Weekly: What has been your most fulfilling work experience?
Strasser: In the whole career?
Watkins: Well, let's see, the time that I felt most excited to be acting is the first time I was cast in a really good part in a play in college. And the elation that went along with that was so fulfilling that it made me want to act more, and it turned into a career.
Strasser: It sounds like you're describing when you realized you wanted to be an actor. It was an epiphany.
Watkins: I never decided I wanted to be an actor. In school, I did it for fun and I was always trying to cut up around my friends and it wasn't until that experience that I thought, "This is something I would like to 'do.'"
Strasser: What did your folks say?
Watkins: Unfortunately, it's a really boring story, because they've always been so supportive of everything I've ever done.
Strasser: That's not boring to me. That's beautiful. I already suspected it when I asked the question.
Watkins: They encouraged me to get a practical degree in college and my dad was paying for my schooling so I agreed with him. I got a fairly practical degree in telecommunications.
Strasser: This qualifies you to do what?
Watkins: I'm not really sure because all my free time was spent in the theater. I got the degree but I spent all my free time working as an actor.

Weekly: Now are you a cook as well? I know your resume says you're a gourmet cook, Robin. I hear you throw a mean dinner party?
Strasser: Did you fall for that?
Weekly: Well, I know it says that.
Strasser: We said all sorts of stuff in the resume.
Watkins: I would never say that I was a gourmet cook because then it could come back to haunt me but I like to experiment with different stuff. I live on the West Side and we have a great produce market, meat and fish. It's fun to go in there and say, "Give me some of that, I'll give that a shot!" I like to have friends over. I like to cook but it's sort of "anything goes" once you show up. Sometimes, it works out sometimes it doesn't work out.

Weekly: Did you learn to cook out of a creative urge or necessity?
Watkins: I learned when I was living in Vancouver for two years. I was kind of bored and lonely up there. I didn't have a lot of friends up there, because I was basically an expatriate and the other people on the TV show I was working with were older and had families. So, I took a cooking class, I took tennis lessons, and I took tango lessons but I only took four. Four lessons in tango ain't nothing.
Weekly: Unless Robin took some and then she could lead.
Strasser: That is a life long delayed ambition, to seriously take ballroom dancing.

PART III>>>