home.  It is an all-too-visible reminder of the glamorous world of show business that she tries to ignore.  Allison plays preppy Jennie Lowell in the hit CBS series Kate & Allie.  Her on-screen companion and off-screen friend Ari Meyers, also 17, who portrays the hipper Emma McArdle, daughter of Kate.  These are rising stars with two bright futures and one dark conflict: a love of acting that is at odds with the notoriety of being an actress.  It is why Allison complains about the limo in front of her home that brought a CBS executive and a guest.  And why Ari will never talk about her career with her high-school friends. 

Their hope is to be considered regular high-school girls who just happen to work in television.  The glittering reality is that they have major roles in a bona fide network hit.  "I don't enjoy being in the spotlight," murmurs Ari.  "That's one of the downfalls of acting.  I ... I ... I hate it."  When she got the role of Emma, she didn't even share her joy with her friends because she was afraid of being treated differently by them.  Same with Allison.  Her schoolmates didn't know she had the part until she had missed classes for a month.  "I feel if my friends hear me talking about my work, they'll think I'm special and that's what I'm afraid of," says Allison. 

The distaste for celebrity has a positive side effect.  They are unaffected by all the attention lavished on them.  They are not young stars with childish egos run amok.  "They're incredibly talented and just plain terrific kids," gushes Jane Curtin, who plays Jennie's mother, Allie.  "I can't say enough about these girls," says co-gusher and co-star Susan Saint James (Kate).  "They're one of the joys of working on this show."  If they have any problems, it may very well be that both of them have had lifelong patterns of overachievement that may have robbed them of some of the pleasures of childhood adolescence.  Take Allison.  In kindergarten, she already knew how to read and add.  At 7,, she skipped a grade because she was so bright. 

At 9, she landed a role in the chorus of the Broadway play "Evita."  While working in "Evita," she had an audition for the title role in the musical "Annie."  She was given a script and three days to prepare for her tryout.  She mistakenly thought she had to memorize the entire part of Annie instead of just familiarizing herself with a few pages.  So, in the privacy of a bathroom stall during the evening performances of "Evita," when she wasn't on stage, she managed to learn all of her lines.  She got the part, succeeding Sarah Jessica Parker, and became the girl who had the Broadway role for the longest period of time.  But her life was thrown upside down.  She'd go to school all day in New Jersey and then at 6 P.M., she'd be driven to Manhattan where she'd become a star for a few hours, dazzling theatergoers night after night.  Then she'd wipe off the greasepaint, ride back to New Jersey and try to resume her other life as Allison Smith, schoolgirl.  Allison denies that she works hard. 

"I'm definitely an underachiever," she says one October day, sitting on the floor of her mother's living room.  "She's an overachiever," corrects her 20-year-old sister Karen, a part-time college student.  "Overachiever," her mother Jo-Ann, agrees.  "Well," says Allison, "I thought I was an overachiever until I met Ari.  She's always studying.  She studies on the set.  It's just sick"  Ari indeed seems driven.  her mother, Taro, says that Ari began talking when she was 5 months old.  As a child she dictated to Taro her first play, "The Super Magic Show," for her nursery school.  She wrote the script and the songs, directed the actors, choreographed the dancing and designed the costumes.  She was all of 4 years old.  A year later, she took up a modeling career.  One day she said she preferred to play after school instead of going to auditions.  Taro said fine.  She didn't go back to work again until she was 11.  But, like Allison, Ari never let her schoolwork suffer, and was always an A student. 

Now, almost every Saturday and Sunday, Ari heads over to the public library where she can study in peace and quiet.  Her senior-year courses have swamped her.  She's loaded down with physics, calculus, British poetry, economics, political science, and advanced French.  During the week, she crams in still more studying between her hours on the set and her 7 A.M. aerobics courses.  "Everyone tells me I'm an overachiever," says Ari.  "I think I am.  I can never do less than my best."  But it's more than overachievement that Ari and Allison have in common.  Another similarity is that both of them, like their characters, come from broken families.  Ari, an only child, lives with her divorced mother in a Manhattan apartment.  Allison's mother has been separated from her husband for five years.  Allison, the youngest of six children, lives with her mother, sister Karen and 23-year-old brother Kevin, a police officer.  The girls do not compete with each other. 

That may be because they are such good friends.  When they are not working together they speak on the telephone at least once a day.  But there are significant differences between them.  Professionally, Allison was considered a more complete actress when she joined the cast.  "She came her a finished product," explains producer-director Bill Persky.  Ari had never done comedy and she wasn't a natural at it.  She's grown tremendously, though."  Another difference between them lies in their personalities.  Allison is more outgoing and gregarious than Ari.  When the two are together, she's apt to be the more dominating force, finishing Ari's sentences and speaking for the two of them.  "Allison is very girlish and very rah-rah," says Susan Saint James.  "She's a typical teen-ager.  Ari is much less social.  She's more sophisticated.  She reads all the fashion magazines.  She's a funkier dresser.  She knows all the people at all the nightclubs."  Part of that may come from her mother, a beautiful stage and television actress with a chorus girl's figure.  When Taro was working on Broadway, Ari often spent hours backstage while her mother rehearsed. 

On hand for Ari's TV GUIDE interview was her publicist, who represents another indication of the conflict in Ari's career.  Ari dislikes having PR person.  And she hates giving interviews.  But if being interviewed and employing a personal publicist are what it takes to succeed than she'll do it.  "Ari has tackled her career in a more professional manner than Allison."  says Susan Saint James.  "She's very businesslike."  Allison doesn't have a publicist.  But she likes giving interviews.  "i want people to know who I really am," she says.  "I'm scared people will think I'm only a show-biz kid who just goes to work and reads her lines.  I want people to know I wasn't forced into show business."  Her professional stage career almost never got off the ground because her mother didn't know how to drive and was worried about Allison's commute to Manhattan for appearances in "Evita."  And when Allison's father left five years ago, he wanted to pull her out of "Annie" and take her to Florida. 

One of the only hints of a show-business connection in the Smith household is Allison's bedroom, where her walls are dotted with photos of 16-year-old Brian Bloom of CBS's As the World Turns.  These pictures don't represent the empty yearnings of a teen-age fan.  The two have been dating ever since they met in 1983 while doing an ABC Weekend Special, "A Different Twist."  He lives about two hours away on Long island and they have a long-distance romance.  Their families often shuttle them by car back and forth for their weekend dates.  When she's graduated from high school this spring, she'll remain close to Brian, who is a year younger than Allison.  Her plan is to attend a new York-area college so that she can continue to work on the show and pursue a further show-business career.