Read I Don't Know What You Know Me From: Confessions of a Co-Star for Free Online

time.”
    “Just let me figure that out. Start working on a monologue. We’re going to Chicago on Friday night.”
    Mollie Evans can be really intense when she needs to be, she rarely takes no for an answer, and, miraculously, in a world before the Internet and e-mail, she managed to get me applied and registered for the auditions that weekend at the Theatre School at DePaul University (thank you, magical fax machines). I did some weird monologue from a Jean-Claude van Itallie play called “The Serpent,” and when I finished, Ric Murphy, my future first-year acting teacher, asked if I had another monologue, something a little more mainstream. I didn’t. But I lied and made one up off the top of my head from
To Kill a Mockingbird
. What did I care? I wasn’t even going to go to this school anyway, but my competitive spirit kicked in again, and I
was
going to at least get accepted to this program, whether I went there or not. I was going to get a letter of acceptance in my mailbox no matter what and immediately show it to Marci.
    And guess what? I did!
I
was one of 10 percent of the kids who auditioned that year to make it in. But now I had to deal with the question of whether I would go or not. It was Chicago, it was acting, I would get a bachelor’s degree, which seemed to be really important to my parents after all the money they were about to spend, and I had a girlfriend there, Amy, who was a year older and studying smart-people things, so, built-in friend. The only snag was Marci. She got in too, and if she went there, it would ruin my total-reinvention plan, where I got to leave behind the old Judy and start fresh where no one knew me, so I waited to find out what she was going to do. She had auditioned for a few differentschools—I didn’t. I applied to two crappy backups but wasn’t as excited about anything else now that Chicago was a real possibility. Thankfully, Marci got accepted to a musical theater program that she liked better than the plain old acting one at DePaul, so she went there. I accepted my acceptance and got ready to learn how to act.
    The Theatre School at DePaul University is a four-year conservatory program that focuses on acting entirely. You take a few academic classes, but they are kind of designed for us to pass, like the ones athletes take. And then you act. You act all day and all night basically. You take your acting classes during the day, and at night you are either on the crew of a play or in a play. It’s really time-consuming, and I had no idea what I was getting myself into when I started. I remember thinking that I would probably transfer after my first year because I wasn’t going to be an actress and I was getting no real education, but it was fun. And it was such a small program. There were only a hundred students in our first year, divided into four classes, and after both first year and second you had to be invited back. They cut our class in half after the first year and then in half again after the second. If you were in danger of not getting invited back, you were put on warning. Your main acting teacher would take you into his or her office and tell you you were being warned. They would tell you why and what you had to do in order to be invited back. Once you made it to your third year, you were home free and didn’t have to worry anymore. I was on warning both years. I was told I had to work on my voice. The quality and the accent. I had a very distinctive midwestern accent. In the Midwest we have a specific way of speaking, it’s nasally, and I often ended my sentences with an up glide? So everything sounded like a question? When I was talking? And I guess that annoyed the faculty? So they told me to stop? Or I would get kicked out of school? Yeah. I guess they were right. It’sas annoying to write as it is to listen to. As for my vocal quality, I think in order to be onstage and be heard, you really have to project from your belly and not sound as if you’re