In the Spring of 1990, during a break from my exciting career as a cruise ship entertainer, it was announced that Madonna was going to be auditioning dancers for her upcoming Blond Ambition world tour.   Myself and my friend and roommate at the time Scott Williams, who was also a dancer, decided, 'What the hell, the worst that could happen is that we would be rejected.'

So we went.   We saw.   We conquered the combination and were sent on our way.   But not before dancing in front of the lady herself and having a few laughs at the absurdity of it all.   The whole experience was so rich and surreal that I decided to write about it.   Though I hadn't written much before--a few school papers and short stories--I knew I had a story to tell and I was going to tell it.

I sat down at my Mac-Plus with the dot-matrix printer and wrote about my experience as a would-be boy toy to the Material Girl.   I felt good about the resulting story and decided I would try to get it published.   I sent query letters to every publication I could think of and got some lovely rejection letters from such magazines as Spin, Spy, Entertainment Weekly, Premiere and LA Weekly.

During my second round of queries, I got a call from Edward Margulies, the editor of one of my favorite magazines Movieline , saying if my story was as funny as my query letter, we might be in business. He liked my story and wanted to publish in the magazine for $300.   I was over the moon about it.   It's interesting looking back because I was quite forthright when it came to the editing.   He did a pass and sent it back to me and I remember going point by point over what I thought should be changed.   I was respectful about it, naturally, but still it seems a little brazen looking back.   I should have cashed the check and letting him do what they wanted, but Ed agreed with many of my suggestions.

The story came out in the Summer of 1990, while I was working on a ship in Europe.   When I returned home for my next two-month break, Ed gave me my first official magazine assignment.   I was going to be interviewing Mrs. Brady herself, Florence Henderson, about her slutty new role in the film Shakes the Clown .   Florence was a delight--very bawdy and irreverent what with the fart jokes and all--and Ed was pleased with my story.   More interviews followed and when I had a handful of stories under my belt, I sent my clips to other magazines.   Most took a pass but a couple, like British Premier --which is where my Screening Party series of articles began--took a chance on me.

Detour also responded and offered me the chance to pen some big, splashy celebrity profiles.   The catch was they didn't pay anything, not one dime, though they threw amazing parties.   I wrote for them for free for three years.   When they finally started paying their writers in 1995, I was able to convince them to give me my own fiction column.   So began my monthly column Misadventures in the (213) , which I turned into a book in 1998.

Edward Margulies of Movieline passed away a few years back.   I remember him telling me at one of the gossipy lunches we'd take together that giving me my start was something he was very proud of.   "I knew you were a writer before you did," he told me.   I'll always be grateful to him for responding to my unsolicited submission and proving that it's not always about who you know.   My 2002 book Screening Party is dedicated to him.

I had the opportunity to interview Madonna in 1995 for her Bedtime Stories album.   It was for a magazine called Singapore Cleo and I was part of a round table of maybe 15 journalists.   When my turn to talk, I told Madonna that I was a journalist because she rejected me as a dancer.   "Good for you," she said.   "You took a negative and turned it into a positive."