![]()
|
After my pageant career ended, I ventured to Chicago to pursue an acting career. I took classes, studied improvisation at Second City with the famed Don De Polo, waited tables, and lived in a great apartment on Oak Street overlooking the entire city! My first commercial was for TCBY Yogurt, and I earned my Screen Actor's Guild Eligibility by landing a role as a news reporter in the feature film, Chain Reaction. Armed with my SAG card, I then moved to sunny Los Angeles and I loved it! I did more commercials for Honda, Toyota, Acura, 7/11, JCPenny, Tropicana, Maytag, ABC and many more. I once did a commercial for a hair product called LUXE for the Japanese market and the star was NOT me....it was Penelope Cruz! She was tiny as a ballerina and as gorgeous as she looks in all her photos! Concurrently, I broke into Episodic Television and was lucky enough to work for shows like "24", "CSI", "Scrubs", "Dharma & Greg", " Reba", "What I like About You". I guest-starred on a short lived, funny sitcom named "The Trouble with Normal" with David Krumholtz (the guy from "Numb3rs"). Once did a play with Maxwell Caulfield who was the heart Throb from Grease 2. And imagine my surprise when I booked one of my first TV shows, "Sabrina the Teenage Witch", and the director was Anson Williams... Potsie on Happy Days...a sitcom I grew up watching! All the while, I studied acting with such great teachers as Howard Fine, Caryn West, Daryn Warren. My most treasured acting coach was Lesly Kahn. Her class began with an intensive education on treating your acting career as a business. I studied in her Professional Class for years. By next big adventure was moving to Arizona with my husband and becoming a mother. By far, my greatest accomplishment and biggest joy! I was honored to judge the Miss Iowa Pageant in 2006, and became re-involved empowering young women to compete showing all their colors, so to speak. You will never hear of me applying a one size fits all formula to contestants. I believe in first determining your own unique strengths, then building on those strengths, minimizing your weak areas, and cooperatively creating a strategy which addresses sending the "whole" person into competition for a win.
|
