Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #281378 in Books
• Published on: 2009-04-14
• Released on: 2009-04-14
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: .75" h x 5.50" w x 8.40" l, .42 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781596914780
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. This funny, bravura memoir describes life as a young actress, and all the "head-banging frustration, demoralizing options, and bewildering compromises" that come with it. Balbirer begins with her time as an undergrad at New York University, using just the right combination of humor, embarrassment and righteous indignation, with just a touch of name dropping: in David Mamet's course, for instance, the playwright's first lecture posited that "Bill Cosby was a whore." A star student, Balbirer was unprepared for the real world, where work is scarce even for the very talented; working the avant-garde circuit led her to become known in "certain fringe theater circles" as "the Chick Who's Willing to Show Her Tits in the Show If Need Be." Her adventures in television include a humiliating stint on MTV's first original program, traveling cross-country for a meeting with Lorne Michaels that never materializes, and a part on Seinfeld that gets whittled down to a one-liner. Other misadventures include demoralizing casting calls, conniving friends and a string of callous boyfriends. Turning her poor-little-L.A. girl material into a read this witty, reflective and charming takes real talent; if there's any justice, that talent will find the fame it deserves among the book buying public.

From Booklist
*Starred Review* It is a fact of life seldom discussed in our celebrity-mad media: most actors do not become either rich or famous. Balbirer revels in her failure in this witty, poignant, exceedingly well-written memoir chronicling the ups and downs (mostly downs) of a trained, hardworking actress who always seems on the cusp of greatness but who nevertheless always fails to make the grade. Starting with her glory days in NYU’s theater program, Balbirer charts her many adventures in off- and off-off-Broadway, on television (where, for a time, she appeared on MTV’s popular Remote Control), and later in Hollywood. Gossipmongers will find her stories of life in La-La Land especially fascinating, and among them, in particular, her heartbreaking tale of being cast as a guest star and then cut from an unnamed popular 1990s sitcom (not Seinfeld; she was on Seinfeld several times) at the insistence of her friend “Jane,” one of the show’s highly paid stars. The irony is that, if Balbirer’s book proves as popular as her autobiographical one-woman show I Slept with Jack Kerouac and Other Stories, she may find fame and fortune by recounting the myriad ways she failed to achieve them. --Jack Helbig

Review

Customer Reviews

if holden caufield was funnier and female...
wow - I just read this book cover to cover... literally couldn't put it down. The book glides on greased wheels - it flows; at times heartbreaking, at times laugh-out-loud funny, but always insightful and thought-provoking.

Although the NY and LA actor-scene is the backdrop, this book is really about self-discovery... what's most remarkable is the depth that Nancy manages to tap into in the midst of all this superficiality; this is NOT the tmz/hills/sex & the city BS.

Nancy is east coast all the way: real, smart, with a super-sharp wit and dark humor. She "busts balls" and is vulnerable and self-aware and honest, honest, honest.

Buy a stack: one for you, one for your mom, one for your sister and your babysitter, and maybe that dbag ex-boyfriend who mistook your tears for weakness : )

Artistic Passion, Hollywood, Fame, Psychics, Mud and More
In Take Your Shirt Off and Cry, Nancy Balbirer gives us a tour of her acting days, from studying with David Mamet, auditioning for Saturday Night Live with her Debra Winger impersonation, guest starring on Seinfeld, and rooming with a pre-fame Jennifer Aniston. She could be bitter about many things, from Aniston nixing her from a guest spot on Friends to waiting two days in a Chicago hotel room to audition for Lorne Michaels (it never happens) to not "making it" in the way she'd hoped, but instead of bitter, she can laugh at herself, and her former profession. Balbirer distills the comic relief in her years of off-off Broadway shows, her father's bemused response to said shows, and the pretentiousness with which she, and her peers, took their roles.

Balbirer's romantic relapses also have a starring role here, notably her attempts to just be friends with Ned, her acting coach. Out of all the people she portrays, including her dismissive father and drama-loving mother, Ned is the one who is the most "a character," the one who you want to physically drag her away from, the one who always says seemingly the opposite of what he means. He's the perpetually clueless guy who really just wants to get in her pants but pretends otherwise. They even split up and don't speak for years and wind up back together, and Balbirer, and the reader, want to think he's changed, but he hasn't.

Balbier's descriptions of her family are heartwarming, at least, will be to anyone who doesn't come from a picture-perfect one. When a producer tells her to change her one-woman show into a version of My Big Fat Greek Wedding, she muses: "My family popped into my head. I saw us all together at Christmas, the one time a year when everyone got together. I saw everyone as usual barely able to contain their contempt for one another, trading obligatory gifts, insults, and hostile remarks while pill-popping downers or tossing back drink after drink to numb out." (It gets worse from thereæor, for the reader, better.)

Balbirer's character studies reveal as much about her as they do about the LA entertainment types she meets. In "Take Fountain," she befriends a woman who many, including the author, see as a has-been, a woman past her prime who, even when she gets a part on Broadway, winds up returning to near-obscurity. Yet Gigi, with her perennially positive attitude, is a powerful presence, one who teaches not by what she says so much as what she doesn't.

In some ways, when Balbirer meets her husband, it has a sort of fairy tale ending. After so many losers, here's her knight. Yet the real story here is deeper. Balbirer constantly looks back at who she was, and, perhaps is. "The girl with the hair in her face," as she sees herself in a photo in the New York Times.

This book is definitely about acting, about Hollywood, about fame, but it's also about art, passion, and love. And psychics. And, yes, Jennifer Aniston. It works if you just want to read for the celebrity tidbits, but it works much better when you look at a little closer. Balbirer celebrates herself at the end not for her success or failures, but for forging ahead not knowing what the future would bring her. Worth a read whatever your artistic passions for Balbirer's humor and insights into herself, LA, "meetings," and the fact that fame may not be all it's cracked up to be.

Like having martinis with the most hilarious girl in the room.
Seriously. A painfully true drive-thru the hell-and heaven- of the L.A. acting world. And some of the NY acting world too. Insightful, painful, funny and honest. The pain of it ALMOST makes fame seem like a desirable alternative. A loving look at a sometimes painful experience, done with great wit and old Hollywood style.