Mommies Who Drink

She moved to Chicago because someone blew the whistle on her illegal sublet in Manhattan, and she needed to go somewhere cheaper. In Chicago, she got married to an actor named Pat Towne, who liked physics and football. She also hooked up with The Annoyance Theater, where she learned a lot about improv and drinking. After a couple of years, she got cast in the tour of The Real Live Brady Bunch, which brought her back to New York for a year, where she could contemplate the irony of acting in a show that mimicked a show she’d never seen, in a city she had to leave to live in.

Acting in The Real Live Brady Bunch for three years turned out to be one of those things that affected everything that came after it. In San Francisco, she and Pat, and some other folks (Jill and Faith Soloway, Melanie Hustsell, Sarah Thyre, Ben Zook, and Eric Wadell) left the tour and developed a show called Not Without My Nipples: The Made for TV Musical. Nipples moved down to LA and was voted one of LA Reader’s worst shows of 1993. Brett and Pat had never intended on living in Los Angeles, but the show was fun, and people thought they might get work -- and they didn’t have the money to move, so they stayed.

A couple of years later, Brett joined the cast of Mr. Show with Bob and David on HBO for three seasons. She also did a couple of movies, and even developed shows for Comedy Central and Oxygen.

Photo Credit: Annie Sperling