I Don't Know What You Know Me From: Confessions of a Co-Star by Judy Greer Page A

was not visible at night. Thank
God
. I had just about as much as I could handle during the day. People, if you find yourself going to L.A. anytime soon, please just buy a postcard photo of the sign. I am not saying to not drive up there and see it, sure, do that. Get a coffee at the café, or even better, go horseback riding at Sunset Ranch and take a million photos of it from the trail on your horsey ride, but please, I beg you, do not exit your vehicle and stand directly in the middle of a road and take a picture. If you ignore this warning, I promise you will hear obscenities being screamed at you from the swerving cars.
    However, none of these screaming people will be me. No, Ihave since moved on. I now have a less interactive view of the sign. I can still see it from my front yard, but I no longer fear committing homicide every time I drive home. When I was finally looking to buy a place, I saw so many different houses in so many different neighborhoods. I wanted to get away from the “sign.” I wanted to get away from the helicopters, cockroaches, and thieves. But in the end, like the crime family to Michael Corleone, it pulled me back in. My house was the only one I could find that I could afford. Call me superstitious, but maybe since I had made it this far staring at those famous white letters every day, I shouldn’t leave it behind just yet. I wonder if that iconic sign was somehow watching out for me as much as I was forced to watch out for its fans, and I realized I just wasn’t ready to leave “Hollywood” for good.
    I think it was once I bought my house that I really felt at home in Los Angeles. Moving to L.A. is really hard. I had an easy time getting work, but fitting in and making friends was another story. I wanted a home, but I didn’t have a lot of faith in Hollywood. I didn’t want to get hurt and have an awkward breakup with it. I wanted it to be a clean split if it happened. And to me, a clean split meant not settling in. But time passed, and not settling in started to mean I wasn’t committing completely to my work and my life here, and I was ready to commit. Besides, at a certain point I had no other skills and nowhere else to go. When I told people I couldn’t get another job besides acting, that I wasn’t qualified for anything else, they’d often say, “Oh, please, if you can use Excel, you can get a job.” This proves my point because I didn’t (and don’t) know how to use Excel. I had no friends left in Chicago or Detroit, and I couldn’t use this famous Excel people spoke so highly of, so I reluctantly found myself at home in L.A.
    When I look back at my first five years in Los Angeles, I don’tthink it was the places I lived and their unique disabilities that kept me from feeling at home—I think it was that fear. I was afraid of failing. I was afraid this town would eat me up, but while I was fighting it and not paying attention, I was planting roots. Time goes by fast in Southern California. I blame the weather. It’s pretty much always warm and sunny, and the seasons are so mild you blink and it’s been five years, blink again and it’s ten. It’s hard to track time here, because it doesn’t change much. Leaves stay green and they stay put, and by accident I did too.



Judy Greer Is My Name. Well, Now It Is.
    WHEN I LANDED MY FIRST PROFESSIONAL ACTING job and had to join SAG, the actors’ union, my given name was Judy Evans. My full legal name is and always has been Judith Therese Evans. For some reason, the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) insists my middle name is Laura—but it is wrong and, it turns out, impossible to bargain with. At the time I joined the union, you could only have one name per member, and there was already a Judi Evans; she was on my awesome babysitter Shirley’s soap,
Days of Our Lives
, which made it my soap, too. Judi Evans played Adrienne Kiriakis, a real pillar of the
Days
community, and in the early days of my career (and life) I didn’t