When I was pre-teen, I auditioned for the Mickey Mouse Club. In the early 1990s, there was a casting call in Chicago for the Disney Channel’s updated version of the Mickey Mouse Club. I dragged two friends along with me, despite the fact that I had no discernible talent for singing or dancing. We were instructed to bring B-side cassette tape instrumentals so that we could show off our vocal skills. My choice? Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up.” Luckily, I was not called upon to sing. (Excellent decision, casting directors.)
Fame Adjacent
I’m a black belt in Tae Kwon Do and Hap Ki Do. Learning martial arts tricked me into exercising because I’m hopeless at aerobics or running on a treadmill.
My husband is a magician. My husband Joe performs close-up magic, stage magic, and mentalism as his full-time job. When we got married, I told him that if I was crazy enough to attempt a career as a novelist, there was no reason he shouldn’t pursue his passion too. His profession helped inspired my book Club Deception, about an underground magic club.
My sister and I used to record radio plays in our basement. Growing up in Illinois, my older sister and I wrote and performed serialized dramas, comedies, soap operas about cats, talk shows, and of course advertisements.
I can time travel (sort of). For ten years I worked as a script reader for a casting company, reading screenplays for projects that were in production. It felt like I lived six months in the future, because I knew what was going to happen on TV before anyone else.
I love 1940s hardboiled noir and musicals. These seem like opposite genres, but I adore them equally, from bleaker-than-bleak gumshoe detective stories to utterly sincere musical numbers that burst forth out of nowhere.
I’m terrible at recognizing celebrities in real life. I’ve been known to have entire blasé conversations with people about our kids and only later when my husband or a friend is gaping at me does it occur to me I was chatting away to a famous person.
I used to keep index cards detailing every episode of Cheers. I’d jot down the opening teaser, the main plot and subplot, and my favorite joke.
If Internet Rehab were real, I’d sign up in a heartbeat… My new romantic comedy Fame Adjacent is about the only cast member of a 1990s song-and-dance show for kids who didn’t become famous. As an adult, she winds up in Internet Rehab when she can’t stop Googling her former friends. As far as I know, no such treatment exists (…yet), but I think it would be relaxing to unplug.
…But I think social media has benefits, too. Despite my qualms about the Internet, I’m grateful for the friendships it’s brought into my life. I met one of my closest friends on Twitter, and now we’re co-authoring a book together.