When I was in sixth grade, I wrote a letter to Wendy, The Snapple Lady, asking if I could accompany her on "Take Your Daughter To Work Day." All of my classmates laughed at me, because at the time she had been receiving thousands of letters a week. About a month later, however, a limo pulled into my driveway and out stepped Wendy, along with a camera crew and five cases of Kiwi Strawberry Cocktail. That story pretty much explains my life thus far.
I grew up in a tiny suburb just north of Manhattan, as the youngest of four kids in a tight-knit family. Since my parents didn't want us paying off student loans until we were 40, we started working in showbiz. My first audition was for the soap opera As The World Turns and I was cast to play Meg Ryan's daughter. I ended up being on the show until I was about seven or eight and it was a total blast. Then one day I came home from school and told my mom that my art teacher only liked me because I was on TV. Almost immediately, she picked up the phone, called my agent, and I was forced into early retirement.
A couple of years later, I wrote a letter to the New York Times Magazine in response to their cover story on female athletes. I didn't really think anything of it until I was in the bathroom one day and my mom started banging on the door, yelling, "Colleen, why is the editor of the New York Times on the phone for you?!" I guess they wanted to make sure that I was really twelve years old.
During high school, I played on the soccer team and was class secretary, but my focus centered around entertaining my classmates. To this day, people still refer to my sophomore year Spanish class as The Colleen Broomall Show. After graduation, I headed off to the University of Delaware, where I majored in Communications and discovered my passion for journalism.
In 2006, I moved out to Hollywood to work as an editor at Tiger Beat magazine. Going through the mail was both the best and worst part of my job. There was one woman who thought David Caruso was her husband and we'd get letters from her every day, which, of course I still have. But there were also the occasional letters from prison, asking for shirtless posters of Aaron Carter.
It was a pretty entertaining job to say the least, but after more than five years in the tween world, I decided to make a change, Michael Jackson, "Man in the Mirror" style. I moved back home and re-entered the on-camera side of showbiz. When I told people I wanted to start acting again, they would laugh and look at me like I was crazy. I mean, I didn't even make the high school play. But their laughter stopped after I booked a role in a feature film starring Sam Rockwell, which premiered at Sundance last January and was subsequently purchased by Lionsgate to be released in theaters in 2010. See? I told you it all goes back to the Snapple story...