When I was in high school, I hung out with a group of guys, all a bit older than me, who liked to make movies and asked me to be in them.

Get your mind out of the gutter.

Albert, Bill, Lee, David and the guys were not porn producers…they were funny writers and would-be producers/actors who walked right up to the edge of nerd-ville without ever quite crossing the city limits. They were older and from a different school, so being with them was a humorous respite from the real-life drama I found at South Miami High.

We did little short films here and there, but one year I was cast in what was to be an epic comedy, a spoof of the always-popular James Bond films. They had a friend named Fritz who had white-blonde hair who was cast as James Blonde. His nemesis, Russian spy Boris Natchkin, was played by David Greenfield. I was cast as Boris’ hardline Soviet assistant and border-line love interest, Fraulein Leibchen. I’m not sure anyone ever questioned her curiously German name, or the fact that she (meaning I) was always assigned the hardest lines.

Sadly, the film was never finished. But my friend Albert has some footage that he recently clipped together for me.

Neither of us can remember the plot. It started with a prisoner/spy exchange. There was a plan to save America from the rich capitalist corrupt legislators. And there was a running gag about cats. To relax, Boris liked to throw cats into the ocean, so he instructed Fraulein Leibchen to order some crates of cats for him. (Not Soviet cats. They had to be California cats, any color would do.) Smitten by love, the Fraulein obeyed, which must have been a stretch for my acting abilities, as I was a crazy cat lady even then.

There is no real point to this post, other than to say, here I am playing a German-named Soviet spy who betrayed her own cat code to further her lover’s communist agenda. It would never happen in real life.