My twenty-eighth birthday fell two weeks before I left for LA, and Carrie had thrown me a birthday party in her penthouse apartment in the El Dorado on the Upper West Side. There was a heat wave, and the elevators were broken, so the guests arrived drenched in sweat after climbing seventeen flights. Seeing Susan Sarandon’s glistening body in a tank top was gift enough, but she threw in another present, which was just a piece of paper with rows of red dots on it.
