Dear ‘ole LA.  Oh, how I used to love thee so.  I remember when I was a few months away from coming out to visit you for my first trip ever.  I was one of the so-called ‘lucky’ ones chosen for the enviable internship of all internships:  The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.  This was 10 years ago, when iPods were unheard of, and the term social networking meant nothing.  I was high on life, feeling empowered at the thought of working at one of television’s most storied franchises.  As a result, I went online to Amazon and purchased Randy Newman’s signature anthem, I Love LA.  I kid you not.  And I listened to it on repeat almost every day until I got there (which at that point, I figured it was probably uncool to listen to a song about LA when you’re actually in LA).  What I didn’t realize is that I was pretty uncool from the start.  It’s a great song, but everyday?  Oy. 

So, I loved LA before I even got to LA.  At least that’s what I convinced myself.  However, the reality of LA was not the glamorous, exciting LA that I had been singing about for the last three months.  It had a shallow, mean-spirited air about it, with a lot of idiots running around thinking they ran the city.  This mid-western girl, who was taught to treat everyone with respect, have enthusiasm for life, and work hard, was subject to an uncomfortable reality in which being an alcoholic meant you were normal, being a bitch was key, and not caring made you cool.  Where on earth did I go wrong?

Every promise that the internship coordinator at The Tonight Show made to me before I accepted was full of crap.  “You’ll get to be in Jay’s skits!”  “You’ll sit in on production meetings!”  “Everyone is so awesome, and you’ll get the best show ever on your resume!”  In other words, “Welcome to LA!  We’re going to tear you down, lie to you, and hope you become one of us.”

So three months later, ten pounds heavier, and a stress-case beyond belief, I marched back to the University of Arizona and into the internship director’s office.  I should have come with a warning label, because boy, was I ready to lose it.  “NEVER AGAIN let a student go to LA and intern for that damn show!”  Ironically, Jay was the nicest guy there, but boy, oh boy, his staff was another story altogether.  I think my internship director was afraid I was going to rocket out of the building, I had so much steam coming out of my ears.  “Who do they think they are?!  Do you know how many times they told me to sit in the closet because they didn’t want network execs to know how mistreated we were when they paid the offices a visit? Or how they actually told me to spend a day cleaning out the cereal containers in the kitchen and yelled at me when there was a trace of Golden Grahams mixed in with the Cheerios?!  I would have rather worked at McDonald’s all summer!!!” 

I Love LA?  I think not.

Amazingly, as tough as it was, I went back to LA five months later for another remote internship.  Thank god this one turned out not as bad, but it still exposed me to a way of life that I was not very comfortable with.  In other words, it was junior high and high school all over again.

I have been lucky in my eight years here.  It has not come without a lot of hard work, sweat and tears, but I have been fortunate too.  I’m no Brandon Tartikoff by any means, but I’m proud of the shows I’ve worked on, actors I’ve been fortunate enough to work with, and contributions I continue to make (well, hopefully, at least).  Maybe that’s why, when people see I haven’t been defeated, that I get the same question all the time: “What does it take to succeed in LA?”

1)  PATIENCE.  PATIENCE.  PATIENCE.  Learn it, preach it, say it over and over again at night until you fall asleep, because nothing will serve you better in this town than learning how to be patient.  For me, someone who was the ultimate-go-getter and as determined as Hillary Clinton was to win the Democratic nomination, it was an eye-opening lesson.  Nothing ever gets done quickly in this town.  EVER.  And then when something does happen, it will be the fastest thing you’ve ever seen.  But getting to that point?  It’s like riding It’s a Small World over and over again until you have nightmares of little Dutch children doing leg kicks. 

You will wait weeks to get an e-mail response from an agent, what seems like years to get a meeting, and often an endless number of reschedules before a coordinator can fit in time to see you.  And if that’s the case, consider yourself lucky that you even got a response at all.  No matter how many times I’ve gone through it myself, it never ceases to amaze me how anything ever gets done in this town.  I have an ongoing joke that it’s no wonder why the state of the US economy is in the toilet when no one gets anything done.  It is simply amazing.  The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien’s Andy Richter recently told The Los Angeles Times, “Now I’m so happy to be back and making TV every night, not asking permission from somebody and waiting six months to get their sparklingly clear and cogent notes. And then wait another month for them to get back from Hawaii and say yes, now we can go make television. I felt like a plumber who kept going into the building and saying, can we put some pipes together? And watching my wrenches gather dust.”

So if watching wrenches gather dust isn’t your thing, don’t expect LA to do it for you either.  It’s no wonder people use as much botox as they do here.  Because by the time someone gets around to wanting to use them for something, they are at least 10 years older anyway.

2)  NOT CARING.  I know, it’s kind of an oxymoron.  How are you supposed to hang in for the long haul if you’re not passionate about what you’re trying to do?  I get it, and all I can say is that I’ve been there before.  Whether it was a role I was dying to get, or the book that just had to be published, no one can ever accuse me of not caring.  In fact, I care too much.  I’m competitive, driven, and hearing the word ‘no’ only propels me further.  So how on earth did I come to not care? 

Well, it’s not that simple.  The fact is, I do care.  I care a lot.  I care about the projects I pitch, the performance I do, and the articles I submit.  I want to be successful, I want to be wealthy, and I want to be in demand.  It’s just that at this point, after you’ve gone through more career heartbreak than you think was ever possible, you learn to stop getting your hopes up—about anything. 

When I recently met with the HR department of a huge magazine publishing house, I was asked what is the biggest lesson I’ve learned in LA.  And my response?  “It’s a long journey in this town.  You can’t get excited about anything until your work has been published, the check clears, and you have proof of your work.”  She laughed and then got oddly serious when she said, ‘that is the most honest answer I’ve ever heard.  Thank you.’

Here’s the bottom line: never stop caring.  How many times have you heard the feel-good story about the guy who pleaded for someone to take a look at his manuscript, when everyone turned him down, telling him he would never make it and to give up his dreams?  Well, that guy turned out to be Sylvester Stallone, and that manuscript turned out to be Rocky.  Never stop caring about what you do.  It’s that passion that will take you from one side to the other.  But do stop caring about what people think, what they say, and why they say you can’t do it.  Stop giving everyone else (no matter what their authority is) the power to tell you that what you have is not good enough.  Because for every successful studio in Hollywood, there are plenty of god-awful films that they swore was the funniest thing ever that failed to do anything.   

3)  LUCK.  Yes, it is about hard work meeting preparation meeting luck, or some formula like that (I was never that good in math).  But more often than not, it’s about being in the right place at the right time, or meeting the right person at the right time.  I can think of many actors that were discovered on a street corner, and yet to this day, they have no talent.  It’s just the luck of the draw—a total crapshoot if you will.  And for someone like me who is, I hate to say it, a bit of a control freak, it’s the hardest thing to come to grips with.  I can’t even begin to count the number of times I wished I were my own agent because I knew I could do it better.  Or that I ran my own network because I knew I could put better quality shows on the air.  So having to sit back and let luck find me?  Jeez, no thank you. 

But as we all know (or hopefully you do at this point), there are things you can do to improve your luck.  Accept most invitations thrown your way. Take the time to be aware of your surroundings and ask for what you want.  Read as much as you can get your hands on.  Find out who the people in this town are that make the big decisions, and find a way to get in front of them.  As tempting as it is to play Wii all day, no one is ever going to discover you in your living room.  You have to get out there.  (Granted, if The Bachelor is on, I will be on my couch).  But still, get out there as much as you can. 

Now, that is not to say that that is going to work either.  Goodness knows if I had all the answers, I’d be writing this from the Four Seasons Resort in Bora Bora and not in my West Hollywood apartment, but you get the idea.  Which makes me think, I better wrap this up.  I need to leave and get discovered.  With some luck, of course.