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This is Play It Forward. Real people. Real stories. The struggle to Play It Forward Episode 539 With Actor And Author John Ross Bowie From his earliest memories of watching Rhoda with his parents in their tiny Hell's Kitchen apartment, John knew that he wanted to be an actor. The strange, alternate world of television-where people always cracked the perfect joke, lived in glamorous Upper East Side buildings, and made up immediately after fighting-seemed far better than his own home life, with parents on the brink of divorce and a neighborhood full of crumbling pre war architecture and not-so-occasional muggings. That other world also seemed so unattainable. Besides crippling stage fright (which would take him years to overcome) John's father, ever aloof and cynical, has instilled within him the notion that acting is "no job for a man."