Til Death Do Us Part

Chapter 1

I guess my story is pretty typical of many a failed young actress.

I came out to L.A. on a Greyhound bus when I was eighteen with stars in my eyes and a dream in my heart, convinced I was going to be the next Demi Moore or Sharon Stone (yeah, it was the early 90's).

Needless to say, things didn't work out that way.

I won't get into my life back home in Mississippi in too much detail. It sucked. My parents were strict, humorless, anti-intellectual working-class Southern Baptist fundamentalists of the fire-and-brimstone variety (is there any other kind?). They didn't want me to go out West. They wanted me and my sister (the lucky one who escaped to college and actually made something of herself) to become nuns and join a convent. Fuck that shit. I took off the day I turned eighteen and never looked back.

I got a job as a waitress at one of those retro 50's diners that were so popular on the West Coast back in the late 80's and early 90's, enrolled in some acting classes, and rented a crappy apartment not much bigger than a walk-in closet (all I could afford) in a pretty seedy part of town where all the liquor stores had steel bars on the windows and all the buildings had gang graffiti on them. The apartment building where I lived wasn't much better --- the kind of dump that always had used syringes littering the hallways from the junkies and you always watched your back coming and going in case someone followed you and tried to jump you. One of my neighbors got busted in a police raid. Turned out he'd been running a crack den in his apartment. It was a pretty scary place. I guess it's kind of miraculous I never got mugged. Or raped. Or killed.

I guess I was a pretty naïve kid. I was convinced I would just stroll into the big studios, show them what I was made of, they'd offer me a juicy contract and before I knew it I'd be up on the big screen playing Tom Cruise's leading lady.

Yeah, looking back, I was pretty stupid. But what else can you except from a dumb Southern girl with a tenth-grade education living in the Big City for the first time in her life?

I found out the hard way that unless you have representation, the studios won't give you the time of day, much less schedule you an appointment. Same with all the auditions and casting calls I went to.

I decided if I was ever going to stand a chance of getting any further than the reception area before security sent me away I needed to find an agent.

Easier said than done. Most of them turned me down flat because I didn't have a SAG card. Hell, I didn't even know what a SAG card was.

I finally met Bill, a down-on-his-luck, third-rate Hollywood agent who looked more like a sleazy used car salesman (baggy cheap suit, a tie that would have been considered loud in the 70's, the world's most obvious toupee).

I met him at his "agency" which was housed in a cheap office building downtown. Bill's office was dimly lit, sparsely furnished, and smelled of cigar smoke. I sat in front of his messy desk on a folding metal chair under the fly-specked light fixtures and pretty much begged him to give me a chance.

He agreed to represent me. Maybe it was because he only had two other clients and needed to pay his rent. Or maybe he really saw some promise in me. Or, more likely, it was the short skirt and low-cut blouse I was wearing. I'll confess, I was pretty good-looking when I was younger and quite stacked. And, I'm ashamed to admit, I did use that to my advantage.

I filled out some paperwork and Bill told me he'd be in touch if he landed any work for me.

A month later I got a call from Bill telling me a TV producer wanted to see me about a new show he was casting. I was thrilled.

I met the producer, Cliff, a tall, thin guy in his thirties with a ponytail, wearing a Eurotrash designer suit, at his office and he explained the premise of the show and the character he was looking to cast. Then he got down to business and told me that he had six other actresses in line for the role and he needed me to show him what made me stand out from "the rest of the herd," to display "what an exceptional talent" I could be.