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mediocre actor, but let me tell you, I had to claw my way to mediocrity, and I think that should count for something. I was only eighteen years old when I announced to my mother that I was leaving Rochester to study at the Village School of Acting, and suffice it to say, she freaked out a bit over it. Two days before I was to leave, I was ambushed intervention style in my living room by my mother, my brother Zachary, and a postcard from my father, on which he had written, “I agree with your mother. Go to college.”
    After hours of screaming and crying and begging (my brother, Zach), and gnawing nervously on lemon bars (my mother), and mentally shoplifting (me), the three of us struck a bargain. I was granted five years to make my dream of becoming an actress a reality and in exchange I agreed not to touch the money that Aunt Betty had left me for college. If after five years I was not a working actress, then I promised to go back to college with Aunt Betty’s money and get a degree so I could get a real job and be just as miserable as everybody else.
    And so I spent the ages of eighteen to twenty-three dedicated to perfecting my craft, arming myself to be a triple threat. Technically, a triple threat referred to someone who was an actor/singer/dancer, but since I wasn’t really adept at singing or dancing, I decided I’d throw in everything under the sun, hoping that knowing how to do a hundred-plus extracurricular activities in a mediocre manner would at least qualify me—if not as a triple threat—at least a threat in general.
    So I took movement lessons, tap dancing lessons, oboe lessons, improvisation for the serious actor, sautéing with a wok, acting for the camera, stage presence, Shakespeare, and even speech classes where I learned at least a hundred tongue twisters to improve my diction. (I am the very model of a major modern general.) I was a rollerblading, sewing, stir-frying ball of fire.
    After three years completing my studies (although a true actor never really completes her studies), I leaped out into the world of New York auditions with my head held high (a brief stint at finishing school helped me accomplish this), and I directed every ounce of energy I had to landing a paying acting job. But with the exception of a couple of plays (no pay), offbeat commercials (paid in product; I still have a drawer full of vaginal cream), training videos (free footage of me in a hard hat), and student films (I got to play this really drunk girl who made out with a really drunk guy in his stinky dorm room), I wasn’t exactly a working actress.
    My only steady paying job had been one summer on tour with a murder mystery dinner theatre where my only line was “I’m hungry.” (I’d like to think that my delivery of this line, no matter how short, was a show stealer. “I’m hungry” can have many layers of meaning: think of everything one hungers for—fame, beauty, sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll, along with the occasional Kit Kat bar—and you’ll get my drift.)
    But that was it, and suddenly my five years were over. So, as promised, at the age of twenty-three I enrolled as a freshman student at NYU. In an effort to please my family I didn’t even take a single acting class. I lasted through three years and three different majors, and I may have eventually gotten it together, graduated, and become another human resources manager in a stuffy office who drank gin on her lunch hour and reminisced about her days as an actress if it hadn’t been for one memorable night where everything imploded. And as much as I hated thinking about that night, it was a wake-up call, I answered it, and I was out of there. To hell with my promise, I still longed to be an actress.
    But I’m still not exactly thriving. In fact, I’ve spent the last three years waitressing, handing out hot dog flyers dressed as—can you guess?—and temping. I was