For seven years after college, I was a waitress at the Buttercup Bakery in Berkeley, and from there I got a job at Merrill Lynch as an account executive, from where I went to vice president of investments for Prudential-Bache Securities. I started my own firm in 1987.
Coming home, we stopped for a bite to eat and ran into a confused waitress. Had a heart-rending time trying to speak the Words of Life to her, and as I think of all this country now, many just as confused, and more so, I realized that the 39th Street bus is as much a mission field as Africa ever was.
I wasn't the best waitress in the world, but I was cheerful and worked hard.
It's always humbling, knowing where we came from. From being friends with the janitor in the bar and being friends with the waitress - because they were some of the only people that were listening when we finished playing - to this, we are able to appreciate every single person and every single piece of it, because we came from nothing to this.
When I was young, I went to the Sinai and worked as a waitress.
I'm like every waitress in every diner; I'm like every mom driving her kids to school. I'm nothing special at all.
Barry Levinson saw me on a tape and put me in 'Rain Man' as the waitress who dropped the toothpicks. The scene was talked about a lot. Then, all of a sudden, I started to get more auditions.
There's a good family of actors in 'Portlandia.' It's a small community with people who pop up again and again. The show's a little weird show, and you want to grow with the people who are in it, like Dana who plays the chicken waitress, and Ellen who was the adult babysitter.
I don't have a lot of skills, but one thing I can do is, I can compartmentalize. I can make that a little world that I can go back to, so I can be a waitress, or I can be a teacher, and then go and work on my book.
I wanted to be a landscape architect, but I trained as a teacher; I worked in publishing; I was a waitress.
There will always be ways to pay my rent, whether I wind up having to be a waitress on the side or whatever it is, but I think it's so important for me to do things that I'm passionate about.
