Waiting For The Call

"Yes!" they replied.

"Then why didn't you say something?"

"We were waiting for you to say something," they said.

To Alt, it isn't work if she enjoys what she's doing. Of the 149 scenes in My First 40 Years, she appears in 146. As a high school senior in East Williston, N.Y., she had a 98 average, played three sports and edited the yearbook, but was denied an ROTC scholarship to college for being insufficiently "well-rounded"—the first and last time she has been accused of that, we trust. After getting straight A's in her freshman year at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y., she was awarded the scholarship but chucked it to pursue modeling.

Alt's acting itch was triggered when she made her first TV commercial in 1980. "I had butterflies the first time I went on the set, something I hadn't felt in modeling in a long time," she says. In 1985 she played Ursala, the blonde bombshell, in a Bob Fosse-supervised revival of Sweet Charity in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Alt had just 20 lines, but the West Coast critics were nonetheless unkind. "They zapped me," she says, smiling. "But I knew I was going out on a limb."

That's where Alt finds herself today. But, as Gutstein would say, she looks good out there.