Free Happy Accidents by Jane Lynch

my train. Somewhere between Brooklyn and Midtown, I started feeling sharp pains in my stomach, like I had food poisoning. By the time I got to my stop at 50 th Street, it was so bad I was doubled over.
    I walked to Glick & Lorwin, but because I was early as usual, no one was there. I didn’t have a key to the office, so I just sat down on a box of paper outside the door, slumped over in pain. I thought my appendix might have burst, so I straggled back to the subway and got on a train heading for the Village, where St. Vincent’s Hospital was.
    On the train, hunched over in the worst pain of my life, I suddenly thought, I have to leave New York. I have to get out of here. And my stomach relaxed. I got to 14 th Street, stood up, and thought, I’m all right . The pain was gone.
    I took the subway straight back to Brooklyn, packed up my two suitcases, and called my mom. “I’m coming home,” I told her. I would miss Boris and Ira (who acted like they were mad at me for leaving and wouldn’t make eye contact). But I couldn’t wait to get back home.

Chapter 5
The Call of Comedy
     
     
    I was now twenty-five years old when I went back home to Dolton, back to the house where I grew up, on Sunset Drive. When I walked into my old bedroom, still with its green-and-yellow shag carpeting and bedspread, there was a big “Welcome Home Jane!” banner, with balloons and everything. I turned to my mom and, half-joking, half-serious, exclaimed, “You can go home again!”
    Mom was happy to have me home as well. “Look, Jane—I organized your books,” she said, waving her hand at the shelves.
    “By author or title?” I asked.
    “By height.” And there they were, perfectly arranged from smallest to tallest.
    My mom’s excitement was short-lived, though. The balloons in my room hadn’t even lost their helium when she started urging me to apply for a regular job, to start my backup career. “You could work as a secretary,” she said.
    My mom had been working at Arthur Andersen for years. She was an old-school secretary: she typed an outrageous number of words per minute and knew shorthand. I was a college graduate with an advanced degree; I considered myself vastly overqualified for secretarial tasks. I had no interest in working at Arthur Andersen.
    But even with my inflated sense of self, I knew I needed a job, so I called and got an interview. Dressed in one of my mom’s suits and looking like a young Janet Reno, I went downtown to their offices. I took the English test that they gave all new submanagement employees . . . and failed. Yes, I was college educated and I even had a master’s degree, but I didn’t know the first thing about the proper form for business letters.
    My mother was so embarrassed.
    Since I had been deemed unqualified to be a secretary, I sent my résumé to an employment agency, this time for receptionist work. Within a week or two, they found me a job answering phones at the Civic Opera House in Chicago.
    I loved it—after all, I was working in a theater—but I also kept trying out for acting gigs. Before long, I got a part in a new Shakespeare company’s outdoor production of The Comedy of Errors .
    On the morning after I was cast in the play, I came bouncing into the office, all excited about my good news. “I got a part in The Comedy of Errors ,” I told a girl I worked with. “But it’s gonna be over the summer, so I’ll have to quit my job here.” I didn’t think twice about telling her. She, in turn, didn’t think twice about going straight into my boss’s office to tell her .
    What I didn’t realize was that, having paid a fee to the employment agency to find me, my boss wouldn’t be too happy about my leaving so soon. So she fired me on the spot. Even though I had been planning to quit, I felt humiliated, as if I had been personally rejected. I was in agony over it.
    I called Chris, so upset I could hardly get the words out. “They fired me,” I said, near