After getting my master's from Trinity University (through the graduate program at the Dallas Theater Center), I spent a while bouncing between New York and Mexico. In New York, I attended countless open calls, banged on a lot of agents’ doors and did a few Off-Off and way Off-Off Broadway shows. In Mexico, I did a few commercials and a lot of, mostly, unpaid singing. I finally wound up back in Texas for the Shakespeare Festival at the non-Equity Globe of the Great Southwest in Odessa, Texas, playing Olivia in Twelfth Night and Lady Macbeth.
During that summer, I was cast as Anne Hathaway in a short film on the life of Shakespeare. The makeup artist was Peggy Taylor, a long time Dallas agent, who offered to represent me if I was willing to relocate. Once I was there, she was able to get me into an Equity audition for No Hard Feelings, being produced on the then Country Dinner Playhouse circuit. Never mind that it was for the part of Richard Egan's 18-year-old pregnant daughter and I was over a decade too old, I let my (very long) hair down, put on a miniskirt, auditioned and got the job! From the sublime to the ridiculous, but it got me my card.
