Two years ago, I graduated from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, after four years studying acting at Playwrights Horizons Theater School and Stonestreet Film & T.V. Studio. I graduated along with several hundred other young, excited actors, who were ready to hit the streets of New York City and take the world of theatre by storm.

And what was I doing? I was moving to Baltimore, MD, a town which I had only visited twice, to begin a Psy.D. program in Clinical Psychology. I had added Psychology as a second major my sophomore year, and after four years filled with many esoteric physical acting exercises designed to get me to express myself in yelps and jerky body movements, and plenty of postmodern, experimental theatre arts courses, I had developed a crippling fear of performance, and a major case of burnout. I was disgusted with the types of performance that had been promoted to me as a student (crucifying yourself to a Volkswagen Beetle does not earn you my respect), and longed to do work that actually helped people, and in which my bent toward thought was seen as an asset, not a liability.

So, I started as a doctoral student. However, after one semester, I realized that many of the culture clashes that had bothered me in the postmodern theatre had counterparts in modern clinical psychology, and that I didn't love it enough to work through them. In order to pass the time while I figured out what I wanted to do with my life, I took an administrative internship with the Baltimore Theatre Alliance, a collection of about 75 theatres and about 300 theatre professionals in the greater Baltimore area, which has the mission of promoting Baltimore theatre and supporting its creators. I realized that I loved helping theatrical folk.

Even better, I got back on stage. This time, it was good old-fashioned fun - Bye Bye Birdie with a local community theatre. The constant support from this loving and unpretentious group of people helped me overcome the constant inner critic I had developed in drama school, and made me remember why I had enjoyed acting in the first place. Somehow, as I danced crazily in front of an audience and screamed for Conrad Birdie at the top of my lungs, the fun returned!

I kept auditioning, and within a year, had performed in 6 plays, including work for a touring children's theatre company, and broken into local film. Last year, I made half my income from acting and other work in the theatre. I signed with my first agent, and am happier than I knew I could be when I graduated two years ago.

I went up to New York a couple months ago to meet up with one of my fellow drama students. She's been successful in her dream, winning entry into the Actors Studio Drama School at Pace University, from which she'll graduate in the spring. She also recently booked a lucrative print job, which will keep her bills paid for several months. She told me that she knew of only one or two of our classmates who, two years later, were still acting regularly. A handful more were doing occasional off-off-Broadway plays, and were miserable that they weren't performing near as regularly or at the level they had dreamed. "But you're doing it in Baltimore," she said. "You're living the actor's life."

What's the moral of this story? You don't have to be in New York or L.A. to live the life of a working actor. You can make it happen wherever you are. Find local opportunities. Join your local theatre organization, and volunteer at local theatres. (I've gotten a significant portion of my work because my employers knew me as a reliable and friendly volunteer first.) Talk to other local actors, and find out what they're doing to work. Form an actors' group to read scenes, practice monologues, and keep each other accountable. Produce your own work!

Don't let geography stop you. Wherever you are, you can find two planks and a passion, and turn them into a career.