The Alumni Magazine for Worcester Polytechnic Institute. (WPI)
Issue link: http://wpialumnimag.epubxp.com/i/277771
talking and dealing with everything, but about six months in I just got it. I was queen of the trolley world and could handle any situation. It gave me a ton of confdence, being in front of people, being funny, being narrative, and driv- ing on all those little cow path roads of Boston at the same time." She also began to make headway in the stand- up world, and was getting up to 10 shows a week with her improv groups. Then in 1992 she took an actor's workshop in Los Angeles and decided she had to move there. All that confdence she had built up quickly came crashing down. "For fve-and-a-half years I busted my butt, struggling, working at survival jobs like waitressing, valet ancy Pimental discovered comedy and engineering have something in common—both have long been male bastions. When she attended WPI, the male- to-female ratio was 4–1; today, it's closer to 2–1. And when she went into stand-up, she discovered that female comics were something of a novelty. "I was talking about these issues recently with someone in an executive position, and she was struggling," Pimental says. "I feel very lucky that I don't look at myself as a woman, I look at myself as a talent in this industry. "I grew up with lots of boys. I wasn't really a tomboy, but I played with all my brother's friends. Cops and robbers, kickball, spitting contests to see who could spit the farthest. Nobody ever said, 'You're a girl, you're not supposed to spit.'" She recalls working once at an improv club in Los Angeles, and watching a woman performer who was exceptionally attractive. "She came onstage and she just 'played beautiful,'" she says. "I pulled her aside and said, 'Look, you're beautiful, so that's taken care of. Now you can play something else—show another dimension of yourself.' "In L.A. it's important how you present yourself," Pimental says. "You can't lead with your emotions, and you can't take stuff personally. You need a tough skin." car parking, catering, handing out cereal samples wearing a squirrel on my hat, just every kind of crappy job. I was writing a lot and was always on the edge of getting somewhere, but nothing was breaking. People would say, 'You've got something going,' but they didn't know what to do with you." Things got so bad that at one point she considered bankruptcy, and it was during a stand-up tour in some hotel in 1997 she remembers seeing her frst episode of South Park. "I'll never forget it. The episode featured that Bigfoot guy who had an arm made of celery and a leg made of Patrick Duffy. It was weird and obscure and I to- tally got it. I said, 'This is my sensibility, that's me, WPI_spring14_features1.indd 21 3/9/14 12:11 PM