I spent most of my life as a professional actor, but in order to help ensure ends met I moonlighted on the weekend as a sales rep for a major electronics manufacturer. Every year in August they would hold a national sales training event in Texas, flying in a few hundred reps from across the country to learn about that year’s new products, the underlying technology, and some sales technique (although they eventually dropped the latter, as they realized their criteria for who to send to the training was based on the highest ranking making sales training superfluous).

One way they saved costs was to double up all sales reps in rooms, typically pairing people from very different parts of the country unless they requested a specific roommate. In this particular instance I was placed with someone from a different state who I had no prior contact with, but on our first night we stayed up late chatting, sharing “war stories,” and talking about our past. The TV was left on during all of this as noise and potential conversation topic. And then an episode of Cheers started.

The topic of acting background had come up previously, and I pointed out that I had done three episodes of Cheers. As I was saying this, I started to notice that the opening teaser on this episode seemed especially familiar. That said, I had always been a fan, so I didn’t think much of it until the opening credits finished and the plot became clear: it was my very first (and best-known) episode of the show, and I got to prove to my new roommate that I wasn’t merely blowing smoke about my past.

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