It was necessary to organize my career to remain at the top level until Salt Lake City.
I had an agent in Salt Lake City, but acting was more like a hobby.
I was the cocktail waitress, and Sandra Bullock was the host, and this guy came in and persuaded me to try improv with Gotham City Improv.
I'm a union guy; I've always been. I've been in SAG 35 years; my father was a garbage man, a sanitation man, for the city, a union guy.
From Calcutta has gone forth a living stream of knowledge in many branches of study. It is inspiring to think of the long succession of scholars, both Indian and European, who have lived in this city, made it their own, and given it of their best.
I was on the San Diego school board for 4 years, where I watched children successfully matriculate into elementary schools from Head Start programs from all around our city.
In 2012, the city of Austin erected an eight-foot-tall bronze statue of Willie Nelson in the heart of the business district. Schoolchildren, churchgoers, tourists, slackers, conventioneers, tech geeks - everybody, it seems - now congregate around this ponytailed shrine to outlaw country.
When I was 12, I used to ride my scooter two miles to a comics shop, which I can't imagine letting my kids do by themselves through the city.
I was not afraid of the press or the militants. It was uncomfortable, but I was not afraid. With respect to the press, I knew I knew more than they knew about city matters. With respect to the militants, I understood it. I mean, everybody believed in those days that they were being screwed, you know, that somebody was getting ahead of them.
If you say city to people, people have no problem thinking of the city as rife with problematic, screwed-up people, but if you say suburbs - and I'm not the first person to say this, it's been said over and over again in literature - there's a sense of normalcy.
To be able to bring an entire city together is not easy, and we definitely have one thing in common in the city - that's the Tigers. The history of the school is well-noted around town. It is an SEC kind of country with all the SEC schools, but Memphis trumps all of that in the city. I embrace that.
I came out of the old Second City in Chicago. Chicago actors are more hard-nosed. They're tough on themselves and their fellow actors. They're self-demanding.
I had, like, two goals in my career: One was to try to get into 'Second City.' When I moved to Chicago, my goal was to try to work at 'Second City.' And beyond that, my goal was to make enough money as an actor to not do anything else but act, not have to go and wait tables again.
I took Second City out of desperation, and that's what ended up working out. It shows that you should be doing a lot of different stuff, taking whatever opportunities are there, to see what works.
We did a year of Uber in San Francisco before we went to a second city. You get those processes down, then you really get started.
Well, actually, the Second City thing came about because I was taking a few improv classes there. I thought that the improv classes would help with my wrestling career, which it has.
I thought of Second City as just the greatest therapeutic job anybody could ever dream of having.
Tina Fey is part of a generation of women who have changed the face of comedy at 'Second City,' 'SNL,' in sitcoms and in film.
I took one class at Second City called Improv for Actors, and that was it, and that was only because my agent told me I had to.
When you get out of school, you just go where the wind blows: Here's an audition; there's an audition. And before you know it, you're where you're supposed to be. And that was Second City.
