Pauley Perrette just started her ninth season as crime lab tech extraordinaire Abby Sciuto on NCIS, and while at CBS’s North Hollywood studios after a press event regarding the TV industry’s use of Twitter, she says she disliked the concept of online social networking until she found out how it could be used.

“This women and children’s shelter in Sylmar that is very close to my heart was closing,” says Perrette. “We knew [it would take] one million six [to keep it open]. Literally, we take people off the downtown streets of L.A. and put them in this beautiful place. We had got about one hundred women and seventy-five kids and about ninety elderly people there, and it was closing. I was freaking out. I talked to my pastor – ‘What do we do? What do we do?’ My friend from church [said], ‘You should start a Twitter account.’”

Perrette resisted at first, but then decided to try Tweeting. You know what? It’s really powerful. Through that, and then a couple other things that happened, we raised $2.5 million in forty-eight hours and saved the shelter. With that much more money, we moved a bunch more people into the shelter. Instead of the shelter closing, we were able to afford that.”

Perrette, who is wearing a NO H8 button, showing her support of gay marriage in California, gives another NO H8 button to a journalist who admires it and answers a few non-Twitter questions.

ASSIGNMENT X: This is your ninth year of playing Abby. What are some of the biggest changes that you think the character has gone through?

PAULEY PERRETTE: It’s interesting with Abby, because one of the things that I actually love is that they’ve kept her very consistent. Abby is such a complicated and complex character – her job is science. What she does is more dynamic, but I like the fact that they’ve kept her pretty consistent. She’s so good at her job, she’s the heart of the team. I always try to give her a bit of memory, just because such Jurassic things happen on NCIS all the time. Her co-workers and people that she’s loved, from Sasha Alexander [as Agent Caitlin Todd, whose character] was killed, to Lauren Holly’s Director [of NCIS] – those were [Abby’s] friends, and they all got shot, and everybody’s dead, and it always happens all the time. So I try to give her a sense of memory about that kind of stuff, so we don’t forget what’s happened. But instead of huge character change all the time, I think one thing that the fans love is that she has remained very true to herself.

AX: A lot of the NCIS characters are involved in multiple-season will-they/won’t-they romantic suspense …

PERRETTE: The biggest things I get asked all the time [are], are all the tattoos real, and then, what’s really in the Caf-Pow [giant cup of caffeine]? The other one is, when are Abby and McGee [Sean Murray] going to get together? Because they dated a long time ago in the past on the show. I think it was Season One, Season Two, it was a flirtation, and then we know that McGee stayed over at her house a couple times, but now they’re definitely really good friends and really good co-workers and a lot of respect for each other, but they’ve brought it up every single season, where the other one still gets jealous if the other one sees somebody of the opposite sex. So there’s always that.

AX: Is there anything you’re particularly looking forward to this season on NCIS?

PERRETTE: We’re definitely getting some Abby back story. They [the producers] even called me over the summer and told me, “This is definitely happening.” Whether it’s going to go the way I want it to or not, who knows? Because I’m obsessed with Abby, I think about her all the time, I’ll never be that lucky that it’ll go down the way I want it to go down.

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