I remember being unemployed and walking the East Village streets for many years, constantly checking my voice mail on pay phones, hoping for an audition.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I used to audition like crazy - I would go on a hundred before I got anything. It took me a long time to get any jobs at all. It was hard until I booked 'Galaxy Quest,' and then it started to get easier.
When I was a kid, I had ambitions for being a television announcer, which was before television took off, you know, in the late '40s. And just through necessity, going out looking for work, I was starting to sing, and dance, and act, and I never expected to do that, nor to have any success at it at least.
I happened to fall into a job that wound up being a seminal piece of television history, which was a show I did on HBO called 'The Wire.' That experience really set the bar for me and opened a lot of doors. It also gave me a lot of street cred in terms of my phone ringing and job offers.
I was auditioning a lot in L.A., and I was actually getting called back a lot for sitcoms. But I wasn't getting jobs. I even tested for 'Saturday Night Live' and didn't get that.
I came to New York and started doing stand-up and improv, and started auditioning for commercials and voiceovers and stuff. My first job was on a pilot of that prank show called 'Boiling Points' on MTV.
My first job was singing on the Cas Walker radio show in Knoxville, Tennessee. I was about 10 years old, and I thought it was big time.
I went through the process of auditioning like every other struggling actress in this town.
I never thought that I could make a living out of my voice, to be completely honest. I thought that I could probably keep playing pubs. And it was exciting for me to get even just a pub gig in my town or country, when I went to university.
I held down as many jobs as I could find, from being a waiter to working at a yoga studio and as a ticket-taker at a small theater company - anything that would allow me to go out and do auditions.
I quit the tax job then and decided that I was going to play in a band. I answered ads in the Village Voice and went through two days of auditioning for bands.