By Erin Hanafy
The Associated Press

Sonia Manzano, who plays Maria on TV's Sesame Street, based her book, No Dogs Allowed!, on her childhood trips to the beach.

After more than 30 years playing Maria on PBS' Sesame Street, Sonia Manzano calls herself an invisible celebrity.

"I feel like I've touched people's lives in a subtle way," the actress says.

Sometimes that connection is surprisingly powerful.

"People cry a lot when I do speaking engagements," says Manzano, 54. "I think it's because seeing me, I'm the catalyst. And all of a sudden they're kids and they're sitting on their mother's laps watching TV."

With Sesame Street's original audience now caring for children of their own, Manzano's influence as Maria is broad. But Manzano is eager to step out of her character's shadow with a new children's book, No Dogs Allowed! (Atheneum).

Manzano, who also has been writing for Sesame Street since 1981, relishes the chance to branch out on her own - but she realizes she's venturing outside a safe haven.

"You go out and do an appearance with Elmo, you're going to be a big hit," she says with a laugh.

Manzano's experiences as a child growing up in New York City inspired the No Dogs story of a family who works up a sweat trying to escape the city to spend a day at the lake.

It's told through the eyes of a little girl, Iris, as she watches her family's caravan grow to include numerous relatives and friends, even the neighborhood grocer and a bunch of domino-playing elderly men who bring their gear to finish "a game they started one hundred years ago when they were young in Puerto Rico."

Meanwhile, the only thing Iris wants to bring is her dog, El Exigente, but it's the pup who presents the final obstacle in the quest for fresh air and cool water.

A sense of fun, good humor and lots of food - thanks to Iris' mother, Mami the Busy - help the group overcome the roadblocks thrown in their way. To prepare for the trip, Mami had made lunch, an after-lunch snack, dinner, an after-dinner snack, dessert and a little something for the road, "in case we got hungry."

"We really did do these ridiculously complicated trips to the beach, and my mother did take milk to boil to the beach," Manzano recalls. She often told friends about her family's derailed trips as "poor-me" tales of her upbringing in a Puerto Rican neighborhood in the Bronx.

"In my impatience to get out there I always thought, 'Why can't we be like the Americans and just bring a sandwich or something?' "

After listening to other people's reactions over the years, she began to see the stories differently.

"They'd say, 'Isn't it wonderful the things they did, and the lengths they went to, to take you out of the city?' "

Manzano keeps the book rooted in reality, something she learned writing scripts for Sesame Street. She doesn't believe that children want writers to create a fantasy world for them.

"There are beautiful things in the world that we live in," she says.

"When I thought about trying writing on Sesame Street, it was kind of an easy transition because you're acting in all the scripts and can kind of figure out how they do it. But it's wonderful to write without the responsibility that a Sesame Street script might have," she says.