"Ladies and gentlemen and children of all ages!" With this phrase, Guiding Light's Rick Hearst (Alan-Michael Spaulding) became an actor. "It was the school play in the first grade," he remembers. "I was the ringmaster in a presentation about the circus. I was just going to be a clown and hang out in the background and climb out of a car with all the other midgets, but I stepped in two days before we were supposed to open, because the kid who was going to be ringmaster got incredible stage fright and couldn't remember his lines."

Twists of fate such as this seem to be a theme in Hearst's acting life. "I got what was called a Morton Brown (acting) scholarship to the University of Texas in Austin," he reveals. "Otherwise I wouldn't have been accepted. I applied to the university, and they turned me down. Then I auditioned for the scholarship and when I got it they sent me an acceptance letter. I thought they only did that for people who play ball. To this day, I still have my acceptance letter and my rejection letter."

After two years of training in the university's drama department, Hearst packed his bags and headed back to his home state, New York. "I wanted to get into a more intensive program," he explains. "I saw a notice on the call board in Texas that Circle in the Square (a Manhattan theater) was coming down for a day to audition people, so I worked up two monologues. A week [after my audition] I got a fat letter of acceptance. I started jumping up and down and almost hit my head on the ceiling fan. Then I made a beeline for New York.

"I was fortunate, because my first year at Circle my parents were still supporting me. And my girlfriend, Donna, who is now my wife, was working so she made sure we had food on the table and a roof over out head," he adds. "After I graduated, I got out there and slung hash like everyone else for a year. Then we moved to California."