Bio

When you sit down to write a bio of yourself in a professional context, ie: a website about you designed to promote you to people who will hopefully find you interesting enough to read it, I suppose the first thing you must consider is your audience.  My audience in this case is you, and so for the purpose of this exercise let us assume that I am a lot like you, only, for obvious reasons, completely different. 

Like you, I was born to other people, in my case those people being Dave and Judy Rosenak, and before me came Rachel and Adam.  All biblical references stop there.  We lived in a nice house in a suburb of Chicago.  Dad worked long hours and on weekends we would ride the horses, bike along Lake Michigan or go to the Brookfield Zoo.  There were no helmets, no seatbelts and no fighting unless you both wanted to lose the toy for the rest of the day.  Mom worked all day as a teacher, then came home and made a five-food-group meal, including dessert.

Dad liked expressions like “Up and at ‘em,” and “Rise and shine.”  He once brought home a llama named Tony he had won in a card game and last year he self-published a book called “Assholes,” which I lovingly refer to as his Communist manifesto (available at amazon.com!).  Among the notable ideas expressed therein: Congress should be reduced to one house and Israel should be moved to northwestern Utah.  (If you’re wondering where the “I’m just like you” part comes in, bear with me.)  

As should already have become evident, I became an actress.  Somebody once asked me why and I’ll be totally honest: I wanted to go to the Oscars and thank my parents.  Also it seemed like a great way to get out of school.  I was eight years old when the young lady told us they were offering acting classes at the most mellifluous-sounding establishment I had ever heard of: The Apple Tree Theatre.  Doesn’t that just sound like heaven?  And so I would become a very famous actor, just like Macaulay Caulkin!

I studied for 15 years—musical theater (to this day I remember all the words to “Corner of the Sky” and “Memories,” though I can’t sing a damn note of them); Shakespeare; movement; voice; scene study; a devastating portrayal of Puss in Puss N’ Boots at Harand Theater Camp; later Kabuki and Commedia in college at the University of Wisconsin- Madison.  Why Madison?  Because NYU cost too much.  A summer program at Steppenwolf Theatre, taught by real live company members (!); another at Boston University where I got to play Miss Rose White in A Shayna Maidel.

I graduated from UW, crossed the street to where the U-Haul was waiting, got in it and drove to Los Angeles.  I was going to be in the movies!  Or maybe on TV!   Or at the very least commercials for Kentucky Fried Chicken!  (This was four years before a greasy bucket of KFC chicken convinced me to stop eating meat for good.)  I studied at The Beverly Hills Playhouse, woke up at 6:00 am to mail dramatic pictures of myself to total strangers, and generally said “yes” to any offer that came along—student films, indies, student indies, indies about being a student—you name it.

I quit the Playhouse after two and half years when the (now late, often great, all-too-human) Milton Katselas finally drove me to the realization that hero worship and acting teaching do not, in fact, need to go hand-in-hand.  The student indies (the footage from which, by the way, I will not burden you with here) did not seem to open many doors and it started to feel like maybe Mick Jagger was right: you can’t always get what you want, or at least not when you thought you were going to get it.

So at 23 I wrote my first screenplay.  (“Writing is what you do when you are ready and acting is what you do when someone else is ready,” Steve Martin—a great autobiography, btw.)  I would go on to write six screenplays, half a novel (side note: never read a young person’s unpublished half-novel.  It’s like watching your parents have sex—ugly, weird, incestuous and obvious; a door you wish you’d never opened), and eventually a play about a woman throwing her best friend a bridal shower.  I spent 10 years on my biopic of Clara Bow, the tragic silent film star chewed up and spit out by Hollywood, and after 10 years, I think I’ve finally figured out what the hell that story is about.

I moved to New York a couple years ago because I figured every artist should live in New York at some point.   The plan was very clear: first learn the Subway system and the entire landscape of Central Park; second, join a small theater company; third, get discovered doing an original one-woman off-off-Broadway show about suburban angst and horses (two ever-popular theatrical themes) and become a smashing stage success.  In the meantime, start using words like “erudite” and “preternaturally” in conversation with people who went to schools like Brown and Carnegie Melon, look like Woody Allen and speak four languages.  Isn’t that a great plan?  I lasted 10 months.  What they don’t tell you is that poor in New York makes poor in Los Angeles look like a day at Disneyland.

I moved back to LA with a vague notion of going to film school at USC, to which all my filmmaker friends insisted, “If you want to make movies, grab a camera and make movies”—not bad advice.  And I have to say that things have fallen into place remarkably well ever since.  In short order, I got myself a dog, got a great job, met the love of my life and joined the Open Fist Theater Company, where I’ve appeared in two plays so far.  Also it looks like my play, The Wedding Shower, might debut there this summer. 

It’s a strange kind of Oz, Los Angeles—a city where even the palm trees are tourists, where people come with big ideas about making their lives transcend the quiet desperation of the human existence, and where sometimes you have to travel far and wide to realize that, like the Tin Man, what you really wanted was there all along.  “If you turned off the sprinklers, it would turn into a desert,” wrote Steve Martin (again, the sage of Hollywood) in L.A. Story.  “But I think it’s a place where they’ve taken a desert and turned it into their dreams.”