UNIVERSAL CITY – If Mary Alice Young sounds as if she knows
something you don't, it's because she does.

Among other things, Mary Alice knows why she committed suicide.

Mary Alice, of course, is one of the "Desperate Housewives," ABC's
Sunday night comic soap opera that is TV's phenomenon of the season.
She shot herself in the first episode, but remains a powerful
presence, a droll, philosophical, omniscient observer of the
adventures of her friends along flower-lined Wisteria Lane.

The flowers are fake, by the way. And so is Wisteria Lane, a row of
generic suburban bungalows on the Universal Studios back lot. ABC
threw a party there Sunday night, and the bus to Wisteria Lane wound
by Cabot Cove, where Jessica Fletcher solved all the local murders,
and zipped past several Old West towns and churches that were no
more than steeples and false fronts.

Peeking inside the doors of Wisteria Lane and making inquiries, one
learns that the outside of one house is the place where Mary Alice
once lived, while the interior is the home of the obsessive Bree
(Marcia Cross). Once upon a time, it was the home of Ward and June
Cleaver and the Beaver.

And Gabrielle's (Eva Longoria) house? The frat house in "Animal
House." Next door: the Munsters' gloomy mansion.

Whatever happens on Wisteria Lane, the voice of Mary Alice is never
far away. She's played by tall, long-haired, green-eyed Brenda
Strong, owner of her own yoga studio, and once known to fans
of "Seinfeld" as "the braless wonder."

Strong, who lately finds that people recognize her by her voice when
she's placing her order at Starbucks, got the job, said creator-
producer Marc Cherry, because that voice made him feel "comfy. It's
like a warm blanket just enveloped me."

Maybe so, but Strong's intonation also seems to say she knows more
than she's telling. She does.

Only seen on screen a few times so far, beginning with that opening
suicide sequence, Strong will get on camera more often in flashbacks
in future episodes.

"You'll see flashbacks from 15 years ago, and you'll see my entire
back story," Strong said in an interview following a press
conference with Cherry and the cast. "So Mary Alice is going to have
a long journey from 15 years forward."

Back when Mary Alice pulled the trigger, Strong didn't know why.
Cherry finally explained it to her at a cast Christmas party. She
wishes he hadn't. "It was much nicer when I didn't know, because
ignorance in some ways is bliss," she said. "It's a huge
responsibility knowing the inner weavings of the wives of Wisteria
Lane, as twisted as it is."

When she did learn the answer, Strong said, she was "very impressed.
I had no clue that that's where it was going. There were little
tidbits, but I didn't get the whole puzzle."

Her delivery, she admitted, carries "a sense of irony, of 'I wish I
could tell them what I know now.' So there's a little sardonic twist
to the voice. I definitely enjoy those lines. I find it wherever I
can."

She also admitted to "a little bit of a secret" in the quality of
her voice-over, "a little bit of an 'I'm withholding and I'll tell
you when I'm ready' kind of a thing. Mary Alice is the keeper of the
secrets in certain respects, and she will be the revealer of certain
intimate secrets as each episode progresses."

Strong said she was having a difficult time finding exactly the
right tone for Mary Alice's voice until director Michael Edelstein
told her to "'drop your voice down into your heart.' As soon as that
happened, the tone changed, the feel of it changed, the entire
resonance of my own experience of the words changed."

The change also allowed Strong to establish her emotional connection
to Mary Alice, "because she really loved these women, and if she had
it to do over again, she wouldn't have committed suicide. Now she
sees that everybody is struggling, and she could have lived through
this, it would have been OK."

So, why did Mary Alice commit suicide? She didn't say.