When I exited my apartment building the following morning, freshly showered and shaved, I grinned in self-assurance. Although I’ve never been an overly superstitious actor like some of my colleagues, never worried about whistling in a dressing room, never fretted over someone wishing me “good luck” instead of “break a leg” before a performance, I couldn’t help viewing the weather as a favorable omen for my audition.
How could I not? When I’d first met Jillian Shinbark, then casting for the soap Tomorrow’s Edge, that day had opened with a deluge of Biblical proportions. I’ll never forget how lightning had forked through the heavens almost continuously, while thunder rattled the cement beneath my feet. Rain spat out of the western sky at a forty-five-degree angle, drenching pedestrians, out
