"What if.." draws us in, and away we go. I've always loved stories that take me out of my surroundings as well as my head. They inspire adventures, such as 8 years working in Africa, assisting women's micro-enterprises and cooperatives and doing disaster relief. And, in another place and time, three years as a studio model.

Now I'm embarked on a very different sort of adventure, inside the human mind. My son has autism, and he'll turn 22 on this date. His first language is music, and he loves to sing and compose. He smiles like the Fourth of July finale and is sweet and gentle and fierce and strange. He has a seizure disorder and something that his doctors to date can only describe as Mood Disorder Not Otherwise Specified.

So when real life (such as bureaucracy or My Divorce from Hell) gets me down, it's soothing to enter the alluring realm of Queer as Folk, which I stumbled upon during the WGA strike. Brian snarked to Justin, "So, you're into leather?" And sparks flew like woah. I had to revise my standards for screen chemistry, removing Bogie and Bacall in To Have and Have Notfrom the pedestal they'd long occupied in my mind. So on I went, discovering a real world of good friends and mind-bending fiction. And I love it. It's just what I need.