This proved to be one of those times. I threw caution to the frostbitten Chicago wind and dared fate to take me on. By the end of the night I had called my landlord, canceled my lease, and purchased my plane ticket to California. I was throwing myself into this decision and not looking back. California or bust.

Jack grins at his wife and snickers. “California or bust, eh? That’s so Hollywood of you.”

Grace thwaps him on the arm as she rises from the sofa to pour more iced tea for Jack and me. “I have my fair share of melodramatic moments.”

“So you just left?” I am impressed with her moxie and tell her so.

She waves it off, and I fear more God talk. “Just one of those instances in life where—well, haven’t you ever done something out of character and amazed yourself, only to find later it was one of the most life-changing decisions you’d ever made?”

I have to admit I had. My whole career is based on such a decision. “From Bedford, Virginia, to Los Angeles, California” I confessed. “I’d never been out of the county before that move.”

“Aha! Then you know what I mean,” she says with a triumphant gleam in her eye. “And now look where you are.”

Look where I am, indeed. “And you, Jack?” I ask, trying to shift the focus from myself. I’m not used to having the interviewer-interviewee roles reversed. “Any out-of-character decisions that changed your life?”

He laughs. “One or two here or there,” he grins. “Although my journey out here was just a matter of time, and everyone knew it. Reily, Vermont, is hardly the home of theatre and film.”

JACK

HOPPING A PLANE and landing in a city I’d never seen was nothing compared to what happened a year later. I don’t think I’d ever been so nervous.

I’d never been to a real audition before. I’d auditioned in the past, sure, but that was small stuff, school plays or community theatre. Not real acting. This was a real audition. With a real casting agent. For a real television show. And I had absolutely no idea what to expect.

I knew others who had gone through auditions before, and what they described didn’t sound too awful, and I’d been accepted for every part I’d auditioned for in the past year (granted none of it was professional), so I was going in with a lot of confidence. But once I got to that fourteenth-floor office and saw how many other people there were, and how much more, I don’t know, handsome? professional? experienced? they looked, every shred of confidence I had went out the plate-glass window.