And what else might the new season hold in store? "I'm sure I'll sleep with people. I'm sure I'll get hired and fired a few times. Of course, I'll never go to another ad agency. For all the times I've been promoted, demoted, taken over, and left, I still come back there. It's some horrible, horrible joke!" She merrily con-tinues, "We're all back there at D&D My boss, who slept with my ex-fiance, who's married to somebody else�we�re all there working together. There's apparently only one ad agency in all of Los Angeles."
Thorne-Smith�s goofy ebullience is hard to square with her de-scriptions of growing up near San Francisco. "I was so horribly shy," she says. "My best friend in fourth grade would say to her friends, 'I'm going to go play with Courtney,' and they'd go, 'Why? 'Because I didn�t talk!" She laughs. "I couldn�t talk in front of people, I was so scared."
Thorne-Smith turned to acting because "that was the only way I had to express myself." She skipped college to appear in movies like Summer School and Revenge of the Nerds II�and a memorable guest shot as a Laker Girl on LA Law. In 1992 Aaron Spelling tapped her for Melrose, and she soon found fame�as well as a brief romance with Andrew Shue. (She now spends her free time with two basenji dogs and a boyfriend of one year, Drew Pillsbury, an actor who shares her obsession with golf.) Just as Thorne-Smith describes Shue as a �good friend,� Shue walks into the trailer. "I'm having a very important interview,� Thorne-Smith warns. "Say something nice.� "Courtney is the greatest," Shue says, retreating to the corner. "Yeah! Good answer," Thorne-Smith replies. �You can write that down as unsolicited.
Obviously, her shyness no longer restrains her. �A friend of mine once said that I'm an introvert who had to act like an extrovert for my job. I got more confident, I got happier with myself. I had a lot of therapy. Now I�m honestly trying to learn how to be quiet again. It�s the seesaw of life.�
