People: They’ve reached a happy medium

These days, the Arquette sisters are colleagues and contemporaries.

That took a while, though. First was the parental phase.

“They were my babies, you know,” Rosanna Arquette says of her brothers and sisters. “They were little kids.”

Back then, money was scarce, and Arquettes were plentiful.

“I think Rosanna did fall into that sort of trap of having to help with so many siblings,” Patricia Arquette says.

Rosanna is 48; Patricia turns 40 on Tuesday – the day after their first roles together, in tonight’s episode of the NBC series “Medium” (10 p.m., KHQ-6 in Spokane).

There are plenty of other Arquettes in their generation: Richmond, 44; Alexis, 38; and David, 36.

“I kind of baby-sat a lot,” Rosanna says.

After enduring some tough times, they turned out fine – depending on your definition.

“We all became narcissistic movie stars,” Rosanna jokes.

Or TV, in Patricia’s case. She stars in “Medium” as a crime-fighting psychic; Rosanna guests, suspected of seducing and killing younger men.

“It’s a testament to what a great actress she is,” Patricia says. “To see her as this sort of carnivorous, mercenary kind of dangerous person was so different for me.”

She thinks of her sister as the caregiver, when they were in a commune.

“It wasn’t that kind of free-drugs, free-sex commune that people often think of,” Patricia says. “It … was more about different ways of thinking about politics and religions.”

Their dad (Lewis Arquette, son of Cliff Arquette, who performed as Charlie Weaver) was an actor-musician who was often on the road. Rosanna did parental things, for a while.

“I left home early,” she says, “so I missed a lot. … As we got older, we became closer.”

Rosanna was making “Desperately Seeking Susan” when a teen Patricia visited, looking different.

She had “a punk haircut, like shaved head on one side,” Rosanna recalls.

It was a phase, Patricia says: “I was a punker, but I always was soft-spoken. Even when I had my Mohawk, instead of spiking it up, I would braid it back with ribbons.”

The phase included a time, in the ninth grade, when she left home and lived with Rosanna.

Still, Patricia says, her wild side has “always been tempered with a very old-fashioned notion of things, I guess.”

Today, she’s a wife and mother on TV and in real life. She’s sometimes the one who gathers the clan.

“Patricia does her big Easter time,” Rosanna says.

And she’s the one with the steady TV job, stopping evil – only this time, her sister is the one to stop.

The birthday bunch

Sitar player Ravi Shankar is 88. Actor James Garner is 80. Actor Wayne Rogers (“M*A*S*H”) is 75. Country singer Bobby Bare is 73. Director Francis Ford Coppola is 69. Television personality David Frost is 69. Singer John Oates (Hall and Oates) is 59. Singer Janis Ian is 57. Actor Jackie Chan is 54. Actor Russell Crowe is 44. Actor Bill Bellamy is 43. Actor Conner Rayburn (“According to Jim”) is 9.