––What was the backstory to the moment?

Allison: I thought I was in love with Melissa. We’d been together for two years, since the end of college. She was the bright spot in an otherwise confusing time. Coming out of school, I knew I wanted to be a writer, but I didn’t know where to start. I ended up taking a job as the resident director of a dormitory at our alma mater, Case Western Reserve. It wasn’t a real job, but that was okay, because my plan was to spend the year writing. All I wrote was garbage, though, and pretty soon I was discouraged, broke, in debt. On top of it all, some nutjob threatened me with a lawsuit over a fender bender, then my car got stolen. That’s about when the sleepwalking started. The first time, Melissa found me lying naked on a mattress in a vacant dorm room down the hall. After that, she made sure I didn’t get out the door.

Donner: I was at an audition for a Sunkist commercial.  A friend who made a mint doing commercials encouraged me to give it a try.  She was the one who had loaned me the bikini, and when I protested that my skin was fish-belly white, she produced a tube of bronzer and slathered it over my body.  I asked her –– watching my skin turn a deep, rich, (if orange-tinged) brown –– if the bronzer would rub off.  “Chill out, okay?” she said.  “It’s waterproof.”

McLarty: There were a lot of factors involved in my meltdown but the big one, I think, was getting to that dangerous part of middle age where you unconsciously become your own cheerleader.  When it comes to yourself perhaps the one person who shouldn’t do the evaluation is you.  And also the sort of ‘lottery’ lure of the fat salary, which would have enabled me to retire the endless loans I’d taken to put my three sons through private school and college!  The possibility of this actually happening made me cocky instead of grateful.

Schrank: My parents were divorced. I was too often a joyless fuck of a kid. I was spoiled and got everything I wanted but I didn’t really understand how to have a good time. Still don’t.