فصل 01

1

If you’d asked me back at the beginning of my career to guess which character I was most likely to return to, fifteen years after I’d played her for the first time, there would have been only one answer. Even back then I knew, from the very first time I read the script, that I had been given the opportunity to play someone very special. In fact, if you’d asked me to bet money on this guess, I would have bet every one of my pennies. Because even though I’ve been lucky enough to play many memorable ladies, and have true and deep affection for each and every person I’ve ever pretended to be, there’s really only one with whom I have the most special kind of connection. In acting, as in life, you try to pretend you don’t have favorites, but usually you do, and usually everyone else can see it too. I wrote this book because, luckily for me, my favorite was also a character beloved by fans and, in my opinion, represents the time I felt I was at my absolute best as an actor.

I think we can all agree I was never better, and the audience was never more impressed, than when I got the chance to inhabit this popular character:

The critics called me—well, I’m not sure we had a theater critic at Langley High School in the late 1980s. But I think it’s undisputed that my performance as Dolly Gallagher Levi in Hello, Dolly! was indeed adored by fans, or, as I like to call them, my grandmother. I believe I’m quoting her verbatim, in fact, when I tell you she raved that my Dolly had “an impressive number of costume changes.” And, not to brag, but my father also deemed my performance: “Wow, that hat sure has a lot of feathers.” So I think I pretty much nailed everything there was to nail as an actress back in my junior year of high school. Which is why it’s baffling that no one has yet called to invite me to reprise that role on Broadway, or even at the obvious next best place, the Langley High School auditorium. In fact—and I don’t mean to sound like a diva here—I’m pretty upset about it. The People (my dad) DESERVE to see me again, years later, with (perhaps only slightly less) age makeup crayoned onto my face! Somebody get Ben Brantley on the phone! Watch your back, Carol Channing, I’m coming to get you!

But seriously.

I really wrote this book because getting to play fast-talking Lorelai Gilmore again made me reflect on what it had been like to play her the first time, and that made me reflect on how I even got there at all, and some of the ways my life had changed in between the first and second incarnations. So this book is about the past, and also the (almost) present, since I’ll share with you some of the diary I kept while filming Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life.

In this book, I will also see into the future and report my findings to you and to select heads of state. These findings will be lies, as I cannot actually see into the future, but who can stop me saying whatever I want here? It’s my audio book! I’m drunk with power!

This audio book is about growing up, starting out, and the time I was asked to audition with my butt. It’s about all the odd jobs I had on the way to pursuing my dream, some of the bad fashion choices I made, and the eleventy million diets I’ve tried. I’ll tell you how I learned to be a more efficient writer, how I discovered that I’m a terrible judge, and how I realized that meeting guys at awards shows was perhaps not the best way to start a successful relationship.

I wondered what it would be like to put someone I loved so much down for eight years and then pick her up again. I wondered if rebooting Gilmore Girls could be as gratifying as doing the series was the first time, if the show would feel as fresh and quirky and smart and speedy as it had been, if returning to Stars Hollow after all those years would be as wonderful as I’d dreamed it would be.

Spoiler alert: it was.